A Private Function Gilbert Chilvers (Michael Palin), who was encouraged to do so by his wife Joyce (Maggie Smith). Meanwhile a food inspector is determined to stop activities circumventing the food rationing. Three pigs were used in the filming of "A Private Function", all named Betty. Producer Mark Shivas was advised by Intellectual Animals UK that the pigs used should be female and six months old so as to not be too large or aggressive. However, the pigs were "unpredictable and often quite dangerous". During filming of one of the kitchen scenes, Maggie Smith was hemmed in by one of the pigs and
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