The Ruling Class - Criterion Collection
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Features
• Anamorphic
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• DVD-Video
• Special Edition
• Widescreen
• NTSC
In Theaters : 1972
DVD Release : 30 October, 2001 |
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The Ruling Class - Criterion Collection Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Veddy British, Veddy Stoopid...I've Resorted To Hypnosis In An Effort To Forget It
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Peter O' Toole's binge drinking (or occasional bouts of momentary sobriety) from the days when this film was made explains a lot about why he took on the role of a mad English Lord in the allegedly funny dark comedy The Ruling Class, although how Arthur Lowe was talked into coming aboard this brain-hurting turkey is a mystery.
In a nutshell, this perhaps one-time avant-garde movie from 1972 plays out like this... A fusty old nobleman, the thirteenth Earl of Gurney, played by Harry Andrews, is secretly an asphyxiphiliac who gets his jollies by having his manservant hang him (as in by the neck) from a bedpost every night, only to step in and rescue him just before he permanently blacks out. Well, the equally antique servant one night keels over of a heart attack right in the middle of one of His Lordship's bizarre and unfunny sessions of pleasure-via-strangulation, and the poor old chap dangles his way kicking and gasping to that great country house party in the sky.
Enter the Lord's heir, Jack, a certifiably insane Mod-ist with terrible fashion sense who goes through life under the delusion that he is none other than (gee, who didn't see this coming?) Jesus Christ incarnate. Scenes of loud, irritatingly madcap British "humor" pass and along the line the new Lord marries a stripper whose primary ambition is to have the salesgirls at Harrod's step-to for her now that she is a Lady. Meanwhile Lord Jack refuses to answer to anything other than "Jesus" or "JC" and the staff and family retainers are thrown into a tizzy. Various efforts are taken to cure the new Lord and make him an acceptable representative of the stogy old-line Tory Gurney family, and finally all seems well at the end when the Lord begins to answer to the name "Jack". Jack becomes a fire-breathing conservative complete with calls in his House of Lord's maiden speech for a return to capital punishment and the general exploitation of a rightfully downtrodden working class. Little do his peers know, however, that while cured of his delusions about being Jesus, the fourteenth Lord Gurney is not now answering to his own name of Jack, but he believes himself to that erroneously romanticized Victorian sexual misfit, Jack the Ripper. Yes, how hil-ar-i-ous, Lord Jack now a sexual murderer of women, uh-huh.
And that, Amazonians, is The Ruling Class for you, an agonizingly awful mislabeled classic.
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The Ruling Class - Criterion Collection dvd movie.