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Grand
Delusion
 Two
veddy proper ladies glide into the parlor of a palatial English
manor for their audience with Jack, 14th Earl of Gurney, a
nobleman whom the locals suspect is tweaked. Sure enough,
Jack is a flamboyant loon who thinks he’s God. After Jack
makes a handful of blasphemous comments, the ladies rise from
their seats—but not to leave. Instead, they join Jack and
his butler in an impromptu musical number, dancing and singing
to music that emanates from who-knows-where, then slip back
to reality after the song as if nothing odd happened.
A song-and-dance interlude outside the context of a musical
is peculiar, but this scene is only mildly abnormal by the
standards of The Ruling Class, a freakshow of a satire
recently issued on DVD by the world-class preservationists
of the Criterion Collection. Released in 1972, the picture
is director Peter Medak’s wild adaptation of an angry play
by Peter Barnes. As the title suggests, Barnes’ play is a
venomous look at the upper echelons of British society, and
his choice of protagonist—an earl so delusional he believes
himself divine—is a good indication of the unsubtle nature
of the piece. As often happened in extreme British entertainment
of the period, whether the comedy of the Monty Python troupe
or the outrageous movies directed by Ken Russell, the sledgehammer
quality of the satire is leavened by unfettered imagination
and mellifluous language.
The movie begins with Jack’s father, the 13th Earl of Gurney
(Harry Andrews), demonstrating his own brand of madness by
dressing in a tutu and military regalia before performing
a bizarre rite of masochistic self-asphyxiation. After his
death, his estate is bequeathed to Jack (Peter O’Toole), a
raving lunatic who has spent years in a psychiatric hospital.
Predictably, Jack’s relatives scheme to get the mad earl out
of the way in order to take control of the family’s wealth.
The biggest schemer in the clan is Sir Charles (William Mervyn),
who epitomizes the intolerant qualities of British entitlement:
It never occurs to him to nurture or accommodate Jack, so
Charles quickly conjures a plan by which Jack will be robbed
of his inheritance. The plan hinges on Grace (Carolyn Seymour),
Charles’ nubile mistress, who agrees to seduce and marry Jack
in order to produce an heir, thereby increasing her own social
standing. A great deal of the tension in the movie comes from
guessing how completely Jack will be swindled, and determining
whether his vestigial sanity will be sufficient for him to
turn the scheme on the schemers.
The movie is filled with insane interludes that underline
the enraged social commentary of the plot. Bishop Lampton
(Alastair Sim), an aging clergyman with close ties to the
Gurney clan, sputteringly objects to various misdeeds committed
by Charles, but is persuaded to endorse such misbehavior simply
by virtue of Charles’ station. Watching the bishop react to
Jack’s ramblings about being God is precious, and also a sharp
depiction of the ridiculous obligations that deference to
members of the ruling class creates.
It’s been said that for everything in The Ruling Class
that works, something fails, and that’s true to some extent.
The movie is quite long, at two and a half hours, and its
shifts from light comedy to dark allegory are startling. But
the sheer vigor of the movie is astounding. The dance numbers
have the happy-go-lucky veneer of old Hollywood musicals,
the shock cuts have the youthful spark of French new-wave
pictures, and the dialogue scenes, while inarguably theatrical,
have a kind of lopsided poetry. It helps that the DVD presents
the movie in such pristine fashion that it looks as if it
was made last year, not three decades ago.
And while all of the performances are powerful or at least
energetic, O’Toole is given ample means by which to run roughshod
over all of his costars. Never an actor known for his restraint,
O’Toole is at his over-the-top best, screaming his way through
monologues, employing his spidery limbs to vivid effect whether
dancing or dangling from a cross, and seeming equally at home
with starry-eyed naiveté and chilling psychosis. Considering
that madness is now regularly played in movies for cheap sympathy
or vulgar horror, watching O’Toole play countless shadings
of mental disease is a pleasure and a surprise.
The
Ruling Class is a cult classic in the truest sense, not
only because it has been embraced by small contingents of
movie lovers, but because its strange allure is the kind of
intoxicant to which fans can return on a regular basis. The
movie may well be crass, lunkheaded and dated, but those qualities
reflect the glorious abandon with which the movie was surely
made.
—Peter
Hanson
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