At the height of the Jazz Age, Ring Lardner was Americas most beloved humorist, equally admired by a popular audience and by literary friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. A sports writer who became a sensation with his comic baseball bestseller, "You Know Me Al," Lardner had a rare gift for inspired nonsense and an ear attuned to the rhythms and hilarious oddities of American speech. He was also a sharp and dispassionate observer of...

The film follows a rube, played by Henry Morgan, on a journey as he uses his recently obtained inheritance to take a trip to 1910's New York with his wife and sister-in-law. Along the way, he encounters numerous eccentric characters including a drunken jockey, a sleaze ball millionaire and a devious stage actor, all scheming to court his sister-in-law in order to gain a slice of the inheritance.