A Private Function (Malcolm Mowbray, 1984)

Maggie Smith and Michael Palin in A Private Function

Cast: Michael Palin, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, Tony Haygarth, John Northington, Bill Paterson, Liz Smith, Alison Steadman, Jim Carter, Pete Postlethwaite. Screenplay: Alan Bennett, Malcolm Mowbray. Cinematography: Tony Pierce-Roberts. Production design: Stuart Walker. Film editing: Barrie Vince. Music: John Du Prez. 

A Private Function begins with Joyce Chilvers (Maggie Smith) and her mother (Liz Smith) entering a darkened movie theater where a newsreel is playing. We watch the newsreel, about meat rationing in postwar Britain, as the two women make their way to their seats, with Joyce scolding her mum for not finding a seat of her own. Then the lights come up and the theater organ rises from the pit. Joyce is playing the organ with her mother awkwardly sharing the bench with her. It's a nifty way to introduce not only two of the movie's key characters but also the era in which the film is set and the core of the plot. The newsreel also includes footage of the preparations for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Sir Philip Mountbatten, so we know that we're in November of 1947. The setting is a town in Northern England where the local dignitaries, led by the irascible, snobbish Dr. Swaby (Denholm Elliott, are preparing for a private function, a banquet, to celebrate the marriage of the future queen and prince consort. But how do you put on a banquet when everything, especially meat, is strictly rationed, and a diligent civil servant named Wormold (Bill Paterson) is enforcing the consumption laws with an iron hand? The banquet planners have found a way: They're raising an illegal pig. Eventually, Joyce and her meek chiropodist husband, Gilbert (Michael Palin), will get involved, especially after the would-be social climbing Joyce is not only frustrated by her inability to get around the rationing laws, but is also piqued by not being invited to the banquet. The only solution, it seems, is for Gilbert to commit pignapping and to hide the purloined swine in their home. The rest is farce in the manner of the British comedies made in the late 1940s and early 1950s, e.g., Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), and The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955). It's raunchier and a good deal more scatalogical than those classic films, and it's sometimes edited a little choppily -- there are jump cuts where none are needed -- but it earns the comparison on the strength of fine comic performances by Maggie Smith, Palin, Elliott, and especially Liz Smith as the endearingly dotty Mother. ("She's 74," Joyce often interjects to excuse, explain, and even praise her parent's behavior.) 

Jabberwocky (Terry Gilliam, 1977)

 

Jabberwocky (Terry Gilliam, 1977)

Cast: Michael Palin, Harry H. Corbett, John Le Mesurier, Warren Mitchell, Max Wall, Deborah Fallender, Annette Badland, Terry Jones. Screenplay: Charles Alverson, Terry Gilliam, based on a poem by Lewis Carroll. Cinematography: Terry Bedford. Production design: Roy Forge Smith. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. 

Despite being directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Michael Palin, and featuring a cameo by Terry Jones, all members of the troupe, Jabberwocky is not a Monty Python movie. Gilliam protested when the distributors wanted to market it as “Monty Python’s Jabberwocky.” It might have been better or funnier if it had featured the talents of the group, because as it is, Jabberwocky is mostly a string of gross-out gags held together by a story about a peasant, Dennis Cooper (Palin), who comes to the city to make his fortune and winds up slaying the Jabberwock and winning the hand of the princess – which he doesn’t particularly want. It’s too messy and too choppy, concentrating more on creating a grimy vision of the “Dark Ages” – “darker than anyone had ever expected,” says the Narrator (Palin) – than on bringing Lewis Carroll’s poem to life. That said, the film does feature a splendidly realized Jabberwock, based on John Tenniel’s illustration, a shambling, ratty-winged creature, performed by an actor (Peter Salmon)  who was forced to walk backward inside the costume so the legs would bend in birdlike fashion. The movie has many admirers, so I have to admit that I appreciate Gilliam’s efforts – it was his first solo feature as director after the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which was co-directed with Terry Jones. 

A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda

Cast: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, Maria Aitken, Tom Georgeson, Patricia Hayes, Geoffrey Palmer, Cynthia Cleese. Screenplay: John Cleese, Charles Crichton. Cinematography: Alan Hume. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: John Jympson. Music: John Du Prez. 

By all rights, A Fish Called Wanda shouldn't have worked: It's a blend of comic acting styles, from Monty Python to Hollywood to Broadway, under the direction of a septuagenarian best known for his work on that comparatively restrained classic of British postwar comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). It's vulgar and silly and hardly sensitive to social concerns -- it was denounced by disability rights advocates for the laughs derived from the Michael Palin character's stutter. And yet it remains one of the most successful screen comedies in history. It won Kevin Kline an Oscar for his performance as the dopey Übermensch Otto, and covered John Cleese, Palin, and Jamie Lee Curtis with glory -- especially Cleese, who not only wrote the screenplay (from a story he concocted with director Charles Crichton) but also reportedly did much of the directing for which Crichton got the Oscar nomination. The secret to its success is that it takes nothing seriously, especially the British and American national identity, but is so light-hearted in its offenses that they amuse rather than offend. It's full of little in-jokes, like calling the character played by Tom Georgeson "George Thomason," and naming Cleese's character Archie Leach without nodding to the fact that it was Cary Grant's real name. (That one may even be a double in-joke, since Grant himself ad-libbed a line about Archie Leach in Howard Hawks's 1941 screwball classic His Girl Friday.) Maybe it falls a little flat at the end, with the frantic business at Heathrow, but it would be hard to top what has gone before. 

Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981)

Craig Warnock and Sean Connery in Time Bandits

Cast: John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Ralph Richardson, Peter Vaughan, David Warner, Craig Warnock, David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Malcolm Dixon, Mike Edmonds, Jack Purvis, Tiny Ross, Jim Broadbent, David Daker, Sheila Fearn. Screenplay: Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam. Cinematography: Peter Biziou. Production design: Milly Burns. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Mike Moran. 

A film with many admirers, but I find it too much a kids' movie -- noisy and sometimes silly -- with not enough genuine wit to please grownups. What works best for me in it are the star performers -- Sean Connery, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm -- letting themselves go. 

Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Jonathan Pryce in Brazil

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. Cinematography: Roger Pratt. Production design: Norman Garwood. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Michael Kamen.

I have to admit reluctantly that I'm not a fan of the kind of dystopian social satire epitomized by Terry Gilliam's Brazil and echoed in such films as Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991) and the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). They seem to me too scattered to be effective as satire, too dependent on production design and special effects to connect with the realities they're supposedly lampooning. I find myself forgetting them almost once they end. That said, Brazil is always worth watching just for the performances of a cast filled with specialists in a kind of British-style muddling through even the weirdest of situations.

The Wipers Times (Andy De Emmony, 2013)

While reading about World War I, I came across a reference to The Wipers Times, a satirical newspaper published by British soldiers at the front, and remembered the listing for this film on The Movie Channel. It turns out to be a made-for-TV movie that first appeared on the BBC. It stars the engaging actor Ben Chaplin, who has never made the A-list despite appearing in some well-known movies like The Truth About Cats and Dogs (Michael Lehmann, 1996) and The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1999). Chaplin plays Capt. Fred Roberts, who started the newspaper along with Lt. Jack Pearson (Julian Rhind-Tutt), after they came across a workable printing press and a supply of paper while scavenging for materials to shore up their trench near Ypres (which the soldiers of course pronounced "Wipers"). With contributions from soldiers, typically irreverent about conditions at the Front and the incompetence of the "brass hats" safely away from the action, the newspaper served as an unofficial morale-builder. The film, written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, manages to overlook the usual horrors of war to celebrate the resilience of the people who endure what has been described (and quoted in the movie) as "months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror." It also borrows from a better-known film, Good Morning, Vietnam (Barry Levinson, 1988), in which DJ Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams), attracted the attention of the brass with his broadcasts over Armed Services Radio. In that film, Cronauer is attacked by a humor-impaired officer played by J.T. Walsh, but defended by a general played by Noble Willingham. In The Wipers Times, the stuffed-shirt officer is played by Ben Daniels and the defending general by Michael Palin. The tension between the troops and the brass is needed to provide dramatic shape to material that's not inherently cinematic -- excerpts from the newspaper are performed as music-hall skits -- and the result is pleasant if unmemorable.