Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #228 Class (1983) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.

As someone who has written professionally about popular culture for twenty-four years I am all too familiar with endings. I’m far too acquainted with the endings of lives and friendships and columns and newspapers and websites.

In my line of business endings are an unfortunate but inevitable fact of life but if you’re lucky, endings can lead to new beginnings. For example, I recently finished my epic jaunt through the film and television work of legendary beauty and quintessential video vixen Tawny Kitaen, a curious, unexpected but much appreciated project whose ending unfortunately coincided with Kitaen’s own recent passing at 59.

The generous patron who funded my look at Kitaen’s career has commissioned a follow-up journey through the films of Academy-Award nominee Virginia Madsen, beginning with her film debut in 1983’s Class.

Class impishly inquires, “What if The Graduate was a shitty teen sex comedy from the 1980s?” The answer, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, is that it would fucking suck and squander a marvelous cast full of future stars.

But before I dissect a very bad movie I would like to recommend a very good book called Teen Movie Hell: A Crucible of Coming-of-Age Comedies from Animal House to Zapped! by my late friend Mike McPadden.

It’s an exhaustive deep dive into the entirety of teen sex comedies written with humor and insight. If you like my books and this website then there is a roughly 100 percent chance that you’ll dig Teen Movie Hell and use it as an invaluable resource for movies like Class.

In his film debut, John Cusack has some nice moments as sleazy opportunist Roscoe but otherwise everyone here is terribly served by Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt’s paper-thin screenplay.

No one has it worse than poor Madsen, who is predictably radiant and fresh-faced in her feature film debut, an absolute stunner with a presence that explodes off the screen. Unfortunately Madsen is onscreen for less than five minutes and in that time is vomited upon by the film’s protagonist in a fit of nervousness and then has her shirt ripped open in a slapstick melee, exposing a naked breast.

I naturally assumed that Madsen’s Liberal do-gooder would inhabit the Katherine Ross role in the proceedings as the impossibly beautiful, pure-hearted younger woman a mixed-up prep school type ends up with after dallying with her mother.

I was wrong. For better or worse callow protagonist Jonathan Ogner (Andrew McCarthy), a working-class scholarship kid at a fancy boarding school who ends up having an affair with uber-WASP roommate Squire Franklin Burroughs IV’s (Rob Lowe) mother Ellen (Jacqueline Bisset) does not have a love interest his own age.

That means that Madsen’s character is on-hand solely to be puked upon by our nervous hero and then be naked for no goddamn reason at all except that this is a teen sex comedy, a genre where strong-willed, opinionated women have a curious way of losing their tops and their dignity, often at the same time.

Then Madsen disappears from the movie forever. In a sense she’s lucky. The only thing worse than having a small, perversely thankless, even masochistic nothing role in a stinker like Class is having a perversely thankless, even masochistic lead role.

Andrew McCarthy, who was nineteen when the film was made but looks a good five years younger, is lost in the lead role of an ambitious young man who gets into a prestigious prep school as part of a plan to get into Harvard and is sexually humiliated by his foppishly named roommate as a cruel hazing ritual in which he is tricked into promenading about publicly in women’s clothing.

One of my pet peeves are movies where characters are treated with inexplicable cruelty by an uncaring universe, only to be feted like Gods just as arbitrarily. So Squire Franklin Burroughs IV’s prank makes poor Jonathan, who cuts an unmistakably Bud Cort-like figure with his huge eyes, shaggy hair and air of beatific innocence/sadness, is cruelly mocked by his vicious peers, first as “a weenie in a bikini”, a “geek in lingerie” and less imaginatively if just as descriptively and accurately, “a guy in women’s underwear.”

Lowe’s child of privilege feels so sorry for his virginal roommate that he gives him one hundred dollars and tells him to go to Rush street in Chicago to get laid. Incidentally when I lived in a group home in Chicago in the early to mid 1990s I very distinctly remember one of my roommates telling me that if I wanted to get laid I should go to Rush street, something that stuck with me as things involving adolescence and sex tend to do.

So it was weird seeing a foppish dandy played by Rob Lowe give a young Andrew McCarthy the same weirdly specific suggestion regarding streets and sex that I received from my Campbell House roommate as a young man.

Because Class is weirdly cruel as well as wildly unconvincing, at the bar on Rush street Jonathan is first humiliated by a woman who draws on his face as a cruel prank and then seduced by his roommate’s sexually frustrated mother.

The experienced older woman and the eager young man have sex in an elevator in a way that, honestly, mostly just made me worry about the poor man’s knees and back.

Bisset was reportedly unhappy that they cut her character’s backstory, leaving her a beautiful blank who is nothing more than the sum total of her sexual desire for someone who looks like he should still be in middle-school, not having an affair with a married, middle-aged woman.

Jonathan doesn’t realize that the older woman he’s sleeping with is his roommate’s mom until an hour into the movie and the scenes where he meets his lover’s uptight husband Franklin Burroughs III (Cliff Robertson) are predictably charged with excruciating tension but not in a fun or funny way.

No one here is afforded any depth or specificity. Everyone is more or less exactly who they appear at first glance, including the roommates’ prep school peers, who are played by familiar faces like Alan Ruck and Casey Siemaszko.

At the risk of stating the obvious Class ain’t got no class. It leaves this column and its wildly over-qualified cast of future teen movie fixtures nowhere to go but up.

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are EIGHT so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

and of course you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace