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"State of the nation" Satires
"But we've always been Church of England!"
Far from being the lofty, intellectually arid exercises in left-wing polemic many people expect them to be, the big, all-encompassing, no- target-left-un-berhetoricked satirical film can, at its best, provide a fine slice of spectacle, oddness and, above all, a great big dollop of yer actual fun. They're always dismissed as over- ambitious, even pretentious, but unlike genuinely pretentious fare from, say, Peter Sodding Greenaway, or even late-period George Bloody Lucas, at their best they do manage to do what they say on the tin, even though they tend to say rather a lot on the tin. Well, it's usually a big tin.
BRAZIL, for instance, counts in this category, and that's hardly a film you could categorise as dry or dull. Lindsay Anderson's IF... trilogy is probably the most famously high-falutin' of the lot, but they're still good value, and of course as they progressed, and got progressively messier, more ambitious and sillier, we liked them even more. BRITANNIA HOSPITAL is utterly fantastic, we'll always be found saying, even if only one other person we know agrees with us. Perhaps mindful of that fact, we won't bang on about it yet again for our example of how to do this genre. Instead, we're plumping for THE RULING CLASS, an adaptation of a stage play - and if you're still reading this article after that, we probably know you by name - by Peter 'Merlin' Barnes, directed by Peter 'Ghost in the Noonday Sun' Medak and starring, neatly enough, Peter 'I must not laugh' O'Toole.
The premise is this. The 13th Earl of Gurney (Harry '633 Squadron' Andrews) is found hanged, in a tutu, in some bizarre auto- asphyxiation session, by faithful retainer Tucker (Arthur Lowe). The call goes out for Jack, the next in line (Peter O'Toole), who has been resident in a lunatic asylum and thinks he's Christ. The rest of his family, led by William 'Kindly old gentleman' Mervyn, start scheming on ways to get rid of him, marrying him off to a stripper (Aylesbury's own Carolyn 'Survivors' Seymour) so the inheritance can skip a generation. The jobless Tucker hangs around getting sozzled and firing abuse at his former masters while the family screw O'Toole's brain up even further than it was to begin with. The stage is set for a hectoring Socialist polemic against the upper classes, you might think, and to an extent you'd be right, but fortunately it's a country mile weirder, and more importantly funnier, than that.
The cast, need it be said, are fantastic from top to bottom. It's an often invoked rule of thumb that any film with more than half a dozen famous names in its cast is going to be rubbish, as if big names have been piled on to save a failing script. This is, as we know, a load of haughty old bollocks, and nothing disproves it more thoroughly than The RC. Every name goes for it 100%, and rather than clash, the resulting gallery of grotesques is a delight to behold. Alastair Sim, as the bishop relative who's roped in, against his faith, to perform the marriage ceremony, does a wonderful OTT number, stuttering helplessly throughout the vows, before falling to his knees in prime comedy panic mode. Graham Crowden, as the psychiatrist sent in to determine O'Toole's (lack of) sanity, is as good value as you'd expect, eyes bulging in Old School recognition when Jack starts reciting the Eton boating song, leading to a crazed duet of same on the sofa in pointy-fingered wide angle vision. This is a film where actors of the calibre of James Grout, Leslie Schofield and Henry Woolf have to content themselves with bit parts, so rich is the cast.
Nigel Green (The Whore, Kremlin Letter fans!), despite being post- dubbed by someone else (he tragically died shortly after principal photography was completed) is marvellously demented as the "rival" looney who fetches up during a thunderstorm to administer some supernatural Electro-Convulsive Therapy. Again, there's a layer of "do you see?" symbolism - Green claims to be a violent, "Old Testament" God as opposed to O'Toole's peacenik Jesoid delusions - but never mind, as it's a fantastic spectacle, thanks to both the demented playing ("I'm EARTHED!"), O'Toole retreating to his lifesize crucifix, and the rather unusual way a gorilla in a top hat breaks through the window and starts wrestling with O'Toole's limp body at the end. O'Toole, natch, is at his deranged best, ranging from fruity stuttering to fruity menace as "Jesus Christ" turns into "Jack the Ripper" in another key bit of symbolic fol-de-rol. Said Ripper, filled with newfound self-confidence, makes for a village pub where he leads a hunting party (featuring Patsy 'Nursie' Byrne) in an impromptu, pro-hanging rendition of Dem Bones, Dem Bones, for seemingly no other reason than to make A Point about High Toryism - and be bloody funny at the same time, of course. When some terrestrial channel feels like digging it out again, do have a look.
Don't bother having a look at TOYS, however. A years-in-development pet project of Barry 'Young Sherlock Holmes' Levinson, this military- industrial-complex raspberry-blower should, by rights, be a fascinating hotch-potch of top set design, over the top performances and bizarre attempts at whimsical satire. Even if it falls apart completely - no, *especially* if it falls apart completely - it should never be anything less than madly watchable, right? Wrong on all counts. The premise - a whimsical, Wonka-meets-Santa-Claus-the- Movie toy company, its factory decked out with outsize Fisher Price elephant heads and Don't Ask Me-style optical illusions (nicely done, but hardly original) sees its owner (Donald O'Connor, never a good sign as far as we're concerned) cark it, and bequeath the business not to kooky son Robin WIlliams, but to military hawk Michael Gambon, for reasons we could never work out. Henceforth, what was a place of innocence, whimsy and delight, becomes a grim factory for "war toys". And, er, that's it.
The cast list is stuffed with, er, not many famous names, either. Michael Gambon stalks about in uniform (and probably got a BAFTA for it, we wouldn't be surprised). We won't bother with the ritual Robin WIlliams slagging, but suffice to say, he does nothing to save the film whatsoever, being just told to do some Mork/Cronauer fast-paced spiel whenever the director thinks a scene needs "that little something extra". He can do that, of course, but the "little something extra" most scenes require is a new, better, scene. The best part of the whole thing, in fact, was the original trailer, which just featured Williams in a cornfield rambling on aimlessly. Of course, they bunged this out because the actual film was stinking the studio out and they didn't want anyone to see it, but we weren't to know that... for a while. Elsewhere, Joan Cusack does "zany" as Williams' sister, to no avail. LL Cool J is on hand purely for the perceived hilarity of being both Gambon's son, and black. Williams does various Beadlesque practical jokes as a means of combating the forces of encroaching militarism - a "smoking jacket" gag, some magnetic canapés etc. - which all fall as flat with the audience as they do with Gambon and his associates. We're meant to be on the side of whimsy! And so it goes on. Two hours have never lasted so long.
It's something of an achievement for a big, ambitious, hopelessly self-indulgent film to go so thoroughly off the rails and still be irreparably dull and mediocre, but Toys manages it with anti-aplomb. The climactic battle between the "good" and "evil" toys - the film's initial concept has long given up the ghost by this point - is weak in all respects. The National Film Board of Canada did this thing much better in the '60s, in a little short animation where toy soldiers come to life in a shop window and start violently destroying each other. That film was also called Toys. It lasted all of eight minutes and left more of a lasting impression on Creamguide than this bloated mess of half-ideas. Levinson was allowed to co- produce his Godawful effort, and we think there's a lesson here. The Ruling Class was, you'll be delighted to hear, co-produced by Jack Hawkins. Yes, *that* Jack Hawkins. We rest our Movie! Movie! case.
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