This Is the Life

Summary

A pampered heir, Billy Drake, trades the gilded cage of Park Avenue for a steamer’s churning wake, dispatched by his steel-vested father to hawk cartridges to banana-republic generals. Deckside he hallucinates cinema: a moonlit gamine becomes silver-screen siren; a purloined hand-crank becomes a proto-auteur’s lens; revolutionaries in sweat-stained bandoliers read as unpaid extras. When the vessel beaches on a blood-slicked pier, Billy still claps for the director who never yells “cut,” until muzzles kiss his temples and the leading lady’s tears smudge real gunpowder. In the flicker of a firing-squad sunrise, fantasy combusts into documentary; the boy stages one last gag—an escape so absurd it loops back into legend—and strides ashore clutching both a nation’s truce and a woman who no longer needs footlights to glow.

Synopsis

Given a choice between traveling to South America as an emissary for his father's ammunition company and foregoing his weekly allowance, Billy Drake heeds his father's warnings and buys an ocean liner ticket. Before leaving, however, the movie-struck Billy spots a beautiful woman standing in front of a theater and imagines that she is a film star. To his delight, he finds the woman on board his ship, as well as Count Von Nuttenburg, a political troublemaker, who has stolen a movie camera, thinking that it is a new brand of machine gun. Von Nuttenburg shows the camera to Billy, who concludes that the count is a director and the ship is a set for a movie melodrama. When the boat lands at a port torn by revolution, Billy insists that the guns and soldiers are part of the show. Not until he and the girl are seized by the rebels and threatened with death, does he admit his error. By a clever ruse, he escapes from his captors and with the help of Federal troops, defeats the count and wins the heart of his pretty shipmate.