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.

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

T.E. Lawrence: Peter O'Toole
Prince Faisal: Alec Guinness
Auda Abu Tayi: Anthony Quinn
Gen. Allenby: Jack Hawkins
Sherif Ali: Omar Sharif
Turkish Bey: José Ferrer
Col. Brighton: Anthony Quayle
Mr. Dryden: Claude Rains
Jackson Bentley: Arthur Kennedy
Gen. Murray: Donald Wolfit
Gasim: I.S. Johar
Majid: Gamil Ratib
Farraj: Michel Ray
Daud: John Dimech
Tafas: Zia Mohyeddin

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Based on the writings of T.E. Lawrence
Cinematography: Freddie Young
Production design: John Box
Film editing: Anne V. Coates
Music: Maurice Jarre

It's often said -- in fact, it was said in today's San Francisco Chronicle -- that David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is one of those films that must be seen in a theater. That statement kind of gets my back up: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? As it happens, I first saw Lawrence in a theater in the year of its release (or at least its European release, which was 1963), but it was a theater in Germany and the film was dubbed in German. Only moderately fluent in spoken German, I don't think I followed the dialogue very well, though I certainly appreciated the spectacle, especially Freddie Young's Oscar-winning cinematography. It took some later viewings on TV in the States for me to grasp the movie's story, though the film was trimmed for time, interrupted by commercials, and subjected to atrocious panning-and-scanning because viewers objected to letterboxing of wide-screen movies. So this viewing was probably my first complete exposure to Lean's celebrated film. And though I watched it at home -- in HD on a 32-inch flat screen TV -- I think I fully appreciated both the spectacle and the story. Which is not to say that I think the movie is all it's celebrated for being. The first half of the film is far more compelling than the latter half, and some of the casting is unforgivable, particularly Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal and Anthony Quinn as Auda. Guinness was usually a subtle actor, but his Faisal is mannered and unconvincing. Quinn simply overacts, as he was prone to do with directors who let him, and his prosthetic beak is atrocious. Omar Sharif, on the other hand, is very good as Ali. The producers are said to have wanted Horst Buchholz or Alain Delon, but they settled on Sharif, already a star in Egypt, and made him an international star. His success points up how unfortunate it is that they couldn't have found Middle Eastern actors to play Faisal and Auda. In his film debut, Peter O'Toole gives a tremendous performance, even though he's nothing like the shorter and more nondescript figure that was the real T.E. Lawrence, and it's sad that screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson couldn't have found room in the script to trace the origins of Lawrence's obsession with Arabia. I recently read Scott Anderson's terrific Lawrence in Arabia: Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which not only depicts Lawrence's complexity but also the madness of the spy-haunted, oil-hungry wartime world in which he played his part. It's beyond the scope of even a three-and-a-half-hour movie to tell, though maybe it would make a tremendous TV miniseries some day.