Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills

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."

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.

Pre-Voyager Robert Beltran and the the often-maligned Mary Woronov are the real stars of this show about the meaning of love and honor among those who know little of either.

While that sounds really dull and serious, keep in mind that this is one of the "sideways" comedies of Paul Bartel, the man who brought us "Eating Raoul," and starring the usual Bartel suspects.

The script is funny, all parts are fully fleshed, these are real people...not anyone I'd want to know personally, for the most part.

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.

This movie is outrageous, funny, ribald, sophisticated & hits the bullseye where 99 % of Hollywood movies don't even make the target. Paul Bartel should be recognized as one of the great directors of this or any era. He's the American Renoir & Bunuel _ combined!!! Glad I have the videodisc.