Paul Bartel's Class Act

Check your sense of good and bad taste at the door as you enter the mordant world of Paul Bartel. The director, whose work has spanned genre films (Death Race 2000) and idiosyncratic satires {Eating Raoul), has a predilection for swinger cannibalism, deadly auto races, and obese drag queens baring treasure maps tattooed on their behinds. The curious thing is, rather than thrust his audiences' faces into a mud trough of grotesquerie, Bartel turns it all into benign and appealing entertainment.

According to the Brooklynborn, New Jersey-raised director, his new entry, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, is "daring, funny, sophisticated, classy, and all the things I've always wanted to be." Bartel's original idea was to do a Restoration-type comedy set in Beverly Hills, "but as it developed, a lot of Buhuel crept into 0 it." The result—which stars, I among others, Jacqueline Bisset, Paul Mazursky, Bartel himself, and regulars Mary Woronov and Robert Beltran—is, in Bisset's words, "sick and hip in some strange way." Just to sample the synopsis: "The hallway of the Lipkin mansion becomes a no-man's land for the terminally tumescent."

The perennially bemused Bartel waged his own (low-) class struggle, toiling on everything from military training films to commercials to Roger Corman flicks, before the self-financed Eating Raoul gave him a wider audience for his own work. Now he alternates between the New York and L.A. highlife. The only problem with his West Coast domicile is that his phone number differs from Immigration's by one digit. "Usually I just explain the difference in number," he says, "but when I get exasperated I just tell them that if they haven't sent in their thousand dollars there's no point in explaining their case.''

MICHAEL MUSTO