Scenes From The Class Struggle In Beverly Hills

Paul Bartel had a minor hit with the cultish black comedy Eating Raoul in 1982, Scenes From the Class Struggle In Beverly Hills is not as economical as that film, indeed is quite the opposite. Nor is it, even if it shares with it a rather bent sensibility, despite the promising title as rewardingly satirical. .

The story revolves around two wealthy Beverly Hills women, Clare Lipkin (Jacqueline Bisset), whose husband (writer and director Paul Mazursky who had a minor hit in 1986 with the Bette Midler comedy Down and Out in Beverley Hills), a former sit-com star trying to make a comeback and her neighbour Lisabeth Hepburn-Saravian (Mary Woronov who appeared in ten films with Bartel), her next-door neighbour who is in the process of divorcing her doctor husband (Wallace Shawn), Lisabeth’s house is being fumigated so she is staying at Clare’s house for the weekend along with Lisabeth's brother Peter (Ed Begley Jr.), an avant-garde playwright of small talent, and Peter's new wife, To-bel (Arnetia Walker). Meanwhile Clare and Lisabeth’s caretaker/chauffeurs (Ray Sharkey and Robert Beltran) make a bet on who can bed the other’s boss first. Bartel himself  appears as Dr. Mo Van de Kamp, a self-styled society ‘”thinologist”.

The film, written by Bruce Wagner based on a story he developed with the director is a slightly camp but mostly dry tongue-in-cheek bed-hopping farce that despite the occasional good line doesn’t really amount to much because the characters are so thinly drawn. The result is a film that is at best a mildly diverting time-filler.
 

 

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