THE RULING CLASS

From a review by New York critic John Simon (September 10-October 2, 1972):

Seldom have I had to revise my opinion of a film upward on seeing it a second time only a few days later. But THE RULING CLASS, which is well worth seeing once, seems to me wickedly persuasive the second time around. The jokes, amusing the first time, become more clearly purposive the second; eve the seemingly deficient discipline and overabundant length reveal a perverse cogency and insidious logic. That second time, as the lights went up, I looked everywhere for my objections - under my seat and all the neighboring ones - but I could not find them.

Peter Barnes's script, which closely follows the text of his London hit play, concerns Jack Gurney, who, on his father's bizarre death, comes out of a private mental institution, where he has been treated for seven years as a paranoid-schizophreic, to become the fourteenth earl of Gurney, lord of the sprawling Gurney Manor. His family is shocked: Jack believes he is the Holy Trinity all in one , looks like a storybook Christ, rejects the name of Jack and answers to every name from J.C. to Yahwe from Khoda to the Naz and "any of the nine billion names of God."

Though his carryings-on are mostly nonsenical, his basic insistence on love is admirable, and the very thing that queers him with his stodfily, though by no means virtuously, aristocratic kinfolk. Only Tucker, the old family retainer, sympathizes with him; he has been left a goodly inheritance but, as a thoroughbred servant, cannot leave and , even though he now drinks and sneers openly, knows too much to be fired.

The family conspire to have Jack committed for good, yet can do so without financial lossonly if he has a male heir, whose guardian Sir Charles, the late earl's half brother, marries off his own mistress, the showgirl Grace Shelley, to Jack, while Charles's wife, Lady Claire, proceeds to seduce his psychiatrist, Dr. Herder, to keep him safely silent.
The scheme almost succeeds, but Dr. Herder is piqued when the Gurneys high-handedly proceed to ignore him, and he manages an eleventh-hour cure by confronting Jack with another madman who thinks he is God: McKyle, the Electronic Messiah. Jack is a loving God, all benevolent laissez-faire and let copulation thrive; McKyle is a God of vengeance for a rotten world, who believes he is giving off deadly electricity. He conquers Jack and shocks him into admitting, "I am Jack." He is on the way to being cured.

What does recovery mean? it means he has adopted another persona, that of the typical reactionary British lord. He wants flogging and capital punishment reinstaed,and advocates sexual repression and strong class distinctions. He secretly identifies himself with Jack the Ripper, too, and his mind and verbiage still intermittently wander. All of which, alas, establishes him as a perfect member of the ruling class. When Lady Claire makes advances to him , he stabs her to death and lets Tucker, the old family retainer, take the rap. He delivers a sanguinary, seminonsensical harangue in theHouse of Lords and receives a thunderous ovation. At last, his wife, the loose chanteuse turned devoted mother and spouse, tries to woo him back; since his return to sanity, he has neglected her sexually. As the cmera pulls away, we hear a terrible scream. The fourteenth earl of Gurney has murdered Grace.

What Peter Barnes has done in his screenplay is threefold. The Ruling Class is, first, riproaring attack on the British upper class - more than just satirical: absurdist. In this sense, it offers little that is new and might be accused of flogging a dead horse. But privilege of one kind or another, persists throughout the worl, and Barnes challenges it wittily and fiercely. The ostensibly cured earl tells his doctor, "Behavior which would be considered insnity in a tradesman is looked on as mild eccentricity in a lord," words "Because you are a great lord, you think you are a genius. What have you done to earn so many advantages? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more.' The bold thing about the film is that its earl gets away, literally, with murder, and lets poor Tucker, a secret "bolshie," take the rap. There is no moralizing cop-out here as in, say, Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Secondly, thougth it is cleverly handled, there is that tiresome thesis of the madman as the only sane person in a world gone mad. This derives ultimately from King Lear (to which the film contain discreetly scattered allusions), whose hero had to go insane with grief to begin to see the light through his very ravings. Enough instances of this motif can be adduced in contemporary art to elevate the theme to a modern topos. (Topoi, you may recall, are the recurrent themes in classical and medieval literature.) We have had it, most recently, in the films King of Hearts and - in an even more ignoble variant - Hammersmith is Out; in the play Marat/Sade, though there it was not the main point; and in a slightly modified version in the opera The Rake's Progress. Personally, I am more in sympathy with Pirandello's Enrico IV, a thematically related work, where the protagonist's putting on the trappings of insanity is viewed as anything but a blessing in disguise.

The Ruling Class, in fact, seems to owe much to the work of R. D. Laing, the British psychiatrist, who perceives schizoid behavior as respecable: the self-defense of the sensitive in a crass world. The assumption is that in a world growing daily more virulent and dangerous, the comparative peaceinside the mental institution looks progressively safer and saner. Granted the psychiatrists and asylum guards may be less normal than most people, sane or insane - thatis a corollary of our topos, seen recently in, for example, Candy and End of the Road - but those harmless little inmates with their amiable delusions insuring contentment are clearly better off than the rest of us, buffeted by the world's evil whims. Thus the film's main ironic intent is summed up in this exchange:

DR. HERDER: Your nephew suffers from the delusion that the world we live in is based on the fact that God is love.
CLAIRE: Can't he wee what the world's really like?
DR. HERDER: No, but he will, when he is cured.

Yet on closer scrutiny the film goes beyond this somewhat simplistic positionn.

For one thing, the author, Barnes, notes with clinical correctness tha, shocked out of exessive love, the unbalanced person overshoots the mark in the opposite direction. For another, there are interesting metaphysical implications here: Jack is clearly the New Testament God in travestied form; McKyle, the unhinged Scotish puritan, is as clearly a caicature of the Old Testament God who declares Earth "an early failure o' mine...where I dump the excrement o; the Universe." Tucker, representing the rising orders, chimes in: "We don't want love, we want a fat slice o' revenge."

In other words, our age, however agnostic and liberated, is seen as still worshipping a fanatical God of vengeance. Our radicals want retribution rather than justice, let alone mercy, and fall in withthe McKylean God, a self-stlyed "holy terror." It is hard to knwo just who is not mad here, or, at least, less mad than the others.

When, earlier, Jack playfully denied his dvinity during a lie detector test, the machine regitered this as a whopping lie. Could the machines be demented, too? The very camera seems so when it sabotages one of Tucker's loveliest lines. Asked what the pandemonium following the McKyle-Jack confrontation is all about, Tucker replies, "Life, Master Dinsdale, sir. The rich moth-eaten tapestry of life." But the camera is not on the speaker, and this pregnant summary of the film's outlook gets lost in a hardly audible voice-over.

Perhaps the most impressive feat of the film is that Barnes and his director, Peter Medak, have tackled quite successfully the well-nigh hopeless task of translating a tricky stage play to the screen. There are lightning transitions here from realistic drama to Victorian melodrama, from musical comedy to absurdist black humor, from genuine feeling to poker-faced farce. Just consider the quick-change dialogue. The tone can be high comedy, as when Jack explains how he knows he is God: "Simple. When I pray to Him I find I'm talking to myself." Or it can be wickedly saticrical, as when Dr. Herder expounds o why the eleven-year-old Jack felt rejected by his parents: "They ent him away, alone, into a primitive community of licensed bullies and pederasts." Sir Charles stolidly dot the i's: "You mena he went to public school." Or it can get downright scabrous, as when Jack announces his divine agenda for the day: "First I shall command the pope to consecrate a planeload of lightweight contraceptives for the priest-ridden Irish."

The frankly stylised world of the stage is more hosptable to such pretidigitation than the film world, whose chief legerdemain has always been the illusion of reality: making the wildest dream look absolutely real. On the stage, blackouts and intermissions help us catch our breaths; on screen, it all becomes a trifle suffocating, especially since the two Peters, Barnes and Medak, have added a strictly filmic level of dizzying comedy. Thus when the supposedly cured Jack and Dr. Herder, who now suspects the worst, engage in a comic duel of canes, the film takes this out of the living room and onto the ledges and balconies along the manor's facade, in a parody of the old Errol FLynn-Basil Rathbone swordplay. And when the government's Master of Lunacy, Kelso Truscott, subjects Jack to a sanity test that might prove fatal, Jack recognises him as a former Etonian and launches into the old school song about rowing to victory. Truscott joins in, and we cut to the two of them in a rowboat that promptly capsizes. Another scene is transferred to a fox hunt, and we see the fox urinate contemptuously in the direction of the hounds and hunters.

Yet, Medak has found ways of moving and stationing his camera that make the proceedings both theatrical and filmic. There are numerous medium and long shots in which what happens around the edges is at least as important as what goes on in the middle (theatrical); overhead shots that emphasize the enormousness - and enormity - of Gurney Hall (filmic);Low-angle shots that turn us into spectators gazing up at heroically strutting players (theatrical); and, above all, brilliantly filmic montages.

Montage has become suspect in the modern cinema. Ever since Andre Bazin opted against it and pulled auteurist critics and filmmakers with him, the longer sequence, replete with deep focus and panning, has tended to displace dynamic cutting, where the juxtaposition or alternation of shorter takes elicts a network of implications. Even that fast cutting of some of New and Newer Wave directors is not truly montage, only the restlessness freely indulged in. But consider the powerful editing by inherif the last part of the film, from Jack's ominous farewell to his wife, Grace, as he goes off to make his wildly cheered maiden speech at the Lords, and all the way to the end. In rapid counterpoint, we see Jack's ascent to the pinnacle of acclaim played off against tiny scenes in which several victims are glimpsed in death, dementia, or police detention; the montage makes Jack's progress look especially sinister and unstoppable, and the victim's fates even more grotesque or monstrous. The soundtrack, in turn, swells, to "Land of Hope and Glory," sinks to the bathos of doddering, skeletal peers chanting "Onward Christian Soldiers" ina hideous recessional, rises to the pathos of Graces sadly miscalculated wooing song that dissolves into her agonized shriek, and ends witha small child's voice , "I am Jack!"

This is, presumably, Jack's b inheriting the Gurney curse. But even as this hlf-formed voice patters on, the camera, in an ironic helicopter shot, soars above Gurney Manor, massive and resplendent in the moonlight - but this, again, is undercut when the soundtrack breaks into, as Jack did when he was still God of love, "The Varsity Drag." The ditty now sounds like the ultimate sarcasm.

And there are ithe fine scenes. Jack believes himslf married in the sanatorium to Marguerite Gautier, the Lady of the Camelias. (Another "martyr of love," his doctor expalins.) Just after our Christ has failed to performe a miracle meant to prove his godhead, there appears at the top of the stairs...Marguerite Gautier, alias Violetta Valery, singing the drinking song from La Traviata. Enthusiatically Jesus Christ, alias Jack Gurney, leaps toward her, and joins her in the aria and dance. A miracle we think, after all! No; only Grace Shelley, instructed by Sir Charles on how to capture the mad earl - and also a stunning theatrical, or cinematic, effect.

Yet all this cleverness would go begging if Medak had not asembled a superb cast and obtained seamless ensembel work from them. There is Peter O'Toole, as mercurial as he is incisive, as Jack who does the most outrageous things witha bemusedly introspective air, who gives absurdity romantic-heroic stature, and makes crude farce so dainty and elegant that the film acquires another dimenson by his mere presence. Alastair Sim may slightly overdo Bertie, thre blithering bishop among the Gurneys; but William Mervyn as Charles, Coral Browne as Claire, ames Villiers as their bumling some Dinsdale, Harry Andrews as the thirteenth earl, Michael Bryant as Dr. Herder, and Graham Crowden as Truscott are paragons each and all: sharp, funny, and also pitiable. And Arthur Lowe, as Tucker, the "bolshie" butler, proves one of the greatest masters of comic underplaying I have ever encountered: he squeezes infinite variety out of the most rigorous economy of gesture and inflection, and if that isn't art, let me sit through Last of the Red Hot Lovers three times in a row. It is too bad that Ken Hodges's color cinematography is only adequate.

In its critique of the upper order (which, however, does not fail to note the complicity of the exploited), in its minglingof sardonicism and wistfulness, in its sense of the abyss where the skid on the banana peel leads us, The Ruling Class bears a modest resemblance o a much finer film, Jean Renoir's The Rulers of the Game. Even to approximate, in broader brushsrokes, Renoir's masterworkis achievement enough.

(Photographs courtesy P.M.) 

Copyright Technofilm 1997