RULING CLASS JAPES

Winner has used all the Charles Bronson in 'Chato's Land' them out and confuse them until they return home. To this end he actually leaves signs for them to follow while at the same time shooting their horses and destroying their water supply.

But he reckons without the skill of the ex-army officer who, thinking strategically anead, senses Chato's intentions. And, of course, there remains the intense paranoiac hatred for the man they never see.

Chato eventually thinks they've given up and reaches his home in the mountains where his wife, child and servant await him.

Constantly the pursuers are driven forward, often against the majority's wishes, by the most brutal among them. Eventually they rape Chato's wife and kill his servant.

From this time they are hunted and stalked by the Indian who kills those who don't kill each other in arguments over whether to return home.

The idea behind the film is interesting enough. The contrast between the rabble driven by hatred and the passive Indian (who hardly says a word throughout) keeps the interest alive.

Yet the development of this conflict is never fully developed. No doubt this would have taken it above the normal, mass film product which Winner specializes in.

Yet the climax is honest enough. There are no scenes where the poor old Indian gets it again, despite having right on his side. If you like a little better-than-average, exciting western, it is worth seeing this film. The frightening thing about The Ruling Class is that Saturday's troop ing of the colour prove! that they are all alive ans well.

Director Peter Medal clearly knows this, but his fun poking film and particularly it conclusion underestimates th importance of it.

His mistake is on the on hand to separate surfac appearances from the histori cal role of the class as th masters of capital and on th other to ignore the changes i has undergone.

Seen through Liberal eye its members are arrogant, col rupt, eccentric, parasitic an nostalgic for the time whe Carolyn Seymour Jack's bride 'England was a jewel set silver sea'.

All of this is true. But it does not make them irrelevant as a social force.

The idea that they are allows Medak to make a great deal of often very funny mileage at their expense.

His principal instrument is the family butler (Arthur Lowe) whose satirical tongue is loosened after old Lord Gurney (Harry Andrews) hangs himself by mistake in a sensual orgy and bequeaths him £30,000.

The noble Lord's son and heir, Jack, is a schizophrenic who believes he is Goa and the immediate family difficuity is how to restore to him sufficient sanity to permit him to manage the estate and take up the class banner where his father dropped it.

In line with. Medak's concept of the class as museum pieces, Jack (Peter O'Toole) shrinks from acting out the subterfuge that what he and his class did meant something.

But in rejecting the role he was born to, he faces the terri. fying prospect of social extins.So he seeks refuge in the belief that he is God—a figure whose powers are only one step removed from those of the ruling class and who is a good deal more secure.

He is not the God godfearing people know. He is a hippie God, a mystic, a tripping divinity to whom all the world is love and roses.

When this flower child is dragged back from the rarefied heights of extreme idealism to reality through confrontation with another "God, love and roses turn into their direct opposite-black reaction. life of his class meaning is ut: teeth into it and he ecomes the spokesman Ior those who are desperate arrest its decay.

He is feted by the Tory ladies of the hunt when he descends upon them to make a hang 'em and flog 'em speech of maniacal intensity.

He sets about the elimination of all signs of decadence, beginning symbolically with hain harons nis own nouse.

He stabs his aunt who tried to seduce him and who has already had an affair with his psychiatrist and murders the gold-digging petty bourgeois wife the family foisted on him when they thought he would have to be shut away for life but needed an heir first.

The butler who is discovered to be a Maoist gets the blame for the first and we are not told who pays for the second. Perhaps he does because now he has a son to carry on the line.

All this is done in moments when he imagines himself to be Jack the Ripper-a significant choice by Medak since the whore killer is also rumoured to have been a nobleman disgusted with the decadence around him.

In other words, if Gurney could not be God, then he would have to be what he was and defend what he was against all and everything that sought to undermine it.

His maniacal speech to the House of Lords, where he calls down fire and brimstone for all those responsible for tarnishing England's image, greeted by wild cheering from the Lords and declarations of 'at last he is one of us' The gap between Gurney's 'madness' and their 'sanity' has been closed. They all agree on what has to be done.

While Gurney speaks Medak shows us the Lords both as reality and as cobweb draped skeletons.

What Gurney and the Lords stand for its certainly as backward and barbaric as the skeletons suggested, but it is by no means as dead.

Colonels are not all blimps and Lords are not all eccentric, goutish old fools. They are the owners and defenders of capital and they will fight to preserve themselves and their positions.

The ruling class can afford to lose an empire-that is only a form of rule. But they cannot forfeit the monopoly of wealth which is their life-blood.

Medak's mistake is to ignore the fact that the ruling class is the capitalist class. It is their system. They are not only part of it. They are its mainspring.

The logical development of Gurney is not lonely madness performing empty rituals in crumbling castles but the 'new world' of fascism where rulers are rulers and the ruled are ruled.