Critic Reviews

Often funny, always telling, this is the kind of not- quite-successful comedy that is fraught with not-quite-intentional meaning. From the pun in the title to the echoes in the script, Class is a pop sociologist's dream. [22 July 1983]

Class is a prep-school retread of "The Graduate" that knows some of its scenes are funny and some are serious, but never figures out quite how they should go together. The result is an uncomfortable, inconsistent movie that doesn't really pay off -- a movie in which everything points to two absolutely key scenes that are, inexplicably, the two most awkward scenes in the film.

McCarthy and Rob Lowe (as his roommate) carry most of the picture, and both acquit themselves reasonably well under the circumstances.

Another of those mildly titillating high-school films, soulless and self-satisfied, realising the youthful fantasy of being initiated into the joys of sex by an older woman.

Sniggery sex, adolescent male-bonding, casual drug use, the agonies of growing up, mistrust [to put it mildly] of the adult world, a yearning for material success and a corresponding distaste for anything that smacks of the "committed" 1960s - it's all here, supporting a plot so lunatic that it could have been assembled only in the backwards fashion outlined above. [22 July 1983, p.3-3]

The movie can't make up its mind whether it's a lighthearted comedy, set in what appears to be a posh New England-style prep school just outside Chicago, or a romantic drama about a teen-age boy who has a torrid affair with his roommate's mother. Either way it's pretty awful.

Class, a sexual disillusion acted out at the prep school level, would be represented far more accurately by the one-word title "Crass." [22 July 1983, p.C4]

The unfortunate aspect of Class, which is glossier than Private Lessons and marginally more believable than My Tutor, is that its laughs are built around the suffering of a prime candidate for intensive therapy. Thus while the kids are watching one movie -- boy loses virginity, ya-hoo -- adults in the audience will be watching another -- wife and mother has an emotional breakdown at the hands, literally, of a 14-year-old. The latter, of course, is not funny. [25 July 1983, p.C6]

A vile concoction. [25 July 1983, p.75]