Plot
Jim Buchanan (Marshall), wealthy president of Buchanan Motor Company, is engaged to Evelyn Fletcher (Inescort), a henpecking aristocrat who is interested in Jim for his money. When Jim's fellow executives reject his plan to introduce a new automobile design, he decides to take a vacation.
Declaring himself "sick and tired of everything", Jim goes for a walk in the park, where he meets a young woman named Joan Hawthorne (Arthur). Joan is having trouble finding a job, and she was just evicted from her apartment. Assuming he is also a job hunter, she asks Jim to pose as her husband so they can apply for a combined job opening for a butler and a cook. Without revealing his true identity, he agrees.
The faux couple, calling themselves "Mr. and Mrs. Burns", are soon hired by Michael Rossini (Carrillo). She is a good cook; he improves his butling skills by sneaking out at night and taking lessons from his own butler. He also sneaks into his office and takes some of his automobile sketches to show to Joan. Impressed by his designs, on their day off she shows them to an executive with one of Buchanan's competitors, but he recognizes Buchanan's style, leading to her arrest for theft. Having fallen in love with Jim, she refuses to help the police find him.
Meanwhile, Jim has decided to tell Joan who he is. When she misses a lunch date while in jail, he writes her a letter, abandons his butler position, and returns to Evelyn and his life as a businessman. Rossini, who has just organized a bootlegging gang, learns of Jim's trip to the office from his assistant Flash (Stander), who is suspicious of Jim and has been tailing him. Wanting Joan for himself, he has her bailed out and tells her the truth about Jim. She reacts by raging against Jim, so Rossini promptly orders his henchmen to kill Jim at his wedding. To ingratiate himself with Joan, he tells her about this, but she declares that she loves Jim after all and begs Rossini to spare his life.
Rossini arrives at the wedding just in time to stop the murder. He and his men now return home with Jim at gunpoint, and fetch a justice of the peace to marry Jim and Joan. Joan refuses and locks herself in her room, but Jim embraces the plan. Since Rossini's men were seen kidnapping him, he blackmails the gang into persuading her to change her mind. Outside Joan's room, Rossini pretends to argue with Jim, Flash fires his gun in the air, and Jim collapses onto the floor, pretending to be hit. The deception works: Joan opens the door and rushes to his side.
Read more about this topic: If You Could Only Cook
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)