Who Chose Your Wife?

A jester-faced Alice Howell, corseted yet uncontainable, ricochets through a matrimonial fun-house where every suitor is a cardboard cut-out concealing a cash-register grin. Betrothed by lottery, auction, and accident, she staggers from one farcical engagement to the next while the film itself—shot through with jittery irises and Keystone-speed slapstick—keeps asking, in subtitle winks and iris-out smirks, whether any of these contracts are signed by choice or by commerce. The plot folds like origami: a dowry-hungry uncle, a poker-wielding aunt, a bridegroom who literally materializes from a hat, and a finale that detonates the altar into a cloud of rice, stock certificates, and fluttering garter belts. In the celluloid silence, the question lingers: if society scripts the vows, who—if anyone—holds the pen?