bkoganbing Class made a ton of money back in the day with Brat Pack king Rob Lowe starring in another teen film about some oversexed adults and undersexed young men. In this case the undersexed one is Andrew McCarthy who gets some love lessons from Jacqueline Bisset who is also Lowe's mother. Which makes it all nice and cozy.McCarthy is a young country kid who wins a scholarship to an exclusive boy's prep school which is mostly inhabited by to the manor born types like Lowe. In fact Lowe has the ultimate prep school name of Skip.Around women McCarthy makes Inspector Clousseau look like Errol Flynn and Lowe gives him some fateful advice about trying to hook up at a certain bar on Rush Street in Chicago where there are lots of women who are as longing as he is. Unfortunately one of them happens to be his mother and that's who McCarthy does it with. Right in one of those glass elevators.Class veers uncomfortably back and forth from comedy to drama without any warning. The values of the Reagan era are upheld here, especially by Cliff Robertson as solid a venture capitalist as you'll ever find and Lowe's father. He's treating his wife like another of his possessions like his mansion or his yacht and no wonder she's looking for love in all the wrong places.As we see noted, a whole lot of people like Andrew McCarthy, John Cusack, Casey Siemaszko, Lolita Davidovitch, and Virginia Madsen all made their screen debuts. That is probably what Class will go down in movie annals for.

moonspinner55 Failed cross-pollination of "The Graduate" with any number of frat-house romps does have one thing going for it: Rob Lowe (pre-"St. Elmo's Fire") gives a loose, frenetic performance as a prep-school student whose unstable mother has a secret affair with Lowe's roommate. As he got older, Lowe tended to lean heavily on his male-model good looks, resulting in some posturing performances. This vehicle for him and newcomer Andrew McCarthy is doomed, however. It wants to be a T&A comedy, a sensitive tale of friendship, and a slightly naughty love story between an older woman and a younger man. The romance is unpleasant from the outset, with Jacqueline Bisset TOO convincing as 40-ish trollop with mental problems. Bisset is definitely in the spirit of the thing, but it's a distressing role for the classy actress, who every once in a while stepped into the gutter. The kids are convincingly callow, but their slapstick antics go over-the-top. Director Lewis Carlino seems to think he's giving us something original. "Class" was lambasted at the time for an 11th-hour decision to edit out most of the seriousness in favor of the jokes, but heavy drama has no place in this story. What we're left with is the buddy-buddy stuff and the R-rated gags, but those don't work either. *1/2 out of ****

Putzberger Three contrived "products" foisted on an unsuspected and ultimately unwilling American public. Some Hollywood exec in the 80s snorted so much cocaine he actually believed that McCarthy, a sniveling, rodent-faced nonentity, had star potential so they stuck the cipher in a series of unfunny sex comedies throughout the decade. In "Class," no-talent pretty boy Rob Lowe teams up with no-talent ugly boy McCarthy to embarrass poor Jacqueline Bisset. Ms Bisset, as Lowe's mother and the only interesting character in the entire film, looks as ravishing as ever, even as she strains under the effort of pretending Andrew McCarthy is sexy.The plot, such as it is, reflects the 80s fascination with inherited wealth: middle-class McCarthy winds up at a prep school full of studdly preppies like Lowe, who are actually poor little rich boys (see? There's no point in envying the wealthy because money isn't everything!). A series of plot machinations throw McCarthy into a glass elevator with Bisset, where they have sex. (Warning: there are multiple shots of an unclothed McCarthy in this film. Not recommended for the faint of heart.) The movie's real dead point is the leaden sequence when Lowe brings little Andrew home with him, where our hero discovers that he's been . . . big fat shocker . . . bonking his roommate's mother! The bigger shock is that Bisset is a drunken (and apparently nearsighted) nymphomaniac who deserves more sympathetic treatment and better co-stars than she gets from this movie. The one semi-saving grace of this movie is that it's blessedly free from drawn-out confrontations. Perhaps they filmmakers realized their young stars had absolutely no capacity for dialogue (or they couldn't hire enough cue-card holders) so they kept the major plot changes brief: during a morning horseback ride, McCarthy asks Bisset: "how are you?" "Get out of my house," she sneers. Lowe is unhappy at home, so instead of spouting some monologue about his pain and alienation that would exhaust his meager abilities, he just sort of takes McCarthy onto a lake in a rowboat and puts on his poutiest face. "Class" managed to destroy Jacqueline Bisset's career, but unfortunately we were stuck with five more years of McCarthy until "Less Than Zero" finally killed him off. (Like a cockroach, Lowe survives.)

cruppel The story was so slow and pointless I found myself hunting around the room for small spores that might possibly sprout and grow into mushrooms by the time each actor managed to solidify his thoughts long enough to mumble a poorly worded and retarded sentence.The story could have ended up with a point but it stopped dead in the middle of nothing. Do not watch this movie. I repeat: DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE.