MOVIE REVIEW : ‘PRIVATE FUNCTION’: A DOUBLE-EDGED TOENAIL

When British playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett calls his astringent British satire (opening today at the Royal) “A Private Function,” he’s having a droll bit of fun. It could be taken as a reference to the exclusive banquet that the pillars of this little Yorkshire town are giving to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Lt. Philip Mountbatten in the austerity-wracked days of 1947.

It could also refer to every function usually performed in private--from clipping toenails to breaking wind, with a wide range of activities in between--some of which Bennett unveils with the owlish delight of a schoolboy who knows when he’s being naughty.

Bennett’s targets are provincial snobs, genteel “niceness” and the encrusted British class system. He salts his crushing disdain with whoopee-cushion humor--and whoopee-cushion sound effects, which is pretty British in itself. Bennett, it should be noted, is an original member of the wildly irreverent “Beyond the Fringe.”

“A Private Function’s” central characters are Michael Palin and Maggie Smith, as Gilbert and Joyce Chilvers, and Liz Smith as Joyce’s mum (a true Aged P. out of Dickens, if ever we saw one). In this stratified little town, the Chilvers are utterly without the elevated social standing that Joyce must have at any cost.

The daughter of a man who owned a chain of dry cleaners, and a family who took wine with their meals, Joyce knows refinement when she practices it. It’s piano tunes with those lovely crossed-hands bits, a flirt of her peplum as she sits down to play the town’s movie-house organ, a sweet Sherry in her own parlor with the town nobs.

Refined is not the word for her husband’s demeaning profession. Gilbert is a more than dedicated chiropodist, ministering to the bunions and ingrown toenails of the ladies of the town and, as often as not, “bringing feet to the table” in his dinner conversation.

This dogged pursuit of status has brought out a Lady Macbeth side to Joyce, although it isn’t a dagger but a chiropodist’s tiny scraper that she holds in her hand, and the best she is up to is Mrs. Macbeth. Joyce has her moments of poetry--like the trips she takes to distant counties with Mum in the family car, although the gas-rationed car is up on blocks and the traveling is done by trilling description. But these flights of imagination are being smothered by marriage to a husband who, like the family car, “can’t get the juice.”

Joyce is also fairly mortified by her Mum, who eats, in these famished times, with the steady rhythm of a camel and lives in a world that is ceasing to make a lot of sense to her. Mum, for her part, is terrified that, like the rest of the kindly old parties of the town, she will be popped into a grim old-age home by Dr. Swaby.

Swaby (played by Denholm Elliott as the very John Simon of physicians), who brooks not the slightest deviation from the norm, is head of the film’s trio of villains, including Allardyce, (Richard Griffiths), a massive, porcine CPA, and Lockwood (John Normington), a solicitor. Although Swaby relishes in reviling the decent, friendly Gilbert and Mrs. Allardyce would sooner die than recognize Joyce socially, the problem facing these elitists is far more urgent than simple social climbing.

The town’s banquet must be suitable to the royal nuptials--and rationing now is even more stringent than during the recent war. All offenses come under the gimlet eye (and unsmelling nose) of Mr. Wormold (“Comfort and Joy’s” Bill Patterson), a Ministry of Food inspector who, in an effort to crack down on a thriving and imaginative black market, works with a fanatic’s zeal.

Swaby et al. have obtained Betty, an “unlicensed” pig from a corrupt nearby farmer. Betty, fed a fairly disgusting diet including rats and the parings of foot skin, is growing steadily toward the time when she will be killed to feed everyone who is anyone at the town’s wedding celebration.

Betty, Gilbert and Joyce cross paths and all schemes go awry, except Joyce’s dream of gentility.

“A Private Function’s” dark look at all the appetites is played with silky perfection by its entire cast. To hear Maggie Smith tackle the explanation to mother about when Mum is to have seen a pig, and when not, is to understand why M. Smith also plays Restoration comedy sublimely. (Both--unrelated--Smiths, as well as Denholm Elliott, won the British Academy Award equivalent for their pungently entertaining performances.)

In an odd turn, Palin and the vast Griffiths are the film’s sweet centers, both misty-eyed over Betty. (To equate “A Private Function” with the effortless Ealing Studio comedies of Britain’s golden age is to mis-place it, and nowhere more obviously than in the case of Betty. She would not wink back at us in one of those earlier comedies as she does in this ending.)

Strange to say, even though he may be fine at individual performances, director Malcolm Mowbray has quashed those moments that might let his film soar. After a wonderfully promising opening third, it lumbers along, tubby and small-eyed and as hard to maneuver as the estimable Betty. And you may find its humor a very private joke indeed.