I remember watching The Ruling Class on TV as a kid and being amused by the sight of Peter O’Toole hanging off a full-size cross in a baronial living room, playing an aristo convinced he is the second coming of Jesus Christ. I also remember being bored by the rest of the film. Fast forward some decades to last week and I had the same experience all over again.
On paper it sounds like a great idea. Get O’Toole at his most flamboyant to play a lunatic who inherits the ancestral seat of the earldom of Gurney after his father dies in a bizarre accident involving a noose and a ballerina’s tutu.
And from here pit the entire stuffy family against him in one scheme after another designed to unseat or neutralise the troublesome new earl, who will insist on preaching equality and godly charity to anyone who will listen.
The family eventually comes up with a double-headed scheme. Marry the new earl off, and at the same time try to cure him. In due course Jack (O’Toole) is betrothed to the unsuitable but pliable Grace (Carolyn Seymour) and is being worked on both by a German shrink (Michael Bryant) with a byline in unsavoury experiments on rats and a celebrity quack (Nigel Green) who bills himself as “the High Voltage Messiah” – electric shock therapy done as a vaudeville act.
The family’s plan backfires and instead of curing the bonkers baron, they force his psyche onto another track entirely – he now believes he is Jack the Ripper.
It is satire but the blunt-force approach means that even if you have a high pain threshold for O’Toole, your limits will surely have been reached before the end, which, in the 154-minute Criterion version I watched, seemed a long time coming.
The original theatrical cut was almost 20 minutes shorter. I’m not sure what was lost in the process. Maybe the big musical number, The Varsity Drag, which the cast perform with enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm, in fact, is this film’s USP. What it lacks in incisive wit it makes up with energy. There are some lovely performances from the sort of British actors you might once have found in an Ealing comedy. Arthur Lowe gets some good laughs as Tucker, the family butler who inherits a wad of money in the late earl’s will and becomes unbearably uppity as a consequence. Nigel Green’s High Voltage Messiah is impressively whacko, and there is good stuff from the likes of William Mervyn and Coral Browne as the family members scheming to usurp Jack. More Alastair Sim (as a dotty bishop) and Harry Andrews (as the late earl) would have been fun but you take what you’re given.
Strangely, it’s only in the second half of the film, which feels at first like an afterthought, that things start to cohere, with O’Toole’s deluded Jack – now convinced he’s a killer – a tender and troubling character sketch of a psychotic out of control.
By the end, after much mayhem and running amok, everyone involved is either mad, dead, hospitalised or under arrest. All except… you guessed it. He’s on the way to the House of Lords, where a seat in Parliament means he’ll be able to wreak terrible damage on the country. Political satire – box ticked.
Is it all meant to be a delightfully arch take on the sort of terribly, terribly witty plays that used to litter London’s West End? Maybe it is, and at that level it would work if it weren’t going at the material with a bludgeon.
In the end it comes down to O’Toole. It is a showcase for his performative prowess and you can’t accuse him of not seizing it with both hands. He followed up by playing Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. Another delusional dreamer, another film in which O’Toole sings – not a good sign.
The Ruling Class – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
