New Line began in the 1970s, distributing movies to be shown on college campuses. John Waters's films were among the first it acquired, and Eat the Rich has a vaguely Waters-esque premise, with an androgynous waiter at a posh restaurant starting a ragtag revolution, killing the restaurant's clientele and then reopening the restaurant under the movie's title, cooking up the killed aristocrats and “beautiful people” as entrees. In addition to Waters's movies, the sensibility in Eat the Rich also recalls the two anti-authoritarian 1980s comedies Michael Nesmith produced, Repo Man and Tapeheads. But it fails to reach the comedic level of those still-funny films.
Eat the Rich sprung from the English alternative comedy group The Comic Strip, whose members have been responsible (collectively and separately) for such TV series as The Young Ones, Absolutely Fabulous, French and Saunders and The Comic Strip Presents, among others. The first movie the group made together, 1985's The Supergrass, is no classic, but it at least features many of the core Comic Strip crowd (folks like Jennifer Saunders, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French and the movie's director, Peter Richardson) in central roles. As good as it was to see these people onscreen in Eat the Rich in 1987, when their prolific work was hard to come by on these shores, now it's rather frustrating that they're mostly on the fringes of the movie.
While Eat the Rich taps into the Comic Strip's post-punk irreverence, instead an ensemble with more novelty value than acting or comic chops plays the movie's central characters. Among them are Lanah Pellay (né Alan Pellay), a sometime female impersonator who's no Divine in the charisma department; Nosher Powell, a stuntman-turned-actor who pretty much steals the movie; Ron Tarr, a behemoth of a bit player elevated to a co-star; and Motörhead frontman Lemmy, who acquits himself very well here (the band also does the movie's song score). Ron Allen is a more conventional presence, playing Commander Fortune, a dapper English spy who's also a Soviet double agent. The double agent and his henchman, Spider (Lemmy), set out to discredit Nosher (Powell), the thuggish yet popular Home Secretary who's maneuvering to be England's next Prime Minister. After fired waiter Alex (Pellay) and similarly unemployed Ron (Tarr) shoot the unemployment-office clerks who disrespect them and then start to recruit fellow revolutionaries to join them, the anti-Nosher schemers start to secretly aid the ex-waiter's crusade, leading to an inevitable Alex-Nosher showdown.
It's a decent enough premise for an irreverent comedy, and the action featuring bruiser Nosher (who single-handedly breaks up an embassy invasion) and the restaurant (before and after the change in management) is good for an occasional chuckle. But the toffy-nosed customers at the restaurant are easy targets, the main characters are one-dimensional and Eat the Rich never really adds up to much. It seems too disjointed, frivolous and gratuitous to make much of an impression, unlike the Waters and Nesmith productions it recalls. Despite those movies' bizarre comedy, they had core values they espoused through that comedy, but Eat the Rich feels shallower, with less of a purpose driving it forward.
Maybe that's because it can seem as if the movie is just an excuse for its stream of cameos. In addition to the Comic Strip members having one-scene pop-ins, sometime Strip cohorts such as Robbie Coltrane, Miranda Richardson and Nigel Planer appear, as do musicians as diverse as Shane MacGowan, Jools Holland, Paul McCartney and Bill Wyman and actresses Koo Stark, Katrin Cartlidge and Kathy Burke. All these cameos repeatedly remind of the novelty value of Eat the Rich. They don't enrich its comic value quite so much. Director/co-writer Peter Richardson and co-writer Pete Richens would segue from this to 1989's The Pope Must Die, which made a bigger impression, with Coltrane in the lead and no cameos from the Comic Strip performers.
Image's disc of Eat the Rich includes no extras. The movie is hardly buried treasure, but at least it's out there now for the curious catching up on their British comedy.
For more information about Eat the Rich, visit Image Entertainment. To order Eat the Rich, go to TCM Shopping.
by Paul Sherman
