|
A Private FunctionRating:
Release Date: 01 April, 2003 Retail Price: $14.95 OUR Price: $13.46 You SAVE: $1.49! Cast: Complete Cast (13 total) |
A Private Function Reviews
Oh! I am sorry.....She's seventy four !
What a surprise that this perfect gem is not better known...such a loss. Britain during the early fifties had much to look forward to and much still to do. Everything was still rationed just as in the war years principally because the treasury was sacked to pay for the arms and munitions needed to fight it. The Empire (or what was left of it) was broke too and most that had not already done so went the autonomous route now, taking revenue away from London...though all quite peaceably and with everyone's best wishes. It would be ten years after the war ended (that makes roughly fourteen in all) until rationing would end for these isles, celebrated with the fantastic Festival of Britain in 1955, and people could at last look forward into a new Elizabethan age, rather than back on that darkness. My god Britain paid for that war in every way possible...really. What a period then to set a comedy I suppose...except that this particular story required those lean and austere times for the telling of it. Fresh meat you see...gammon, bacon, joints roasted and slavered with apple sauce...mouth watering! Imagine then the lengths you might go to for some of that after, let's say, eleven years of powdered egg.
Michael Palin as the hen pecked chiropodist, Maggie Smith as the social climbing hen, Liz Smith as the batty scatty mother-in law who'll stuff virtually anything and everything in her gannet gob, Denholm Eliot (as the doctor) who refuses to be impressed and so must be made so...along with everyone else in town who matters....I have never laughed so much. They are all that generation who would have been children (more or less) in this time period and all say how they never felt they went without....how they enjoyed their childhood's and wish it could be the same always...when you watch this you can see their point. This film and everyone's performance in it is superb. Please...for your good health and for your better and more cheerful disposition...buy this movie.
A comedy about post-war rationing?
A true lost-between-the-cracks comic gem. My friends and I have enjoyed this movie since we first saw it and finding good copies of it were difficult, to put it mildly. Although the DVD is skimpy, it's here, and damn reasonably priced, too.
Even with the DVD remaster, the sound is typically lousy (what IS it with the British...refuse to use German microphones?) and one almost has to turn the subtitles on to understand all the muffled dialog. Miking problems aside, "A Private Function" is a delightful, funny, occasionally crude comedy about class struggle in post-war Britain. A small "who's-who" of England's character actors make up the perfect cast of this film and all turn in splendid, low-key performances. Michael Palin, possibly the best "actor-actor" of the Monty Python troupe, is charming as the chiropodist who unwittingly stumbles unto the upper-middle-class via his female clientele, much to the delight of his social-aspiring, piano teacher wife, Maggie Smith.
Thank George Harrison's Handmade Films, without whom this, and many other films would have never been made, however low-budget and poorly-received they were. "A Private Function" may not grab you on the first viewing, but there's much to go back for on repeated viewings. And it gets funnier each time.
One warning: if you're at all squeamish about the butchering business (or piggie gastro-intestinal business), you may want to skip this one!
More Customer Reviews (3 total)
You like A Private Function?
|
