The Missionary (1982)
Michael Palin's first film away from the Python team is a partly saucy comedy set at the dawn of the twentieth century. Palin plays a missionary recalled from Africa, where he'd been for ten years, charged with setting up a mission for the ladies of the night in London's docklands.
Palin is well suited as the innocent abroad, or in this case at home, in the petticoat jungle of Edwardian London prostitution, most of the smut going well over his head, if not the viewers.
Maggie Smith leads a top support cast and she has a lot of fun playing the frustrated aristo attempting to seduce the naive missionary.
This is all so very British and quite wonderful with it once you get a taste for the comedic tone. As with Palin's A Private Function a couple of years later this really plays out like an elongated episode of his mid seventies series Ripping Yarns and feels like a relic of a bygone era, more's the pity.
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