Sir Sidney

Summary

In the smoky afterglow of the Great War, while Clemenceau’s Paris still reeks of cordite and absinthe, two American vaudeville tumbleweeds—Mutt, a beanpole flim-flam man with the ethics of a raccoon in a butcher’s shop, and Jeff, a microcephalic cherub who believes every diplomatic speech is a lullaby—crash the Peace Conference like counterfeit coins in the collection plate. Through a labyrinth of gilded corridors they ricochet, past Wilson’s Fourteen Points, past silk-stocking spies trading secrets for dance cards, past generals who’ve mistaken cartography for destiny. Their slapstick sabotage is a Dadaist guillotine: Mutt impersonates a Rumanian delegate by draping a tablecloth as a sash, Jeff signs a border treaty with a jellybean thumbprint, and together they accidentally swap the German reparations clause for a recipe for sauerkraut chocolate cake. Inkpots explode like Verdun shells, monocles pop like champagne corks, and the Treaty of Versailles becomes a paper chase down the Champs-Élysées. When the duo finally staggers onto a balcony overlooking a city that has mistaken vengeance for closure, the film freezes on their silhouettes—one impossibly tall, one impossibly short—framing a world that has learned nothing except how to canonize its own follies.

Synopsis

Mutt and Jeff at the Peace Conference at Paris.