Once you put on a black cap everything tastes like wax fruit.

The Ruling Class
Peter Medak 1972 UK
Starring: Peter O’Toole, Arthur Lowe, William Mervyn, Coral Browne, Alastair Sim, Harry Andrews, Michael Bryant, Carolyn Seymour, Patsy Byrne, Graham Crowden, Nigel Green

When it came to his acting style Peter O'Toole was known for many things, among them his exceptional theatrical talent, his ready humour, his ability for extended monologues, his portraits of fatal ambition and his reputation as a soused hellraiser, so it's a pleasure to see a film such as Peter Medak's gleeful, hilarious, fearlessly savage skewering of the upper classes, the peerage, communism, the public school system, family, musicals and even Britain itself, The Ruling Class, where he gets the opportunity to meld most of them successfully into a single role as Jack Gurney (although he also answers to JC, Barney, Eric, Bert and Entwistle), a schizophrenic Earl by default who veers between believing he's Jesus and Mycroft Holmes. Obviously it's a character that in lesser hands could be daft or even offensive but thankfully Medak, O'Toole and Peter Barnes (who wrote the source play) had the intelligence to go against the ferocity of the rest of the film and treat him with a delicacy that steers clear of mocking mental illness or religion and renders his delusions utterly sincere and, as a result, believable. Several psychiatrists have even hailed it as the most accurate representation of mania in British film history. For his part O'Toole appears to be in his element, leaping, dancing and breaking into song, riding a tricycle like a child, spouting forth bible verses, Shakespeare and psychological diagnoses and pulling off magic tricks before falling into heartbreak and Conservatism. He thinks he's married to La Dame aux camellias, claims to have been ordained by visions of St Francis, Socrates and Timothy O'Leary and gets one of the greatest entrance of the 1970's, striding into the room past the family butler, appearing close to eight feet tall, dressed like a mix of Christ and the Cowardly Lion, both benign and dominant. In one scene he rests on a cross (which is delivered early in the film wrapped in brown paper) lent against the back wall of the family mansion as his relatives (played by an astonishing cast of British cinematic legends) discuss what to do with him. As might be expected they aren't happy, but right from the start they've been treated as unremitting villains. In fact after a short opening scene where the previous Earl gives a patriotic after-dinner speech on the Empire to the strains of the National Anthem we're introduced to them via a display of their racism, avarice, cruelty, perversion and general inner ugliness, following which the Earl relaxes with a spot of auto-erotic asphyxiation dressed in a tutu, sock garters and a cocked admiral's cap. He then crashes through the forth wall, addresses the audience (or perhaps just thin air) on "moonlit trips to Marrakesh and vestal virgins smoking cigars" and accidentally offs himself leaving his mantle to his eldest living son (Jack). About the closest we get to traditionally good characters are Arthur Lowe's dignified, dryly sarcastic butler (that is, until he is left money in the old man's will and becomes impertinent, brazen, drunken and defiant) and Jack's decent but brainless upper class twit of a cousin. At first they plan to simply say he's "eccentric, or better still a heavy drinker" but soon start coming up with several appalling schemes including hiring his uncle's mistress to pretend to be his imagined wife so she can bear him an heir who they can then use as a controllable replacement before bundling Jack off to an asylum. Of course chaos ensues (including an intense face off with Nigel Green's frenzied McKyle, who believes he is "the electric Christ") but as in all truly great satire Medak throws in drama and horror to offset the silliness so that it stands to reason that in the end the corrupt will be punished and the only true innocent will be corrupted. Regular readers will have seen me give out reviews both admiring and unflinchingly disparaging in the past but I've always aimed to be accurate, at least to my opinion, so I hope no-one will discount this one when I call The Ruling Class a genuine gem only held back from full masterpiece status by Medak's indulgence in making the film over two and a half hours long. Watch it, buy the DVD, laud it on Twitter, buy it as a gift for friends.


PETER O'TOOLE