Summary
In a city of jazz-age neon and clandestine correspondence, Beatrice Ridley—newlywed, porcelain-delicate yet flint-spined—discovers that her groom’s pocket yields not love-notes but perfumed envelopes postmarked from the Honeysuckle Inn, a louche café whose very name drips like molasses over the tongue of gossip. Each letter is a siren song of infidelity, luring her toward the offices of Widgast & Pidgeon, leonine attorneys whose brass plate boasts they transmute holy wedlock into hard coin. While Widgast swears to tail the errant spouse, Pidgeon, contrapuntally, offers sanctuary to the husband, a silent partner desperate to sever fiscal arteries from the inn’s ledger. The wives—equal parts vestal and vixen—orchestrate a soirée at the Honeysuckle, ostensibly to civilize their menfolk; instead, all six collide amid saxophones and bootleg gin just as badge-flashing crusaders batter the doors. Dawn finds them behind iron bars, reputations in tatters, secrets fermenting like sour mash—until a magistrate’s gavel turns carnival into catharsis, proving that marriage, like comedy, is merely tragedy outrunning its consequences.
Synopsis
Beatrice Ridley suspects her new husband of infidelity because he continually receives letters from the notorious café, the Honeysuckle Inn. Beatrice consults lawyer John P. Widgast, who, with his partner Charley Pidgeon, specializes in "converting matrimony into alimony." The wives of the lawyers object to their husbands' practice, but plan a dinner for them at the Honeysuckle Inn. Widgast has promised to help Beatrice shadow her husband there, while Pidgeon has promised to give legal aid to the husband, who is foreclosing his silent partnership in the inn's management. The three couples all meet unexpectedly at the inn, which is raided that night. All six spend the night in jail, but everything is explained in court the next morning.
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