The Society Bug

A champagne-cork of a film, The Society Bug detonates inside gilded parlours where marble cherubs leer at the nouveau riche and the old money moths chew the velvet drapes. Polly Moran, that bulldozer in a lace collar, storms through drawing-room after drawing-room as Lulu McBluff, a brassy, bantam-weight social climber who believes pedigree can be purchased by the yard and hyphenated surnames are sold by the pound. The plot pirouettes on a forged genealogical scroll that Lulu waves like a battle standard, insisting she descends from a Bourbon bastard and therefore deserves a gilt-edged invitation to the Belgrave Cotillion. The coterie of velvet-robed gatekeepers—matrons whose corsets squeak with ancestral disdain—plot her public humiliation via a rigged scavenger hunt that should end with Lulu hunting for her dignity in a gutter. Instead, she ricochets from one chandeliered catastrophe to the next: swapping the Duke’s silver snuffbox for a hot penny-pretzel, commandeering a parade of poodles dyed patriotic colours, and accidentally detonating a fireworks cache beneath the mayor’s coronation canoe. Each pratfall peels another layer of varnish off high society, revealing the worm-eaten wood beneath. By the time the forged parchment is exposed, the hypocrites have been tarred with their own snobbery, and Lulu—now crowned ‘Duchess of Malarkey’ by a tipsy press—waltzes off with the one blue-blood who always loathed the charade, leaving behind a ballroom that looks like Versailles after a tomato fight.