The Ruling Class
Encyclopedia
The Ruling Class is a 1972
1972 in film
The year 1972 in film involved some significant events.-Top grossing films :- Awards :Academy Awards:*Avanti!, directed by Billy Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet MillsB...

 British
British comedy
British comedy, in film, radio and television, is known for its consistently quirky characters, plots and settings, and has produced some of the most famous and memorable comic actors and characters in the last fifty years.-Film comedy:...

 black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...

 film. It is an adaptation of Peter Barnes
Peter Barnes
Peter Barnes was an English Olivier Award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His most famous work is the play The Ruling Class, which was made into a 1972 film for which Peter O'Toole received an Oscar nomination....

' satirical
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

 stage play which tells the story of a paranoid schizophrenic British
British people
The British are citizens of the United Kingdom, of the Isle of Man, any of the Channel Islands, or of any of the British overseas territories, and their descendants...

 nobleman (played by Peter O'Toole
Peter O'Toole
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole is an Irish actor of stage and screen. O'Toole achieved stardom in 1962 playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and then went on to become a highly-honoured film and stage actor. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, and holds the record for most...

) who inherits a peerage
Peerage
The Peerage is a legal system of largely hereditary titles in the United Kingdom, which constitute the ranks of British nobility and is part of the British honours system...

. The film costars Alastair Sim
Alastair Sim
Alastair George Bell Sim, CBE was a Scottish character actor who appeared in a string of classic British films. He is best remembered in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1951 film Scrooge, and for his portrayal of Miss Fritton, the headmistress in two St. Trinian's films...

, William Mervyn
William Mervyn
William Mervyn was an English actor best known for his portrayal of the Bishop in the clerical comedy All Gas and Gaiters.-Life and career:...

, Coral Browne
Coral Browne
Coral Browne was an Australian-American stage and screen actress.-Career:Coral Edith Brown was the only daughter of a restaurant-owner. She and her two brothers were raised in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, where she studied at the National Gallery Art School...

, Harry Andrews
Harry Andrews
Harry Fleetwood Andrews, CBE was an English film actor known for his frequent portrayals of tough military officers. His performance as Sergeant Major Wilson in The Hill alongside Sean Connery earned Andrews the 1965 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for the...

, Carolyn Seymour
Carolyn Seymour
Carolyn Seymour is an English actress, best associated with portraying the role of Abby Grant in the BBC series Survivors in 1975....

, James Villiers
James Villiers
James Michael Hyde Villiers was a British character actor and a familiar face on British television...

 and Arthur Lowe
Arthur Lowe
Arthur Lowe was a BAFTA Award winning English actor. He was best known for playing Captain George Mainwaring in the popular British sitcom Dad's Army from 1968 until 1977.-Early life:...

. It was produced by Jules Buck
Jules Buck
Jules Buck was an American producer of films. He was cameraman for John Huston's war documentaries and began producing as assistant to Mark Hellinger....

 and directed by Peter Medak
Peter Medak
Peter Medak is a Hungarian-born film director of British and American films.-Early life:He was born in Budapest, Hungary to a Jewish family, but in 1956 fled his native country for England due to the Hungarian Revolution...

.

The film is a "commercial failure [...that] has since become a cult classic"; Peter O'Toole described it as "a comedy with tragic
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...

 relief".

Synopsis

Following the death from erotic asphyxiation
Erotic asphyxiation
Erotic asphyxiation or breath control play is the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for sexual arousal. The sexual preference for that behavior is variously called asphyxiophilia, autoerotic asphyxia, hypoxyphilia. Colloquially, a person engaging in the activity is sometimes called a...

 of Ralph Gurney, the 13th Earl of Gurney (Andrews), Jack Gurney (O'Toole) becomes the 14th Earl of Gurney. Jack Gurney at first thinks he is God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....

 and shocks his family and friends with his talk of returning to the world to bring it love and charity, not to mention his penchant for breaking out into song and dance routines and sleeping upright on a cross. When faced with unpalatable facts (such as his identity as the 14th Earl), Jack puts them in his "galvanized pressure cooker" and they disappear. His unscrupulous uncle, Sir Charles (Mervyn), marries him to his mistress, Grace (Seymour), in hopes of producing an heir and putting his nephew in an institution; the plan fails when Grace falls in love with Jack. Jack gains another ally in Sir Charles' wife, Lady Claire (Browne), who hates her husband and befriends Jack just to spite him. She also begins sleeping with Jack's psychiatrist
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

, Dr. Herder (Michael Bryant
Michael Bryant (actor)
Michael Dennis Bryant was a British stage and television actor.-Biography:Bryant attended Battersea Grammar School and after service in the Merchant Navy and Army, he attended drama school and appeared in many productions on the London stage. He made his film debut in 1955...

), to persuade him to cure Jack quickly.

Herder attempts to cure him through intensive psychotherapy
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...

, to no avail; Jack so thoroughly believes that he is the "God of Love" that he dismisses any suggestion to the contrary as the rambling of lunatic
Lunatic
"Lunatic" is a commonly used term for a person who is mentally ill, dangerous, foolish, unpredictable; a condition once called lunacy. The word derives from lunaticus meaning "of the moon" or "moonstruck".-Lunar hypothesis:...

s. The night his wife goes into labour, Herder makes a last effort at therapy; he introduces Jack to McKyle (Nigel Green
Nigel Green
Nigel Green was a South African-born English character actor. Because of his strapping build and commanding demeanour he would often be found playing military types and men of action in such classic sixties films as Jason and the Argonauts, Zulu, Tobruk and The Ipcress File.-Early life and...

), a patient who also believes himself to be Christ
Christ
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...

 or as the patient puts it, "The Electric Messiah" who subjects an unwitting Jack to electroshock therapy. The plan is to use the electroshock to jolt Jack out of his delusions, showing him that the two men could not both be God and so he must be operating under hallucination
Hallucination
A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid,...

s. The plan works, and as Grace delivers a healthy baby boy, Jack appears to return to his senses and proclaims "I'm Jack, I'm Jack". In truth, he now believes himself to be Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper
"Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the...

.

Sir Charles sends for a court appointed psychiatrist (Graham Crowden
Graham Crowden
Clement Graham Crowden was a Scottish actor. He was best known for his many appearances in television comedy dramas and films, often playing eccentric 'offbeat' scientist, teacher and doctor characters.-Early life:...

) to evaluate Jack, confident that his nephew will be sent to an asylum for life. He is once again thwarted when the psychiatrist discovers that Jack was a fellow Old Etonian
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....

, bonds with him and declares him sane
Sane
Sane is an English word meaning "of sound mind"; see Sanity.Sane or SANE may also refer to:* Sane Ancient Greek city* An archaeological site and a modern name of Sani, Greece*Sane, Mali...

.

Jack Gurney is now a violent psychopath with a fanatical hatred of women and an ability to pretend to be sane as needed. Jack murder
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

s Lady Claire in a fit of enraged revulsion when the aging woman tries to seduce him. He frames the Communist family butler
Butler
A butler is a domestic worker in a large household. In great houses, the household is sometimes divided into departments with the butler in charge of the dining room, wine cellar, and pantry. Some also have charge of the entire parlour floor, and housekeepers caring for the entire house and its...

, Tucker (Lowe), for the murder and assumes his place in the House of Lords
House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster....

 with a fiery speech in favor of capital
Capital punishment
Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...

 and corporal punishment
Corporal punishment
Corporal punishment is a form of physical punishment that involves the deliberate infliction of pain as retribution for an offence, or for the purpose of disciplining or reforming a wrongdoer, or to deter attitudes or behaviour deemed unacceptable...

. The speech is wildly applauded and the lords have no idea that it is the ranting of a madman, in contrast to society's reaction when Jack believed he was Christ. That night, he murders Grace for expressing her love for him.

The story's ending is ambiguous; Jack's fate is left open to interpretation.

Production

O'Toole held the rights to Barnes's play; Medak approached O'Toole repeatedly about exercising those rights. According to Medak, the project got started one night that he and O'Toole were returning from the theatre, which "meant stopping at every pub between Soho and Hampstead, and it didn't matter if it was after closing hour because he would knock on the door and just say 'Peter's here,' and every door opened for him"; Later on, at O'Toole's apartment, the deeply inebriated actor phoned his manager and said, "I'm with the crazy Hungarian and I know I'm drunk but I give you 24 hours to set this movie up." The next day, Medak received a call from United Artists and a deal was put together to shoot The Ruling Class.

The screenplay was adapted by Peter Barnes from his play with few major changes. It was filmed at a sprawling estate in Harlaxton
Harlaxton Manor
Harlaxton Manor, built in 1837, is a manor house in Harlaxton, Lincolnshire, England. Its architecture, which combines elements of Jacobean and Elizabethan styles with symmetrical Baroque massing, renders the mansion unique among surviving Jacobethan manors....

 with the interiors reconstructed on sound stages. It cost around $1.4 million, with O'Toole working for free (he was instead paid a great deal for the big budget Man of La Mancha
Man of La Mancha (film)
Man of La Mancha is a 1972 film adaptation of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman, with music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion...

, released by the same studio later the same year).

It was the official British entry at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival
1972 Cannes Film Festival
- Jury :*Joseph Losey *Bibi Andersson *Georges Auric *Erskine Caldwell *Mark Donskoi *Miloš Forman *Giorgio Papi *Jean Rochereau *Alain Tanner...

.

Reception

The film divided critics. The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

described it as "fantastic fun" and Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

called it "brilliantly caustic", but the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

called it "snail
Snail
Snail is a common name applied to most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have coiled shells in the adult stage. When the word is used in its most general sense, it includes sea snails, land snails and freshwater snails. The word snail without any qualifier is however more often...

-slow, shrill and gesticulating" and Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...

said it was a "sledgehammer satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

".
Jay Cocks
Jay Cocks
Jay Cocks is a film critic and motion picture screenwriter.He is a graduate of Kenyon College. He was a critic for Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone, among other magazines, before moving into film writing....

 called the screenplay a "snarling, overwrought and somewhat parochial satire on aristocracy and privileged morality"; he called the film "wretchedly photographed...as if it were shot under floodlights"; in contrast Cocks praised the performances by Alastair Sim
Alastair Sim
Alastair George Bell Sim, CBE was a Scottish character actor who appeared in a string of classic British films. He is best remembered in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1951 film Scrooge, and for his portrayal of Miss Fritton, the headmistress in two St. Trinian's films...

, Arthur Lowe
Arthur Lowe
Arthur Lowe was a BAFTA Award winning English actor. He was best known for playing Captain George Mainwaring in the popular British sitcom Dad's Army from 1968 until 1977.-Early life:...

, William Mervyn
William Mervyn
William Mervyn was an English actor best known for his portrayal of the Bishop in the clerical comedy All Gas and Gaiters.-Life and career:...

, Coral Browne
Coral Browne
Coral Browne was an Australian-American stage and screen actress.-Career:Coral Edith Brown was the only daughter of a restaurant-owner. She and her two brothers were raised in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, where she studied at the National Gallery Art School...

, and James Villiers
James Villiers
James Michael Hyde Villiers was a British character actor and a familiar face on British television...

, but reserves most of his praise for O'Toole, saying his performance is of "such intensity that it may trouble sleep as surely as it will haunt memory. All actors can play insanity; few play it well. O'Toole begins where other actors stop, with the unfocused gaze, the abrupt bursts of frenzied high spirits and precipitous depressions. Funny, disturbing, finally devastating, O'Toole finds his way into the workings of madness, revealing the anger and consuming anguish at the source."

Despite mixed critical reaction to the film, O'Toole's performance was universally praised and garnered numerous prestigious awards and prizes, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor
Academy Award for Best Actor
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

. Reportedly, when United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....

, its North American distributor, told producer Jules Buck that it would be cutting the film extensively for US release, Buck punched the company's London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 representative and bought the film back. Avco Embassy then bought distribution rights and cut its 154-minute running time by six minutes.

In a review nearly 30 years after The Ruling Class was first released, Ian Christie
Ian Christie (film scholar)
Ian Christie is a British film scholar. He has written several books including studies of the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Martin Scorsese and the development of cinema. He is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and a frequent broadcaster...

 said the film is "unashamedly theatrical, and it emerges from a particularly interesting period in English culture when theatre and cinema together were mining a rich vein of flamboyant self-analysis. Many stage works of this period cry out for filmic extension—in fact, Medak had just filmed a very different play that mingled fantasy and reality by a writer often bracketed with Barnes, Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. But what makes The Ruling Class exceptional (and difficult for some) are its outrageous mixing of genres and its sheer ambition. Not only are there allusions to Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 and Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...

, but also to Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 and Whitehall farce
Whitehall farce
Whitehall farce is a descriptive term applied to a series of improbable events that caused grief at the time to everyone involved but could—perhaps only with distance or hindsight—be considered comical....

; to the gentility of Ealing Studios
Ealing Studios
Ealing Studios is a television and film production company and facilities provider at Ealing Green in West London. Will Barker bought the White Lodge on Ealing Green in 1902 as a base for film making, and films have been made on the site ever since...

, with a plot that distantly evokes that other great black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...

 Kind Hearts and Coronets
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Kind Hearts and Coronets is a 1949 British black comedy feature film. The plot is loosely based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman, with the screenplay written by Robert Hamer and John Dighton and the film directed by Hamer...

, and to Hammer’s gore-fests
Hammer Film Productions
Hammer Film Productions is a film production company based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1934, the company is best known for a series of Gothic "Hammer Horror" films made from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers, film noir and comedies and in later...

.

Awards and nominations

  • 1972 National Board of Review of Motion Pictures
    National Board of Review Awards 1972
    - Top Ten Films :#Cabaret#Man of La Mancha#The Godfather#Sounder#1776#The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds#Deliverance#The Ruling Class#The Candidate#Frenzy- Top Foreign Films :...

    , USA - Won NBR Award (Best Actor) - Peter O'Toole
  • 1972 Cannes Film Festival
    1972 Cannes Film Festival
    - Jury :*Joseph Losey *Bibi Andersson *Georges Auric *Erskine Caldwell *Mark Donskoi *Miloš Forman *Giorgio Papi *Jean Rochereau *Alain Tanner...

    , France - Nominated for the Palme d'Or
    Palme d'Or
    The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...

  • 1973 Academy Awards
    45th Academy Awards
    The 45th Academy Awards were presented March 27, 1973 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles. The ceremonies were presided over by Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Charlton Heston, and Rock Hudson....

    , USA - Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor
    Academy Award for Best Actor
    Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

     - Peter O'Toole
  • 1973 Golden Globe Awards
    30th Golden Globe Awards
    The 30th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and television for 1972 films, were held on 28 January 1973.-Best Actor - Drama: Marlon Brando - The Godfather*Michael Caine - Sleuth*Laurence Olivier - Sleuth...

    , USA - Nominated for the Golden Globe for Best English Language Foreign Film

Subsequent history

In 1974, following an earlier-than-normal TV screening of the film on BBC TV, which broke a gentlemen's agreement
Gentlemen's agreement
A gentlemen's agreement is an informal agreement between two or more parties. It may be written, oral, or simply understood as part of an unspoken agreement by convention or through mutually beneficial etiquette. The essence of a gentlemen's agreement is that it relies upon the honor of the parties...

 allowing a 'window' of theatrical distribution before any TV screening, the UK's Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association
Cinema Exhibitors' Association
The Cinema Exhibitors' Association is the national trade association for cinema operators in the United Kingdom...

 (the theatrical distributors' association) recommended its members black all future movies produced by Jules Buck.

Embassy Pictures
Embassy Pictures
Embassy Pictures Corporation was an independent studio and distributor responsible for such films as The Graduate, The Lion in Winter, This Is Spinal Tap and Escape from New York.-Founding:The company was founded in 1942 by producer Joseph E...

 re-released the film in May 1983.

An unsuccessful stage version of the movie opened at The Wilma Theater
The Wilma Theater
The Wilma Theater is a 501 non-profit theater company located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.-History:It was founded in 1973 as the Wilma Project to encourage theatrical productions of original material and the development of community artists. In 1979, Blanka Zizka and Jiri Zizka of former...

 in Philadelphia in 1997 with some plot changes. For example, Jesus was changed to the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...

.

External links

  • A Grade One, Galilee Miracle from yoism.org, with a film clip in which the O'Toole character claims that he is Jesus Christ and presents a "miracle"
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