Summary
A lantern-jawed misogynist-in-chief, sworn to perpetual bachelorhood, drafts a sadistic charter for his fraternal order: any defector who dares utter matrimonial vows must be hounded by hooded White Caps, shoe-horned into suffocating woolens and crippling patent-leather brogues, then dragged back to the clubhouse in ritual disgrace. Irony, that fickle jester, uncorks the first bottle of champagne: the very scribe of this draconian pact becomes the first to tumble, helpless, into the iris-blue gaze of an ingénue whose laughter flickers like nitrate catching fire. His gavel still warm from ratifying the bylaws, he now scrambles through moonlit orange-groves and Edwardian ballrooms, dodging the gleeful vendetta he once authored, while the fraternity—equal parts mummers’ chorus and kangaroo court—brandish lanterns, blunderbusses, and a child’s giddy malice. The chase balloons—literally—into the slate-gray dawn when the fugitive groom discovers that only a drifting, hydrogen-filled airship offers sanctuary; there, among billowing silk and the perfume of burnt rope, a sky-parson knots the paradoxical noose of wedlock, turning the club’s cruel jest into a vertiginous farce suspended between terra firma and the void.
Synopsis
The president of a Bachelors' Club presents a code of rules that demand the harrowing of any of the members who submit to wedlock: They call for his capture by White Caps on his bridal night and wearing to the ceremony woolen underwear and patent-leather shoes too small for him. This woman-hater is the first to fall in love and seek union with a captivating young woman, and his fellow club members proceed to carry out his own suggestions. He manages to evade them, but a blimp is found to be the only place in which he is safe from them, and it is above the ground in that conveyance that the knot is tied.
Director
Cast
