A Private Function Sarah Lancashire as Joyce. A Private Function A Private Function is a 1984 British comedy film starring Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. The film was predominantly filmed in Ilkley, Ben Rhydding, and Barnoldswick, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. In a small Northern English town in 1947 the citizens endure continuing food rationing. Some local businessmen want to hold a party to celebrate the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip and illegally decide to raise a pig for that occasion. However, the
The Devil Is a Woman (1935 film) sympathy: each are “symbols of the endless futility of passion...[t]hey are the last lovers Sternberg postulated for Dietrich’s screen incarnation and their absurdity only marks the death of desire.” Film critic Andrew Sarris described "The Devil is a Woman" as the “coldest” of Sternberg's films in its uncompromising, yet humorously cynical, appraisal of romantic self-deception. This, despite the film's “sumptuous surface.” Silver remarks upon the film's “diamond-like hardness”, where romanticism is trumped by “cynical introspection and fatalism.” On Dietrich's character, Concha Perez, Cecelia Ager, film critic for "Variety" was "particularly lucid on the subject": Sarris summed up the film this