TFE will be periodically looking back at the 1972 film year before we hit the Supporting Actress Smackdown at month's end. Here's Anna from Defiant Success
Adapted from the play of the same name by Peter Barnes (who also serves the film’s writer), Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class establishes its bizarre nature early on. The plot kicks off after Ralph Gurney, the 13th Earl of Gurney (Harry Andrews) accidentally hangs himself while performing autoerotic asphyxiation. Upon his death, his only surviving son Jack (Peter O’Toole) becomes the 14th Earl of Gurney. One problem with this new arrangement: Jack firmly believes that he’s Jesus Christ...
This film has everything: stuffy British people, impromptu song-and-dance numbers, a fourth wall-breaking burlesque, a room full of cobweb-covered corpses, and look over there, is that Jack the Ripper? No, it’s a man in a gorilla costume wearing a top hat and a dinner jacket. (And yes, reading that in Stefon’s voice was intentional as well as recommended.) There’s just so much going on in The Ruling Class, you basically need to watch it to understand what was written within the last two paragraphs. So, on to more coherent analysis.
Having already starred in a production of the play back in 1969, O’Toole also held the rights for The Ruling Class but they had been collecting dust while he pursued other roles. Medak was determined to get them from the actor, and he knew how to convince O’Toole in doing so: they went on a pub crawl. (And this was not long after O’Toole was hospitalized for a different drinking binge!) Afterwards, a thoroughly plastered O’Toole phoned his manager and told him to get the movie underway within the next 24 hours.(Medak got a call from United Artists the next day, and that was that.
O’Toole ended up doing The Ruling Class for free (he got paid handsomely for Man of La Mancha, also released by United Artists that year) but the lack of a paycheck didn’t curb his legendary boozing in the slightest. According to Medak, most of the cast and crew would regularly get drunk with O’Toole in his dressing room during lunch breaks. (One has to wonder how much of said inebriation was captured within the final product.) That being said, Medak was amazed by the actor’s photographic memory, his ability to memorize his lines after one readthrough of the script. Perhaps there truly was a method to O’Toole’s madness.\
In stark contrast to his previous roles in Lawrence of Arabia and The Lion in Winter, O’Toole is clearly having an absolute ball reveling in insanity, unabashedly devouring the scenery as though he hasn’t eaten in ages. Take note that some of his later roles like The Stunt Man and My Favorite Year also have him doing much of the same, minus the insanity… for the most part. Could you imagine if he had won that ever-elusive Oscar for this? Granted, he was up against Marlon Brando, Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier and Paul Winfield that year so his chances were slim at best.
Nowadays what’s mostly known about The Ruling Class is that O’Toole earned his fifth of eight Oscar nominations for his work (and as many Academy Award aficionados will tell you, he was – save for an Honorary Oscar in 2002 – always the groomsman but never the groom). But that shouldn’t be the only thing to take away from the film. If anything, it’s as if Yorgos Lanthimos got his hands on an Ernst Lubitsch script and amped up the absurdity. But don’t take my word for it – see it for yourself.
