Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/27/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, March 27, 2020

The Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972)

Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class

Cast: Peter O'Toole, Arthur Lowe, William Mervyn, Coral Browne, Michael Bryant, Alastair Sim, Carolyn Seymour, Harry Andrews, James Villiers. Screenplay: Peter Barnes, based on his play. Cinematography: Ken Hodges. Production design: Peter Murton. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: John Cameron.

The Ruling Class is one of those movies that don't know when to stop. Up to and including the scene in which Jack (Peter O'Toole) is judged sane by an obviously dotty authority after he discovers that they are fellow Old Etonians, Peter Medak's film, which has a screenplay by Peter Barnes derived from his play, is an often amusing, sometimes hilarious blend of the kind of skewering of British eccentricity and class consciousness found in the Ealing Studios movies of the 1950s, with some of the surreal cheekiness of the Monty Python skits and films. Then the whole thing turns dark, as Jack discovers that he isn't God but instead Jack the Ripper. It's a shift in tone that might have worked, if it hadn't been delivered with such heavy-handedness as the flashes that show the members of the House of Lords as desiccated corpses shrouded in cobwebs. Believe me, we have gotten the point by then. There's a good biting satire of about 100 minutes inside this 154-minute film, including a few buoyantly daffy musical numbers. The Ruling Class remains worth seeing for O'Toole's performance, which earned him one of his eight unsuccessful Oscar nominations, along with some delicious work from Arthur Lowe as the communist butler who stays on with the Gurney family to torment them after he gets a £30,000 bequest in the late Earl of Gurney's will; Harry Andrews as that nutty nobleman; Alastair Sim as a befuddled bishop (Sim makes even the act of sitting down funny); Coral Browne as the sardonic Lady Claire; James Villiers as her upperclass twit of a son; William Mervyn as the perpetually scheming Sir Charles; and Carolyn Seymour as Sir Charles's mistress, brought in to pretend to be Marguerite Gautier, the Lady of the Camellias, whom Jack/God believes to be his wife. But the nihilism into which the film descends casts a pall over even these performances.