A curious episode in English history, this: In 1866, Sir Roger Tichborne disappears at sea. His black manservant, Ben Bogle (John Kani), sent to find him in Australia, years later brings back a loutish local (Robert Pugh) who may or may not be the AWOL aristocrat. Bogle has tamped down this fellow's ribald social behavior and tutored him in Englishness (for the servant has all the intimate gestures, and more of the grace, of the master) in return for half the expected Tichborne inheritance. The plot is foiled (but the film greatly enhanced) by the so-called "English disease of eccentricity," a class-bred madness even the classy Bogle can't outwit. A highly publicized trial (the ubiquitous John Gielgud, presiding), jail sentences, and still we wonder... The film becomes a study of identity as provocative and ambiguous as The Return of Martin Guerre, blackly comic, and strained through a subtext of class-inheritance versus entitlement. (JB)