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CHILLING OUT “Innocence has always been my position,” says Jeremy Irons as the snobbish vampire Claus von Bülow to his defense team, headed by adequate Ron Silver as Harvard professor/attorney Alan Dershowitz, in Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune. Based on Dershowitz’s account of his successful reversal of von Bülow’s original 1982 convictions of attempting to murder his high society wife Sunny back in 1979 and 1980, Iron’s verbatim declaration earns him the crown for giving the star performance of 1990. The irony is that even earning the Oscar for it, he will probably never be a megastar: long suited as the quintessential snit from across the Atlantic, he doesn’t have the kind of cinematic charisma to win over large numbers of moviegoers. And this isn’t the role to win them over if he had rizz in spades. (A somewhat similar problem in the based-on-fact Dead Ringers: as the twin psychos putting fear into the privates of female viewers, he may have inadvertently set back the need for gynecological checkups.) The only way to play ghoul Claus—who has been rumored to dabble in necrophilia—is to duplicate his haughty comic detachment which Irons delivers in one of the more estimable let-in-bleed assaults on drollness since any you-name-it performance by John Gielgud. He caricatures von Bülow with such cagey semi-serious tongue-in-cheek that we’re helpless in getting a fix: is he so badass in the hip urban definition of great, or so bad in original meaning he’s channeling a novel connotation of awful? They may be dual essences in Irons’ success. As for the real Claus, he seemed ready to be a sociologically intriguing critic, an offer he did not refuse from London’s The Catholic Herald. The chilled-out, postured nonchalance of the Cambridge-educated von Bülow (who was born Claus Cecil Borberg in Copenhagen in 1926, to a mother whose maiden name was Bülow—Claus added “von” himself—and to a father who was considered sympathetic to the Nazis) was too sheathe for most Americans to take; there’s no warming up to him, likely the chief reason he was convicted in the first place. The book editor at The Catholic Herald recognized in Claus the preferred media perquisites for a career as book-theatre-drama critic, providing him a chair roughly eight years after the acquittal and lasting till 2005. Claus wasn’t an empty-headed “infamy”: educated, articulate, cosmopolitan and, significantly, a 1960 convert to Catholicism. No one looking in from the outside knows what transpired in the von Bülow household as Sonny entered her frequent self-induced booze & drug & aspirin nightlies, and the movie stays clear of affixing a definitive explanation of the circumstances surrounding Sunny’s two coma episodes. It does want to ask in a cautious fashion three main questions: Did beautiful nincompoop-druggie Sunny plan a de riguer felo de se? Did Claus coax it along? Was Claus framed? (The real Sunny remained in a coma for 28 years, dying in December, 2008.) In a sly narrative summation, belying as well as capping off her arresting zombie, Glenn Close tells the audience we’ll never know what happened until we get to where she’s at. Shouldn’t be at all funny; nevertheless, as reflection of our soullessness, it’s a scream. When Reversal of Fortune was released in 1990, Ron Silver’s self-righteous Alan Dershowitz got away with this comment to Claus: “Legally this [acquittal] was an important victory. Morally, you’re on your own.” In just a few years he’d be a willing defender in the sordid O.J. Simpson case, and then later be on Harvey Weinstein’s defense team in 2018, joined Donald Trump’s defense team in his first impeachment trial in 2020, and member of Jeffrey Epstein’s defense who was heavily involved in negotiating a contentious non-prosecution agreement for Epstein. One additional but egregious libtard ploy inserted in the movie—changing the name and race of the white Tison brothers to Johnson and black. The end credits says that the Johnson boys were still living as their death penalty case was being appealed. In fact, the Tison boys lost their appeal to the Supreme Court but in 1992, Dershowitz convinced the Arizona Supreme Court to commute their sentences to life imprisonment. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER (Revised 10/2026) All Rights Reserved.
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