Movie Log: The Missionary

I've spent the last twenty-five years vaguely intending to see The Missionary someday (and A Private Function at approximately the same time), but that someday finally came last week.

The Missionary was one of the flurry of movies put out by George Harrison's production company Handmade Films in the early '80s. Handmade was formed to finance Monty Python's The Life of Brian when EMI pulled out, and Handmade's roster of films do have a decided Pythonian bent. The Missionary was early in their string, before the body blows of Shanghai Surprise and Nuns on the Run, when Handmade was a respectable, even highbrow, British film outfit.

Michael Palin is Rev. Charles Fortescue, an Anglican priest returning from a ten-year mission somewhere in Africa to 1906 London and hoping to get a nice village parish somewhere so he can marry his dim but frightfully organized fiancee Deborah (Phoebe Nicholls). Unfortunately, the Bishop instead gives him another mission: bringing the gospel to the "fallen women" of London.

Fortescue, with the financial aid of the randy and bored Lady Isabel Ames (Maggie Smith), sets up his mission, and attracts many young women of negotiable virtue via the unlikely stratagem of being friendly, non-judgmental, and sexually available. (Palin plays this a bit bashful, as if he's too British to object to a lady's request -- though he did object to Lady Isabel for quite a while.) As others have noted, the entire movie is essentially the Castle Anthrax bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail writ large, with a "aren't those religious people so hypocritical" subtext.

The plot doesn't entirely make sense, and wanders off in several directions somewhat aimlessly, though The Missionary maintains an even tone, which goes a long way to sell all of the odd and unlikely moments. However, the ending just collapses into a unearned, and hasty, happy ending that really doesn't follow from the immediately previous events. This many years later, I have no idea if the problems were funding, script, or editing -- or maybe all three -- but something went wrong, and the movie ends with a muffled, unfortunate thud.

I'll also note that the current DVD has a rotten old pan-and-scan transfer which is obnoxiously noticeable in several scenes. I don't expect this minor middle-aged movie is going to get a new transfer any time soon, but it's still a shame to see any movie so shabbily treated.