dougmcnair This movie is sometimes brilliant, sometimes silly, sometimes surreal, sometimes tragic, sometimes wickedly satirical, and always schizophrenic (which is the whole point). It's also the only film in which Jesus Christ does the Varsity Drag. Peter O'Toole plays the paranoid schizophrenic heir to an English earldom, and as his relatives try to either cure him or commit him, what we think is being played for laughs slowly becomes something far darker.O'Toole's performance is brilliant, bringing out this man's almost unbearable pain as he tries to hold his mind together by escaping into whatever fantasy world he can manage. Unfortunately, escaping into a world where he is God and everyone loves each other does not work for society, so his family has to snap him out of that so he can become acceptable. At its core, the film is about what kind of insanity (and what kind of god) is acceptable in upper-class British society, and it makes its points on that score very well. But unfortunately, it's far too long; there are so many supporting characters with their own subplots that it gets bogged down in many places. But if you can last through the slow parts, you'll be rewarded with some unforgettable scenes before the end. Seven stars.

moonspinner55 Gross, frequently tasteless satire, much as if Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" were transplanted to England's House of Lords and then played at the wrong speed. After the Earl of Gurney accidentally kills himself during one of his fetish games, the 14th Earl--son Jack--is groomed to accept the crown. Once mad Jack--who believes himself to be Christ--undergoes a mental transformation on the night of his son's birth and self-metamorphoses into Jack the Ripper, the plot (thin to begin with) becomes a dartboard for the one-liners (some of which are very funny and are a compensation). Peter Barnes adapted his play for the screen, the kind of material upper-crust audiences like to label 'savage'; he was reciprocated with a game cast and a fine director in Peter Medak, yet these nutty fantasies are merely clotheslines for Barnes to hang his maddening soliloquies on. Peter O'Toole (with cartoony strawberry-blond hair) has some terrific moments early on, particularly in the musical send-ups, but later begins to bellow and rarely stops. The film is too full of targets, and too nasty overall, for its extreme length...it doesn't even look good. ** from ****

SHAWFAN Despite this film's age (38 years and counting) when I saw it last night this was the first time I had ever seen it. I immediately added it to my list of the greatest movies of all time. Its mixtures of genres while highly unusual are not unrepresented elsewhere: Dr. Strangelove, Monty Python, Rocky Horror, etc., would seem to fill in its category with other examples of the combination of social satire, psychological horror, off-the-wall musical numbers, etc.But what really makes this film so special is of course Peter O'Toole himself. This has to be his greatest role as an actor and would have been the same for any other actor who might have succeeded in bringing it off so brilliantly as O'Toole did. Could anyone else have done it? Peter Sellers? Richard Burton? Laurence Olivier? Perhaps the latter had O'Toole's versatility to be able to go from one bizarre attitude to another without incongruity or the slightest skip of a beat. But I don't think Olivier was ever offered such a marvelous actor's showoff role as this.But among the fifty or so critiques of this incomparable, stunning, and never-to-be-forgotten film which I read on your site, none referred to the very possible antecedent to Peter Barnes' play and movie, the celebrated Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello's play Henry IV, which also posited an insane monarch imagining himself to be a character out of history and the attempts of the monarch's relatives to cope with the situation.

george karpouzas I have heard about this film from one of my teachers in high school and when I saw it yesterday in a video club I immediately recognized it, since I remembered that the protagonist thought of himself as Jesus. Peter O' Toole is so good in this movie that he made me think the unthinkable, that Lawrence of Arabia is not his best role ever. This movie is black comedy,musical, farce, political satire , parable all in one. It has some terrific moments as the one where the hero and the representative who came to see whether he is insane or not, sing together the Eton boat song-I remembered Churchill in Great Contemporaries who wrote of a British political personage who died singing the Eton or Harrow boat song- I can not recollect this detail. Anyhow for someone who has an idea of British class conventions derived from reading, papers and films as opposed from actual experience this movie is a rare treat.The scene where the House of Lords is presented as a house full of corpses and skeletons through the eyes of the protagonist is a haunting scene, not at all comic, although it is ironic.The scene with the two Gods in a room is also brilliant.I wonder if the Tatler for example could present such a character for an interview, when it presents representative samples of British socialites.I think that someone must be very sure of his strength in order to produce so savage satire and criticism. I wonder if we could see equally successful representations of American WASPS or French Enarques.This movie has everything and I can not classify it. I also have not seen or read the play which I am going to buy in order to form an impression although a written text is not the same as a live performance.Still a society that produces such self-criticism must be very sure of itself.