Rushes the Shooting Party

It is the autumn of 1913, and as the war clouds gather over Europe, a cross section of the English nobility gathers at Sir Randolph Nettleby's estate for a weekend's shoot. The symbolic correlation between the mass destruction of feathered innocents and the slaughter soon to ensue in France seems a little cruder onscreen than it did in Isabel Colegate's subtle novel of manners, as do the human dramas played out around the mansion. But as Sir Randolph, the late James Mason, whose last performance this was, is superb in his distracted eccentricity, especially in a scene with John Gielgud, who plays an animal- rights enthusiast dangerously disrupting the shoot. And there is another good performance by Cheryl Campbell as a coolly amoral aristocrat. Julian Bond's script is curtly literate, Alan Bridges' direction is more Masterpiece Theatre than The Rules of the Game. Still, as Winston Churchill once said, "The old world in its sunset was fair to see," and some of that ironic glow lights The Shooting Party.