CineFile Video

Plot outline: Peter O’Toole is Jack, a man who is cured of his belief that he is God, only to turn into Jack the Ripper. The movie, an indictment of Britain’s class system, peers behind the closed doors of English aristocracy and deals with everything from sadistic sarcasm to insanity to black comedy… as well as a touch of the Hollywood musical.

This lengthy and willfully incoherent slab of weirdness features O’Toole doing a handful of vaudeville-type numbers, the highlight of which is “The Varsity Drag”. At times both whimsical and terrfying, due to what I think is a spot-on representation of the the depravity of aristocracy, these songs are effective punctuation throughout the film. This vinyl rip of the LP, unfortunately, is not track-listed; it is only two tracks, a Side A and a Side B.

Glenn Erickson of DVD Talk sez:

“‘The Ruling Class’ sneaked onto the scene as one of those off-the-wall things that hipsters said you had to see, even if they couldn’t explain it. (My two friends and I at a Westwood screening seemed to be the only people in the audience not smoking dope.) A combination of sophomoric sub-Monty Python jokes and bizarre Lewis Carroll-like speeches, this is basically a drawing-room comedy on acid.

There are laughs. Peter O’Toole’s manic delivery sells his gibberish lines in much the desperate but effective manner of ‘What’s New Pussycat?’. He’s very likeable as the lost-lamb Jesus, and terrifying as the bloodless-faced Jack of the final reel.”

“The Ruling Class” soundtrack LP (ZIP file)

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Movie Music Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.