British playwright and TV writer Alan Bennett once complained that film directors confuse moviemaking with generalship, and thus fail to see his screenplays as "ready-made movie material" - since in his scripts, "the infantry is recruited from aunties, and wheelchairs make up the armored division." His first produced screenplay, "A Private Function" (1984), about a pig and a bloke, proved to be prime British comedy on the hoof. The plot is a Jonathan Swiftie.
It's set in 1947, when postwar food rationing is at its fiercest. Three Yorkshire professional men (Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, and John Normington) plan a celebration banquet for the impending royal wedding of Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth. The only way they can furnish a proper feast is to buy an unlicensed pig named Betty and fatten her up in secret, under the all-seeing eye of a sinister Ministry of Food inspector (Bill Paterson).
What they don't count on is the intervention of chiropodist Michael Palin, who pays a house call to the pigkeeper's farm and ends up playing Androcles to the porker, relieving Betty of a painful splinter and ultimately pignapping her.
Bennett has a wicked sense of how all our advanced-primate itches - whether for food or affection, tradition or glory - simply demand to be scratched, no matter what the circumstances. And Malcolm Mowbray, the director, elicits savory performances. Maggie Smith gets more out of the chiropodist's wife than most actresses get out of Lady Macbeth. "It's not pork," she tells her husband, "it's power."
Liz (no relation) Smith is magnificently muddled as her mother, a woman who crosses the point when she can't trust her mind or body to keep hold of its contents. And Pete Postlethwaite had one of his first movie roles in this earthy farce: he deftly handles the small but significant part of a butcher.
