Night Life of the Gods 1935

Hunter Hawk, Alan Mowbray, is an eccentric scientist who nearly blows himself up during a dangerous experiment. When he comes to, he discovers his invention has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: a ring that can turn living beings into statues and, astonishingly, revive statues back to life. He tests it on his dog, then uses it on his disagreeable family, turning several relatives into stone and sparing only his favorite niece, Daphne Lambert Peggy Shannon.

Hawk and Daphne celebrate with a bottle of wine, and then Daphne heads off to meet her boyfriend Cyril Sparks Douglas Fowley. Hawk, now in a drunken mood, staggers through a cornfield where he encounters Old Man Turner, a gardener who proves to be a leprechaun. Turner takes Hawk home to meet his daughter Meg Florine McKinney, and the two quickly hit it off.

They embark on a spree, turning other disagreeable people into statues left and right, and even bring statues of Greek gods to life in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The gods join them on a whirlwind tour of the modern world, with Manhattan as the glittering stage, provoking wild mayhem and sparking a growing disillusionment with contemporary life. Hawk grows weary of what he has wrought, yet he and Meg choose to press on in their desire to be together.

As the consequences mount and fear of being locked up as a madman grows, Hawk makes a fateful decision: he turns the ring on Meg and himself so they can stay together. The next moment finds him waking in an ambulance, discovering that the entire extraordinary evening was the result of head injuries sustained in the explosion that opened the story.