Leon the Pig Farmer *** (1992, Mark Frankel, Brian Glover, Janet Suzman, Connie Booth, David de Keyser) – Classic Movie Review 3790

Vadim Jean and Gary Sinyor’s exuberant, lively and inventive if raw and raggedy début film is loaded with good actors and irreverent Jewish stereotype humour. It won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Charlie Chaplin Award for the best first feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1992.

The directors also won the Best Newcomer award from the London Critics’ Circle and the Most Promising Newcomer at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.

It is an uneasy but often funny and quite likeable British low-budget comedy starring Mark Frankel as the handsome, sensitive Jewish hero Leon Geller, an estate agent in London who discovers that his father is not actually London businessman Sidney Geller (David de Keyser) after all. In fact, thanks to an artificial insemination mishap, Leon turns out to have Yorkshire Dales pig farmer Brian Chadwick (Brian Glover) as a father.

The writing by Michael Normand and Gary Sinyor is uneven and occasionally uncertain, but the best of it is clever and excellent.

It was the last film (after a decade gap) of Carry On veteran Bernard Bresslaw, as Rabbi Hartmann; he died on 11 June 1993 of a heart attack at 59.

It also stars Janet Suzman as Judith Geller, Connie Booth as Yvonne Chadwick, Maryam D’Abo, Gina Bellman, Vincenzo Ricotta, Jean Anderson, John Woodvine, Annette Crosbie, Stephen Greif, Neil Mullarkey, Bert Kwouk (art collector), Sean Pertwee, Barry Stanton, Peter Whitman, Gordon Reid, Jack Raymond and Claudia Morris.

Mark Frankel was killed in a road accident on 24 September, aged 34. He was an avid biker and proud of his yellow Harley Davidson, one of only six in the world. Tragically, that was the one on which he died.

Bert Kwouk OBE died of cancer on 24 May 2016, aged 85. From 2002 till the series ended in 2010, he played one of the three main characters in TV’s Last of the Summer Wine, as ‘Electrical’ Entwistle.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3790

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