If....

I was in a sort of daze for hours after seeing If...for the first time in 2017. A work of art? Certainly but also a poetic historical document. After all the film dates back to 1968. 1968! when things were really changing and youth was taking a step forward, reminding the older generation that we'll be suffering the consequences of your thoughtlessness. So move over or else. I remember my father despising this film, he call it, propaganda. Propaganda?Maybe that's why I never saw it, until now. I was really moved by the film. Malcolm McDowell is the perfect man to incarnate the revolution that was about to come. It also made me look for all of Lindsay Anderson films - Just half a dozen feature films but my God! What an extraordinary director.

Lindsay Anderson's "If...." begins rather slow, establishing itself as a typical boarding school drama, as students arrive and get into routine at a 500-year-old public school in Britain. In the second half, though, the film takes a turn for the surreal, becoming a dreamlike dark comedy with cultural relevance and artistic wonder.

Watching "If...'s" first few scenes, we expect that the main character will be a first-year student at the school who adapts to the institution's rigorous standards and social hierarchies. However, it slowly becomes apparent that our protagonist is actually an upperclassman named Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell).

With his two loyal friends Johnny (David Wood) and Wallace (Richard Warwick), Mick refuses to conform to the school's conservative agenda. Late in their academic career, the trio decides to give into their rebellious desires, relishing in rule breaking and defying the school's snootier patrons.

The film is thus a commentary on 1960s British counterculture just as much as it itself is a product of that revolution. Mick, Johnny, and Wallace reflect the time's rebellious youth as the rock-n-roll generation turning against society's archaic norms. Meanwhile, the movie partakes in the same counterculture as a piece of subversive art. The surrealist sequences, experimental editing, sexual undertones, and nudity all go against traditional British cinema to offer something novel, and perhaps even appalling for the formalists.

One of the most blatantly defiant methods that Lindsay Anderson endorses is the use of both black-and-white and color film in the same movie. Timing and lighting restraints initially forced Anderson to use black-and-white when filming in the school's chapel. Allegedly, he liked the effect so much that he decided to shoot additional scenes in the outmoded style. There's no telling why Anderson chose certain scenes for color and others for black-and-white, but the nonconformist blend aids the movie's dreaminess. The audience wonders what is real and what is depraved fantasy.

Malcolm McDowell certainly stands out for his performance as Mick. In fact, McDowell is so convincing as a rebel that this performance led to Stanley Kubrick casting him as the lead in "A Clockwork Orange." McDowell also reprised Mick in two additional Anderson films: 1973's "O Lucky Man!" and 1982's "Britannia Hospital." The character has been hailed as an "everyman," and he certainly has our attention, empathy, and support all throughout "If...."

An unfortunate outcome of that support, however, comes at the film's ending. The finale is climactic and in an odd way satisfying, but has aged horrendously. Without giving too much away, I will say that the denouement involves Mick, his friends, the school, and some guns. In the current age, it is hard to cheer the characters on through such a conclusion, given the real-world relevance of gun violence in schools.

None of this is to say that Anderson is at fault for finishing the movie in this way. In 1968, he could not have imagined the weight this ending might someday carry. Also, the conclusion is not necessarily inappropriate watching it today, but it is definitely darker. We can no longer champion Mick's rebellion in its entirety, but must come to terms with its limits and morality after the screen goes black.

Regardless of the lens we see it through, "If...." is an overlooked movie in British (film) history. While it might retain interest from scholars and critics, the general public - at least in America - has sadly forgotten it. Such is a shame, for it is a brilliant piece of cinema that acutely captures the light and dark sides of a pivotal transition in modern Western civilization.

My word!

"If.." has always been a firm favourite of mine, particularly as I have been in much the same situation (minus B+W/Colour changes, and gun battles, naturally), and indeed still consider myself a hair rebel. It captures perfectly the horrors of public shool-The fawning, smarmy head-master, the rigors of cadet training and founder's day, it's all drawn from horrible reality.

Saw a late night showing yesterday, and on the cinema screen the fabulous direction and power of the photography- so still and unobtrusive, yet so iconic-becomes apparent. That final looped shot of Mick firing the brenn Gun is just stunning! I left the cinema feeling so goddamn moved!

At times the sheer 60s-ness, and random dialogue ("I like Johnny") can seem to undermine the viewing experience, but the spirit of bold rebellion which saturates this marvelous film wins you over. A favourite joke which I had never spotted before, is near the start, where the whips tick off a list that goes something like "Measles, tape worm, conformation class"..marvellous..

GO SEE!!

The best film ever made about school life; the rituals, the drudgery, the humiliation and ultimately the excitement. Anderson's masterpiece works on a number of levels, not least as one of the cinema's great pieces of surrealism. It's a state of the nation movie, a fantasy, an account of public school life told with an almost documentary-like precision and it's as fresh today as it was when it first appeared, (hard to believe that was almost 40 years ago or that Malcom McDowell was ever this young).

Using Jean Vigo's "Zero De Conduite" as a template, (it's not a remake), Anderson's movie is quintessentially youthful and so accurately does it depict its milieu as to appear almost arrogant. He handles revolution with a grandstanding authority and homosexual, (and heterosexual), schoolboy yearning more romantically than any other film I can think of, (Wallace's display in the gymnasium as blonde, beautiful, tousle-haired Bobby Phillips looks on is blissfully homo-erotic), and he does this with a masterly control of the medium. (His comments about financial restraints dictating the fluctuations between black-and-white and colour photography may well be true but the choices seem inspired, nevertheless and the great Miroslav Ondricek's camera-work is superb).

He was also a great actor's director, often working with many of the same actors both in theatre and in cinema and he extracts marvellous performances from the likes of Arthur Lowe, Peter Jeffrey, Mona Washborne and Geoffrey Chater representing the Establishment as well as pitch-perfect performances from David Wood, Richard Warwick, Rupert Webster, Robert Swann and Hugh Thomas, all new to cinema, as the students.

The film made Malcom McDowell a star and for a few short years, (here, in "O Lucky Man", as Alex in "A Clockwork Orange"), that star burned brightly before he sold out to Hollywood and his career began to flounder in a series of mediocre American movies, reaching a nadir with "Caligula". But his performance as Mick Travis is a marvel and both it and the film that first encapsulated it remain among the finest achievements in British cinema.

This glorious 1968 film is a document not just of its times but of the eternal and mysterious communion between two enormous artists. Lindsay Anderson, the director, the mentor, the older man and Malcolm McDowell his young, brilliant, loving disciple. The trust between this two men is overwhelming and the results are in every frame in every nuance. For me, to see this film after many years was a remarkable emotional experience. Daring, visionary with a Malcolm McDowell that broke new ground with the fearlessness of an explorer venturing into totally virgin territory. Brilliant, beautiful, unique. Lead by the magical hand of Anderson and McDowell we confront the anger of the artists with their love for each other. Wow!