Which side will you be on?

I decided to go ahead and add some stuff to this blog before I go back to work. Of course as I add to the blog, the name will no longer make sense. But this is something I'm willing to sacrifice in the name of ending my sloth during my time off work.

I watched Lindsay Anderson's "If...." today. Notice an ellipses of 4 periods, not the usual 3, giving you an indication of the anarchism that will ensue over the next 1 hr. 52 min. This film released in 1968, is neatly sandwiched somewhere between Anderson's work on "This Sporting Life" (1963) and "Wham! In China: Foreign Skies" (1984).


Malcolm McDowell plays Mick Travis, a senior student at a private boys school in England. As the film began, it was hard for me to not think of McDowell as Alex from "A Clockwork Orange". This soon passes and I'm able to watch the movie without thinking of droogs cruising along real horrorshow in the Durango 95. Travis is a troublemaker at the stodgy school, which is a nice metaphor for the state of things at that time with its elitist hierarchical structure: there's the school's staff, then the whips (the "hall monitors"), then the senior students, then the junior students. Travis is in constant struggle with the whips, along with his two buddies, Wallace and Johnny. He is poisonous to the order of the school as he is no fan of conformity. They continually try to break him, but can't. He continues to fight and fight. Just when you think that they've beat him into submission, he fights back, along with his buddies, in a way that no film today could.


As the film ends, the line between terrorism and revolution gets blurred. What make one person a terrorist and another a revolutionary? I guess the determining factor is the level of oppression that they experience. In this case, quite a bit. Incidentally, it is said by Mick at the end, "one man can change the world with a bullet in the right place". But it's not a man that shoots that bullet. It's a woman.


The film itself is surprisingly stylish. It starts out very ordinarily, telling a very British story, then (and apparently for no other reason than "just because") the film goes from color to black and white. Back and forth throughout the film, the color and black and white imagery trade off. You look for a reason, whether it's dream sequences or flashbacks, but nothing... there's no reason other than because they wanted to. Apparently, Anderson loved to shoot in black and white, but was required by Paramount to shoot in color so as to ensure that the movie could be played on TV in the future.


Just like any good boys' school movie, there is tons of homosexual imagery throughout the film, none of which really pays off to anything. Most of the homosexual subtext (aside from a shower scene) involves a junior named Bobby Phillips. In the beginning, one of the whips tells him to stop flirting. There is also scene where the whips discuss trading him for another boy from a neighboring school. Just allusions that you are watching a movie made by a gay man.


There are two scenes involving Wallace that step it up though: one in which we gaze with Bobby at Wallace's performing a gymnastics routine, and another where the two have an after hours interlude in the school's armory where they share cigarettes until one of the whips comes to break it up. In these scenes, the homosexuality is not buried in the subtext, but right there on the screen, both times in black and white.

Everything about this movie is so British, even for an Anglophile like myself, I feel that about a third of it is lost on me. Between the borstal-like environment of the school, to the class frustrations, to the vernacular, I occasionally found myself feeling a little left out of the joke. That didn't stop me from enjoying it, although by today's standards the ending comes up a little short. I wanted to see more of the aftermath and felt a little short-changed by it. But I'm sure that's just me and my Hollywood blockbuster sensibilities.

I watched the Criterion DVD of the film which came in at 1:51:37. The 1.75:1 image was clear and free from defects as far as I could tell. The commentary is pretty good. McDowell is not unhappy with his performance which makes for an entertaining listen.

There were two subsequent films, "O Lucky Man!" and "Brittania Hospital" that completed a trilogy of sorts, with Malcolm McDowell reprising his role as Mick Travis. Haven't seen those yet though.