By Richard Winters
My Rating: 6 out of 10
4-Word Review: Couple hides a pig.
The year is 1947 and even though the war has been over for 2 years there’s still food rationing going on in this small England town. Gilbert (Michael Palin) works as a podiatrist and travels to residential homes where he cuts the toenails of the women who live there. During some of his visits he comes upon families who are hiding meat in their homes, and they must rush to cover-up any evidence of it when the local food inspector (John Normington) comes around to investigate. One such home has been illegally raising a pig in hopes to use it for a private party to celebrate the upcoming Royal Wedding between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Gilbert tells his wife Joyce (Maggie Smith) about it, and she convinces him to steal the pig, so that they can sell it off to the bacon black market but trying to hide a pig from both their neighbors as well as Joyce’s noisy elderly mother (Liz Smith) let alone being able to kill it proves quite challenging.
The film is a perfect mix of droll English humor and quirky moments. It starts out with a very original idea and manages to add one amusing moment, or sly comment, after the other becoming one of the better foreign comedies of the year where you can pick-up on funny little things that you might’ve missed on the first viewing, each time you watch it. Palin is especially good as a timid man who finds himself in the middle of chaos that he didn’t want and his unique profession along with the giant plastic foot that he orders to help represent his business are all on-target as are his engagingly consternated facial expressions.
Initially I thought Smith, a two-time Academy Award winner, was wasted here as she isn’t seen much during the first act and pushed mainly to the background making it seem almost like a token role that doesn’t have much pizazz, but she comes on strong by the end by having an interesting arch where she is just a passive, doting wife at first, but proves to be quite controlling, conniving and even demanding by the end. Liz Smith is equally engaging as the sometimes-confused aging mother ‘she’s 74’ whose dialogue is limited, but the few lines that she does say are doozies.
Spoiler Alert!
The pig though becomes the main star even though behind-the-scenes it made things quite difficult to film. This led to one 12-year-old boy getting his ‘big break’ into show business. When he heard that they were going to be making a movie in his area he proudly proclaimed that he’d be ‘willing to do anything’ in order to ‘get into the movies’ so the producer handed him a pail and told him to follow the pig around and collect its droppings every time it defecated and for this he got his name proudly billed during the final credits as ‘the bucket boy’.
As pigs go this one struck me as being quite small. Apparently, this was intentional as the filmmakers were advised by animal experts to choose a 6-month-old female pig as it was deemed, they’d be easier to control and less unpredictable, but visually she looked too scrawny and certainly not the type of pig to be used as the centerpiece for a giant feast such as the one that the townspeople were excitedly planning. It’s also a bit of a downer, even depressing, when the animal is eventually killed and served up on a platter. There’s a lot of close calls where the animal evades death and it makes it seem almost like the human captors were ultimately too afraid to do it, but when it does finally occur it hurts the film’s levity and makes it feel like murder when it does die and thus sucks all of the comedy that came before it right out.
The climactic party isn’t eventful either making the story go out with a whimper. It had been relatively lively up to then with all sorts of subtle twists and goofy turns only to end things on a dry note. There needed to be some sort of ultimate confrontation between the couple and the former owners of the pig, so things could’ve ended with more of a bang as it’s not quite able to hold-up feeling almost like it ran out of ideas with an uninspired conclusion.
My Rating: 6 out of 10
Released: November 9, 1984
Runtime: 1 Hour 32 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Malcolm Mowbray
Studio: HandMade Films
Available: DVD
Scopophilia 