CLASS @ 40 (Spoilers, so I can discuss this one)

Working class scholarship boy Jonathon gets into an exclusive school and then gets pranked by his roommate Skip on his first day. A prank arms race later and they're friends forever. After several disastrous attempts to get Jonathon a girlfriend, Skip sends him off to a pickup joint at the nearby metropolis. A few more disasters later and Jonathon gets picked up by the hot-as older woman Ellen who takes him back to her hotel to have sex in the glass walled lift and then to her room for more. Jonathon returns to the dorm swinging Ellen's trophy knickers which jets him to school hero within minutes. Then, Skip invites him back to the family mansion for Christmas Jonathon fits in fine before Skip's mum turns up. It's Ellen.

When this film was approaching release (in the third last day of 1983 so I'm counting it as 1984) the trailers promised a naughty update of The Graduate, focussing on the lift scene and a few odd slapstick moments. What I saw at the end of the year on VHS was a dramedy that fell somewhere between Ordinary People and Porky's but with the convictions  or depth of neither. Yet, it's made of the kind of ingredients that might make real substance from its title. Instead, it's goofy pranks in the dorm and attempted steamy sex with Ellen on the town. The notion of social stratification implied by the title is barely addressed and the other side of it, of savoir faire, is lost in the tension between the school friends. There is one action that might claim the concept of grace but it is placed there so much telescoping and leaden writing that it's as though the film is saying: "See? This is classy!" And even then, that decision is forced by subcultural norms.

Skip's big moment, after his discovery of Jonathon's lover's identity, is also undermined by how he came by the information he could use against Jonathon. He tricked it out of him in a prank. Talk about a forced hand compelling an act of grace. By this stage there's also another Jumbo plodding around. After that cathartic discovery, Skip's father visits him in the dorm to say that Ellen has admitted herself to pyschiatric care. It's Anna Karenina under the train but this is the '80s so she's off to get some zombie pills and a talking cure. The coast is then clear for the lads to duke it out in the mud until they fall over laughing at how crazy it all is.

A scene between Skip's parents, after Ellen has drunk herself numb at dinner, pretending Jonathon wasn't across the table, shows Dad in a patrician rage at her disgrace. This woman, caged by her life, had chosen a form of pleasure acceptable to her that offered something flavoursome and forbidden. Yes, it's adultery and that's a real issue but the punishment she finds is that of a wayward wife but an errant mother. There are complications here: as soon as she found out that Jonathon wasn't a uni student but a schoolboy she abandoned him in a moment of horror, but then, later, she prevents a second rejection by him (ever the honourable bloke) with a fresh seduction. As much as the stunning and effective Jacqueline Bissett provides this film, she is, after all reduced to a teenage wank reverie and then, insofar as she is at all real, immured in the thick silencing purgatory of a mental facility. Oh, and all that time that Skip's dad was telling him about this, those burgundy knickers were still stretched between the horns of a wall ornament over Skip's dorm bed. Skip had just left them up there, after knowing whose they were.

So, I could do what other people of my age do when they talk about this one and mention Rob Lowe's scandal, Andrew McCarthy's fading career, and the appearance of John and Joan Cusack as well as Virginia Madsen, all in adolescent form before their own breakthroughs later in the decade. But, having done just that, I'll instead recall my impressions on first seeing the film as a twenty-two year old. 

This was at the end of my first year after uni, what they might smirkingly call a gap year now, but so much of what I gleaned there was still active. I saw a mild comedy that mixed uneasily with a coming of age story in which the reversal of the autumn/spring partnering was offered as both a boyhood miracle and a sinister exploitation. People who have never read Lolita but think they know it generally don't know that it condemns its predatory narrator. Back then, at twenty-two (I had actually read Lolita by then) I couldn't quite make it past the contempt in Ellen's fate (even that it was reported rather than shown). We were meant to join the lads in a big laugh now they've really gone through it together and will be friends for life. Watching it again last night, this effect, the screaming void of hollowness beneath that laugh or at least the attempted diversion of it, made me wince. Two boys chortling over how they made it through, who would be headed for societal leadership and the kind of class reinforcement only hinted at here, are effectively laughing at all the chumps who are yet to be ground by their own life lessons. Maybe the film should have been called Status Quo.

Viewing notes: Class is currently available via subscription on Prime.