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.
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