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(More customer reviews)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.
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Michael Palin (A Fish Called Wanda) teams with OscarÂ(r) winner* Maggie Smith (Gosford Park) in this uproarious comedy in which 'the laughs come fast(Variety) and the upper class becomes furious! Co-starring Denholm Elliott, Pete Postlethwaite and one divine swine, this hilarious comedy isalive and unruly, [and] the humor keeps boiling up(Pauline Kael, The New Yorker)!Life isn't easy in 1947 Yorkshire, where strict post-war rationing is putting the squeeze on the townspeople. But when a married working-class couple (Palin and Smith) discovers that the town's wealthy elite has been secretly fattening up anillegalpig for their own selfish gluttony, they hatch an outlandish kidnapping scheme that gives new meaning to the phrasebringing home the bacon ! *1969: Actress, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; 1978: Supporting Actress, California Suite
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