Director: Unknown
Writer(s): Unknown
Starring: Mantan Moreland, F.E. Miller, Johnny Lee
Synopsis: While making dinner for his wife, Mantan, a former comic star of radio and screen, is visited by an old show business friend, Stevie, and Stevie’s sidekick, Blabber. Mantan tries desperately to get rid of the pair before his shrewish wife returns, and they respond by teasing him for being henpecked.
When Mantan turns his back, Blabber quickly gobbles down the dinner. Mantan’s wife does not believe his story that the cat ate her dinner and she comes after him, sending Mantan running from the house in abject fear. Mantan takes refuge in the rehearsal hall where Stevie and Blabber are preparing a new show, but his wife tracks him down, declaring that when she finishes with him he will think “the atomic bomb is a cap pistol.”
Mantan escapes his wife’s clutches and ends up being hired as a chauffeur to the wealthy Dave Clark, who is about to be married to Clara York, a glamourous actress. When Clark learns that he is being blackmailed by a former fiancée, he has Mantan drive his car to the city, where Clara awaits and makes plans to meet him later. Because they want to bring their theatrical production to the city, Stevie and Blabber invite themselves along for the ride.
Shortly after Mantan drops them off, he he wrecks the car and is hospitalized in serious condition. Because Mantan was wearing his boss’s clothes and driving his car, everyone mistakenly assumes he is Clark. Although Stevie warns that the injured man is not Clark, Rex, a theatrical manager to whom Clara was under contract prior to her engagement, devises a publicity stunt in which Clara will marry her intended on his deathbed. Clara reluctantly agrees to the marriage, but asks not to see her beloved’s face because she wants to remember him as he once was.
Meanwhile, Clark manages to rid himself of his conniving ex-fiancée by buying the embarrassing love letters he wrote to her and then heads by plane to meet Clara in the city for their impending wedding. Mantan wakes up in the hospital and Clara is immediately summoned, but upon hearing that his wife is coming, Mantan escapes the hospital clad only in his white gown.
Mantan is finally caught by the police, but is so fearful of going back to the hospital that the policemen bring him to a doctor to have his head examined. After a lengthy examination during which Mantan’s antics almost succeed in driving the doctor mad, the doctor determines that Mantan is mentally sound, but manifests a pathological fear of his wife. Clara arrives to see her husband, and is shocked to see that she is married to Mantan.
After Clara is reunited with Clark and Rex’s publicity ploy is revealed, Mantan is sent to jail on bigamy charges. The charges are quickly dismissed, though, when Rex declares that the marriage license was a phony. Mantan, however, sure that his wife will catch up with him soon, begs to stay in jail. His pleas are ignored, and an enraged Mrs. Mantan forces her way to Mantan’s cell and collars her wayward husband, sending the entire jail into an uproar.
Release Date: 1948 (USA) | Length: 7 reels | Genre: Comedy | Certificate: Unknown
Note: The above plot summary is taken from a dialogue continuity deposited with the NYSA. Although modern sources provide a release year of 1948, the picture was approved for exhibition in New York state in 1949. (TCM) I didn’t find any other info on this film and am assuming it lost. Not sure why the two women in the film (Mantan’s wife and Clara) aren’t credited in any cast list that I have found.