A geek, a nerd and
two tough-as-nails ranch women fight rubber rustlers during WWII – when rubber was
worth big money!
A masterpiece of screwball romcom from Clarence Budington Kelland, the man who
invented the genre, set against the background of the Homefront during the
Second World War. The Puzzle of Archibald the Great is filled with his trademark
delirious, pixilated battle-of-the-sexes dialogue. Archibald Cloyd was an
ubergeek and as pedantic as it is possible to be. He looked like Napoleon, he
strutted like Napoleon, so naturally, he made himself the world's greatest
expert on the Little Corsican. Naturally, Hollywood hired him at thousands of
dollars a week as the technical director on a movie about Napoleon.
Wilson Page, Cloyd's secretary, was a nerd. He didn’t fit in anywhere, and when
the Air Force turned him down due to a childhood heart problem, Wilson gave up
on life. He figured he didn't deserve anything better than being nursemaid to a
strutting egomaniac like Archibald Cloyd. He looked down on himself and Cloyd
in equal measure.
But when Archibald fell for a gangster’s moll, the gangster took exception to
the relationship, and the pompous little geek proved too stuck-up to back down
even when faced with torture. Wilson Page discovered he had developed affection
for the pigmy popinjay and swore to extract Cloyd from the situation.
Then the movie company moved to Arizona to shoot desert scenes about Napoleon's
Egyptian venture, and with Archibald now thousands of miles away from the
hot-tempered gangster, Wilson Page breathed a sigh of relief.
But his relief didn't last long. In the desert, Page discovered a complication
he had never dreamed of, when they encountered the Widow Hammer, an outsized
woman with an outsized voice that could call the cattle home from a range
beyond the mountains in a different state, who took a shine to Archibald
because, as she said, "He talks beautiful. He don't always make
sense a body can understand, but the sound of it is lovely."
And matters became even more complicated for Wilson Page when he fell for the
irritating Miss Jemima Ward, a young woman who was used to running her own
ranch, which she had inherited from her father, and looked down on soft men who
earned their keep at soft jobs sitting in chairs, like secretaries to academic
pedants, and looked down even further on young men who were not enlisted and
off fighting in defense of their country against the fascist regimes of Italy
and Germany.
Just when it looked like things couldn't get more complicated, Page and Jemma
discovered an old abandoned mine filled with a fortune in stolen rubber tires,
one of the homefront's least obtainable and most valuable commodities. And who
did it belong to? The same hot-tempered gangster who had sworn to do the dirty
to Archibald the first chance he got.
