Nice and Friendly

A single reel of celluloid, originally wrapped in white ribbon and handed to Edwina and Louis Mountbatten on their wedding day, detonates into a carnival of larceny and whimsy. A rope of Tahitian pearls—each orb a miniature moon—becomes the magnetic pole around which a battalion of velvet-jacketed rogues pirouette. Chaplin, the eternal tramp transfigured into a kind of garden-shed demigod, materialises with a mallet carved from driftwood and thunder, flattening felons as if they were paper silhouettes. The lawn of Broadlands House, normally a manicured testament to Edwardian restraint, mutates into a proscenium where unconscious bodies are arranged like croquet hoops. Jackie Coogan—infant phenomenon, future Addams uncle—lurks beneath a counterpane that flaps like a surrender flag, his cameo a non-sequitur that feels, paradoxically, the most honest line of the whole affair. No intertitles moralise; no iris-in offers closure. The film ends when the camera, drunk on its own contrariness, simply loses interest and gazes skyward, leaving the necklace twinkling in the grass like a fallen constellation.