IF… Movie Review

Director Lindsay Anderson created enormous controversy in a year in which controversy was the norm with his 1968 epic about tradition, cruelty, and, finally, machine-gun-totin' rebellion at a British boys' school. Malcolm McDowell plays Mick Travis, the angry young man whose anti-establishment leanings contrast with the embalmed tradition of the British public education system portrayed here, and who eventually leads an armed assault on the school. Writer David Sherwin began working on the concept a decade earlier, after he saw Rebel without a Cause—this script was titled The Crusaders in its embryonic stage—but lf…'s eventual release in 1968 couldn't have been timed better. With French students taking to the streets in Paris and American students being beaten by police at Chicago's Democratic National Convention, critics were able to write Sunday newspaper “think” pieces about whether If… was inspired by, or was inspiring, real-life events. The narrative—a series of progressively surrealistic “chapters” building up to the bloody climax—flows entertainingly and often ingeniously, demonstrating at every turn the school's brutal, often sadistic traditions until the students' assault on the school at the film's finish seems eminently sensible. But as there are almost no sympathetic characters in If… (McDowell is likable by default), you just can't get worked up by it like you can with agit-prop classics like The Battleship Potemkin or even Easy Rider. That's probably why If… was never a smash in the States, though the initial “X” rating didn't help (there may also have been just too many scenes set in school for student audiences to comfortably plunk their money down). Critics debated the significance of If… ’s switching back and forth between black-and-white and color, but years later Anderson said he simply ran out of money one day and had to shoot whatever was left in less expensive black-and-white. Palme d'Or, Cannes Film Festival.

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1969 (R) 111 m/C GB Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Christine Noonan, Richard Warwick, Robert Swann, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Graham Crowden, Hugh Thomas, Guy Rose, Peter Jeffrey, Geoffrey Chater, Mary MacLeod, Anthony Nicholls, Ben Aris, Charles Lloyd Pack, Rupert Webster, Brian Pettifer, Sean Bury, Michael Cadman; D: Lindsay Anderson; W: David Sherwin; C: Miroslav Ondricek; M: Marc Wilkinson. Cannes Film Festival ‘69: Best Film. VHS, LV PAR