Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills

Often laugh out loud funny play on sex, family, and the classes in Beverly Hills milks more laughs out of the zip code than it's seen since the days of Granny and Jed Clampett. Plot centers on two chauffers who've bet on which one of them can bed his employer (both single or soon to be single ladies, quite sexy -- Bisset and Woronov) first. If Manuel wins, his friend will pay off his debt to a violent asian street gang -- if he loses, he must play bottom man to his friend!

Lots of raunchy dialogue, fairly sick physical humour, etc. But a lot of the comedy is just beneath the surface. Bartel is memorable as a very sensual oder member of the family who ends up taking his sexy, teenaged niece on a year long "missionary trip" to Africa.

Hilarious fun.

I can't believe the user rating for this great film is so low! This is Paul Bartel's best film. It is a fantastically clever remake of "Rules of the Game" and is secretly beloved by film academics around the world. It is beautifully shot, well performed by an amazing cast and very well written. If you are a true fan of cinema, this one must not be missed. Hey Criterion, this film deserves a special edition DVD, get on it!

Paul Bartel's final film as both writer/director feels consistent with his earlier black comic outings ("Death Race 2000," "Eating Raoul," etc.). Set in Beverly Hills among the rich and beautiful, the film follows a houseboy and a chauffeur betting who their recently widowed employer, Jacqueline Bisset, will bed next. The cast is a good one, which includes Ray Sharkey, Mary Woronov, Ed Begley Jr., Wallace Shawn, Bartel, Paul Mazursky, Barret Oliver, and an uncredited Little Richard, but it's really Bartel's unique voice as co-writer/director that makes this farcical sex comedy uniquely enjoyable. Bartel's plot set-up could easily have been a standard 80s sex comedy along the lines of "Class" or "My Tutor," but Bartel's exaggerated soap opera tone to the boundary pushing humor make it a hilariously mannered comedy that doesn't feel far off from John Waters. Bartel's films are never ones that were intended to appeal to a wide audience, but for those who do enjoy his offbeat satirical style, this is quite enjoyable.

Great title; and in its day Bruce Wagner's extravagantly purple dialogue made a lot of eyes widen. In his fiction, Wagner scales astonishing heights of cruelty and scabrousness, but writing a SHAMPOO-style rondo, he seems miscast; it's as if Terry Southern had ambitions of being Ernst Lubitsch. There are savory performances generously sprinkled: Paul Mazursky is the wistful shade of a TV producer, brought by lust back to this mortal coil, and Wallace Shawn makes a sumptuous entrance, flanked by two LAPD officers, telling his hostess, "These perverse gentlemen have made a slanderous assertion."

Cult figure Paul Bartel probably hoped for mainstream acceptance with this film, but it actually had the opposite effect; it practically stopped his movie-directing career in its tracks. And it's not hard to see why: the film lacks a dramatic center of gravity - it has nothing to compel you to keep watching apart from the familiar names in the cast. It's basically a bedroom farce that builds to some "outrageous" events which could hardly be considered shocking in 1989. It's not terrible - just terribly pointless. *1/2 out of 4.