Cartoons from Punch

THE RULING CLASS

Directed by PETER MEDAK Screenplay by PETER BARNES

A toast from the 13th Earl of Gurney: "To England, this teeming womb of privilege." His luncheon companions, each a member of the House of Lords, raise their glasses in solemn salute. Later, at home, his manservant Tucker (Arthur Lowe) offers the earl (Harry Andrews) his evening whisky and a selection of nooses on a silver salver. "May I suggest the silk, sir?" Tucker says respectfully. The earl accepts, and begins his evening ritual, first stripping to his long underwear, then donning a regimental uniform jacket and a white ballet skirt, and finally stringing himself up for a harmless little swing. The earl, however, mucks up on this particular occasion, and Tucker discovers him dangling from the proper silk rope, neck twisted like a child's top.

Most of the earl's estate, which seems to be the size of Delaware, goes to his only living son Jack (Peter O'Toole), an odd sort who runs about in monk's habit sublimely certain that he is God. "He's a paranoid schizophrenic," his doctor diagnoses, to which Jack's Uncle Charles sputters indignantly: "But he's a Gurney."

The balance of the film is concerned with the family's plan to do Jack out of his inheritance, Jack's marriage to an actress (Carolyn Seymour) and his progress toward sanity. Surrendering for a time the identity of God, he becomes Jack the Ripper, murders his flirtatious aunt and makes an enormously successful speech in the House of Lords--a ringing call for a return to law, order and morality.

Scenarist Barnes (who has adapted the film from his own play) has written a snarling, overwrought and somewhat parochial satire on aristocracy and privileged morality. He lays his ironies on with a trowel and drives his points home with a bludgeon. The direction is uneven. As in Joe Egg, which he also filmed, Director Medak frequently has his actors break into ironic renditions of old pop songs, like Varsity Drag or Dem Bones, a device whose brittle charm crumbles with repetition. He also persists in having his films wretchedly photographed. The Ruling Class looks as if it were shot under floodlights.

But Medak apparently gives his actors free rein, with excellent results. Alastair Sim does a hilarious turn as a dotty bishop of the Church of England, officiating at Jack's nuptials with wide-eyed horror. Arthur Lowe plays Tucker like a recalcitrant titmouse. William Mervyn as Sir Charles, Coral Browne as Lady Claire, and James Villiers as their epicene offspring make the Gurneys as engagingly insufferable as a gallery of aristocrats from Punch.

The film will be remembered, however, for Peter O'Toole's Jack, a performance of such intensity that it may trouble sleep as surely as it will haunt memory. All actors can play insanity; few play it well. O'Toole begins where other actors stop, with the unfocused gaze, the abrupt bursts of frenzied high spirits and precipitous depressions. Funny, disturbing, finally devastating, O'Toole finds his way into the workings of madness, revealing the anger and consuming anguish at the source. Jay Cocks

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