The Town Went Wild 1944

Like Romeo and Juliet, two next-door neighbors David Conway, Freddie Bartholomew and Carol Harrison, Jill Browning, are deeply in love despite a lifelong feud between the Conway and Harrison families. Their fathers, Everett Conway, Edward Everett Horton, and Henry Harrison, Tom Tully, have carried that quarrel into adulthood, a history that shadows the lovers’ plans and their future.

David, who is preparing to depart for the Alaskan Territory to work as an engineer for the United States Government, and Carol decide to elope. To witness the ceremony at a nearby Justice of the Peace, David recruits his best friend, Bob Harrison, Jimmy Lydon, while Millie Walker, Roberta Smith, who has a crush on Bob, rides along to drive them to the town and also serves as a second witness.

The wedding moment is delayed at the Justice of the Peace because state law requires banns of marriage to be posted in the local newspaper for three days prior to the ceremony. Returning to their own town, David hastens to arrange the banns and to obtain his birth certificate for his government posting. In the town hall, clerks uncover a shocking truth: because the fathers fought when the children were born, the two infants were mixed at the hospital, leaving David technically a Harrison and Bob a Conway. This revelation transforms a hopeful elopement into a troubling legal quandary: not only is Carol poised to marry her own brother, but such a union could carry a fifteen-year prison sentence.