In a small Yorkshire town in 1947, a pig is being illicitly reared to provide meat for a forthcoming banquet of local dignitaries celebrating the marriage of Princess Elizabeth. That is, until a timid chiropodist (Michael Palin) pig-naps the animal, urged on by his grasping wife (Maggie Smith), who sees it as a possible ticket out of their glumly austere lives and up the social ladder.
So begins A Private Function (1984), originally titled Pork Royale, Alan Bennett’s first script for cinema. With finely rendered performances from Palin, Smith – who is hilariously sour as what Time Out called “a Lady Macbeth of the aspidistras” – and a host of British talent (Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, Bill Paterson, Liz Smith, Alison Steadman), the film’s tone teeters on the brink of unwholesomeness without ever quite tipping over.
No wonder Pauline Kael in the New Yorker likened it to “an Ealing Studios comedy … as it might have been skewed by Joe Orton” and praised its “distinctive zest and virulence”.
The notion of a ration-book comedy was suggested to Bennett by the film’s director, Malcolm Mowbray, who has died aged 73 of complications from dementia. The pair became acquainted after Bennett commended Mowbray on his BBC film Days at the Beach (1980), about three soldiers guarding an unexploded mine. Mowbray then directed Bennett’s Our Winnie (1981), also for the BBC, starring Sheila Kelley as a woman with learning differences living with her elderly mother and aunt.
“I had been working on an idea about rationing and black-marketeering,” the director said. “It was something I wasn’t keen to write myself so I put the idea to Alan in 1981. My wife’s family had been vaguely involved insofar as they were farmers. Her father also sold carpets and often he’d wrap up a piece of ham in a carpet and send it off to a customer.”
He directed with a light, tender touch, marshalling the various flawed and deluded figures embroiled in the porcine espionage plot. The presence of three pigs inevitably made the shoot unpredictable.
“They are supposed to have been house-trained and taught to come when called, but they aren’t and don’t,” noted Bennett.
Among his human collaborators at least, Mowbray inspired trust and loyalty. The film’s producer, Mark Shivas, discerned echoes of Miloš Forman in Mowbray’s habit of letting comedy emerge unforced from a scene. Smith referred to him on set as “our fearless leader”.
Like Bennett, he had a knack for coaxing to life even the most apparently insignificant characters so that one could imagine them existing beyond the edges of the story. The critic Kevin Jackson in the Independent said the film thrived “on its countless small recognitions of the malice, gentleness and thwarted romanticism of English lives”.
In March 1985, A Private Function was chosen to open British film week at the LA film festival, where it was shown in the magnificent setting of Grauman’s Chinese theatre. “A limousine which will fetch Malcolm and myself from our hotel to the cinema doesn’t arrive,” Bennett wrote in his diary. “Eventually we are rushed down Hollywood Boulevard in the hotel van, which smells strongly of fish … A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael York and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film).”
In 2011, it was adapted into an acclaimed West End musical, Betty Blue Eyes, starring Sarah Lancashire and Reece Shearsmith. The animatronic pig was even given a voice, supplied by Kylie Minogue.
Mowbray was born in Knebworth, Hertfordshire, to Arnold, a dentist who ran his own practice, and Betty (nee Dickins). He was educated at Sherrardswood, an independent school in Welwyn Garden City, then at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design (now Ravensbourne University London) where he studied fine art, painting and sculpture. In 1972, he enrolled at the National Film and Television School.
His graduation film, Path of the Weft (1975), based on Muriel Spark’s novel Not to Disturb, attracted the attention of the producer David Puttnam, who commissioned him to adapt one of Tolstoy’s short stories. For the BBC, he directed Hanging Around (1978), a drama about three bored London teenagers, written by Barrie Keeffe. He also made Capital City (1979), a short film about Capital Radio which was screened in cinemas.
Following the success of A Private Function, Mowbray moved to Los Angeles with his wife Valerie (nee Hill), whom he had met at Ravensbourne and married in 1977, and their sons, Joe and Nathan. His first US film, Out Cold (1989), was a black comedy about a butcher (John Lithgow) who believes he has accidentally killed his boss; Teri Garr and Randy Quaid also starred.
The picture earned another rave from Kael, who called it “trim and smart … buffed to shine like a jewel.” Alexander Walker in the London Evening Standard observed that “Mowbray’s Englishness shows itself in dozens of tiny moments that squeeze the seed of character revelation out of a performance.” But poor distribution by the beleaguered company Hemdale led to the film being largely unseen. The same fate also befell his next comedy, Don’t Tell Her It’s Me (1990), starring Shelley Long as a romance novelist teaching her brother (Steve Guttenberg) how to be a hit with women.
Mowbray returned to Britain and spent the rest of the decade directing episodes of television series: Cadfael, starring Derek Jacobi as a sleuthing monk, Pie in the Sky, with Griffiths as a police detective turned restaurateur, and Crocodile Shoes, starring Jimmy Nail as a factory worker who becomes a country-and-western singer.
In The Revengers’ Comedies (1998), also known as Sweet Revenge, he reshaped Alan Ayckbourn’s two-part, five-hour play about suicidal strangers who meet while trying to throw themselves from Tower Bridge into a brisk farce starring Sam Neill, Helena Bonham Carter, Kristin Scott Thomas and Steve Coogan. His last film was Meeting Spencer (2011), a screwball comedy, with Jeffrey Tambor as a stage director hoping to bounce back after a run of flops.
Mowbray taught at institutions including the NFTS, Bournemouth Film School and Leeds Beckett University, and seemed himself always to be learning. “Some directors get typecast on their strengths,” he said. “I’d prefer to concentrate on my weaknesses and improve across the board.”
Valerie died in 2006. He is survived by Joe and Nathan.
• Malcolm Mowbray, film and television director, born 24 June 1949; died 23 June 2023
