Unruly Rulers
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen UNRULY RULERS BY JOHN SIMON F ^^^nough instances of "the madman is saner than the so-called normal man" 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...
...Herder explains why the 11-year-old Jack felt rejected by his parents: "They sent him away, alone, into a primitive community of licensed bullies and pederasts...
...The icy Claire goes romantically soft on Jack and dies for it...
...But he will, when he's cured...
...Truscott joins in, and we cut to the two of them in a rowboat that promptly capsizes...
...Especially since the two Peters, Barnes and Medak, have added one more, strictly filmic, level of dizzying comedy...
...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...
...Herder: No...
...Granted, the psychiatrists and asylum guards may be less normal than most people, sane or insane?that is 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...
...The tone can be high comedy, as when Jack explains how he knows he is God: "Simple...
...The reversals, however, continue...
...It all finally strikes us as wire-pulling: manipulative and repetitive and hell-bent on proving universal madness by driving its audience batty, too...
...It means that he has adopted another persona, that of a typical reactionary British lord...
...It has even received scientific, or quasi-scientific, support in the writings of R. D. Laing...
...on screen, it all becomes rather suffocating...
...Or it is 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...
...only Grace Shelley, instructed by Sir Charles on how to capture the mad earl—and also a stunning theatrical, or cinematic, effect...
...The assumption is that in a world growing daily more virulent and dangerous, the comparative peace inside the mental institution looks progressively safer and saner...
...Herder, and Graham Crowden as Truscott are perfect...
...The scheme almost succeeds, but Dr...
...The Fourteenth Earl of Gurney has murdered Grace...
...He conquers Jack, who previously answered to every name from J. C. to Yahwe, from Khoda to the Naz, and merely abominated his real name, but now meekly declares himself to be Jack...
...The trouble with this lord is that he thinks he is The Lord, and also Jesus, whose appearance he imitates, the Holy Ghost, and all other forms of divinity...
...Herder, who now suspects the worst, engage in a comic duel with their 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...
...Considering the amount of gear-shifting involved, Barnes and his director, Peter Me-dak, have done a fair job of making it all cohere...
...Claire: Can't he see what the world's really like...
...Another scene is transferred to a fox hunt, and we see the fox urinate contemptuously in the direction of hounds and hunters...
...Just after our Christ has failed to perform 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 Tra-viata...
...The family conspires to have him committed for good, yet can do so without grave financial loss only if he has a male heir, whose guardian Sir Charles can become...
...By dint of continually trying to outdo each other and outwit us, those two clever Peters end by petering out...
...But Barnes and Medak often go too far...
...Another "martyr of love," his doctor explains...
...The innocent Tucker is taken for the murderer—a reversal of the old the-butler-did-it plot...
...Upon his autocratic father's eccentric demise, our hero, Jack, becomes the fourteenth Earl of Gurney...
...Just consider the quick-change dialogue...
...Peter O'Toole as Jack is almost as good, and Arthur Lowe, as Tucker the "bolshie" butler, is best of all, his art far transcending its vehicle...
...At last, his wife...
...Jack is a loving God, all benevolent laissez-faire and let copulation thrive...
...On stage, blackouts and intermissions help us catch our breaths...
...the loose chanteuse turned devoted mother and spouse, tries to woo him back...
...Still, it becomes harder and harder to sustain this chameleon tomfoolery over the film's 148 minutes, already cut down from its original, nearly three-hour version...
...A musical comedy on the subject is due this season on Broadway, and right now we have the movie, The Ruling Class, adapted by Peter Barnes from his own successful London play...
...Yet there are fine scenes...
...and in a slightly modified version in the opera, The Rake's Progress...
...So on top of its many other comedic levels, the film piles a further layer of vaudeville...
...Fundamentally, though, it is the old story...
...in the play Marat/ Sade, though there it was not the main point...
...but William Mervyn as Charles, Coral Browne as Claire, James Vil-liers as their bumbling son Dinsdale, Harry Andrews as the thirteenth Earl, Michael Bryant as Dr...
...What a fascinating study could be made of the permutations of the theme in fiction, drama and film—particularly given its present-day proliferation...
...When I pray to Him I find I'm talking to myself...
...Beyond the mocking of the aristocracy, the main ironic intent is summed up in this exchange: "Dr...
...And when the Government's Master in Lunacy, Kelso Truscott, subjects Jack to a sanity test that might prove fatal, Jack recognizes him as a former fellow-Etonian and launches into the old school song about rowing to victory...
...What does recovery mean...
...Herder: Your nephew suffers from the delusion that the world we live in is based on the fact that God is love...
...Herder and the mean but shrewd Charles go crazy...
...Alastair Sim may slightly overdo Bertie, the blithering bishop among the Gur-neys...
...Whereas in the play the House of Lords was occupied mostly by mouldy, cobwebby dummies, in the film they become skeletons performing the dance of death...
...It is to Peter Barnes' credit that in The Ruling Class he manages to wrest a number of new twists from this topos, and that, furthermore, he is able to give the protagonist who embodies the mad-is-saner-than-normal prototype certain dimensions and shadings that make him more interesting than his basic familiarity would seem to allow...
...More often, the tone is simply farcical, as when Tucker, the cynical but lovable manservant, offers this explanation of an outburst of pandemonium at Gurney Manor: "Life, Master Dinsdale, sir...
...The film, like the underlying play, espouses several genres: farce, satire, absurdist black comedy, musical comedy (there are some neatly interpolated song-and-dance numbers), even melodrama...
...He delivers a sanguinary, seminonsensical harangue in the House of Lords and receives a thunderous ovation...
...The rich moth-eaten tapestry of life...
...I suppose it all goes back to Lear, who has to go insane with grief to begin to see the light through his very ravings...
...The reasonably sane Dr...
...Thus Jack believes himself married in the sanatorium to Marguerite Gautier, the Lady of the Camelias...
...McKyle is a God of vengeance for a rotten world, who believes he is giving off deadly electricity...
...We have had it, most recently, in the films King of Hearts and—in an ignoble variant—Hammersmith Is Out...
...The changing tones demand great flexibility from the actors and, happily, a splendid cast is on hand to supply it—only Carolyn Seymour as Grace fails to dazzle us...
...Sir Charles stolidly dots the i's: "You mean he went to Public School...
...Herder, to keep him safely silent...
...He secretly identifies himself with Jack the Ripper, too, and his mind and verbiage still intermittently wander...
...w ^ ^ hat finally does in The Ruling Class is the number of reversals...
...Herder, and, to his family's great dismay, takes over the earldom and its emoluments...
...Sir Charles, the late earl's half-brother, marries off his own mistress, the showgirl Grace Shelley, to Jack, while Charles' wife, Lady Claire, proceeds to seduce Dr...
...Ken Hodges' color cinematography is adequate...
...If The Ruling Class is less than we might ask for, it is more than we usually get...
...Thus when the supposedly cured Jack and Dr...
...As the camera pulls away, we hear a terrible scream...
...He wants flogging and capital punishment reinstated, and advocates sexual repression and strong class distinctions...
...Enthusiastically Jesus Christ, alias Jack Gurney, leaps toward her, and joins her in the aria and dance...
...Or it can be wickedly satirical, as when Dr...
...The performances, as I have suggested, are just right...
...And then the collateral reversals...
...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...
...He leaves a private mental sanatorium, where he has been treated for seven years as a paranoic-schizophrenic by the head psychaitrist, Dr...
...It further results in his huge success in the House of Lords, a reversal into ostensible sanity, then back into the absolute madness of uxoricide...
...A miracle we think, after all...
...So when Jack as the New Testament God is symbolically defeated by an Old Testament God figure, we expect the sad, diminishing sobriety with which he faces the sane world to be the final reversal...
...Jack's sanity results in his becoming Jack the Ripper, a worse insanity...
...since his return to sanity, he has neglected her sexually...
...He is on the way to being cured...
Vol. 55 • October 1972 • No. 19
