If.... (1968)

Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If... is a beautiful film with a simple message, yet the director's touch and the performances take it to entirely different level.

If... takes place in all boys boarding school and stars Malcolm McDowell as

"Mick" (McDowell in his first screen role). Mick and his two friends feel

somewhat distant from their peers, school, and society. Their general attitude towards such things as sex, war, and authority could be call revolutionary. With surrealistic touches such as unexplained occurrences and changing between

color and black and white. Lindsay Anderson paints a vivid picture of "teenage alienation" before there was a term for such a thing. McDowell would later reprise his role of "Mick" in two other Anderson pictures O' Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital. A must see for fans of McDowell. Just a great film with a message that sparks positive, pro-active thinking. An important film that makes you remember to question authority instead complying to it rules. Sadly If... is not available on DVD at this time.

Fmovies: I first saw this movie when i was 15 and it shook up my world. I was aware of Malcolm McDowell having previously seen him as Alex delarge in Clockwork Orange. This film is a perfect surreal study of teenage rebellion and should be seen by everyone who is able. The direction is brilliant the supporting cast shine (Arthur Lowe etc)and the film as a whole is made up of memorable images that you'll take to the grave. Lindsay Anderson is one of the most important director geniuses of an era and i was very sad to hear of his demise. The memory of him lives on through this film and its two "Mick Travis" sequels!!

The first entry to the Mick Travis trilogy ("If...", 1968, O Lucky Man, 1973, and "Britannia Hospital", 1982), "If.." is a surreal black comedy about an English private boys' school and a student rebellion. In his three films, Anderson had covered all aspects, politics, and institutions of British Society from 1968 to 1982 with its complex system of class differences and privileges. "If..." which was released in 1968 at the peak of youthful rebellion in Europe and USA, received BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival where it competed with 27 films from all over the world.

Anderson was in part inspired by Jean Vigo's 41 minutes long "Zero for conduct" (1933) about the similar to "If..." subject. Like in Vigo's film, Anderson inserts some surrealistic episodes shot in black-and-white and according to him, it was driven by budget rather than style. Malcolm McDowell in his first big screen role and the first of three Mick Travis' movies is a charismatic leader of the rebel students who call themselves the Crusaders and like to break the rules. The cruel corporal punishments from the faculty and the older students provoked a bloody uprising against the school system.

Made almost 40 years ago, "If.." still has a power to shock as well as to entertain and it remains an outstanding and controversial depiction of the problems that have not disappear from the English public school system or from any school system as well as from society in general.

I am sure that Stanley Kubrick saw "If..." and was impressed by McDowell's debut performance, by his charisma that shines through his close-ups and especially in the final shot of "If...", and by his face that strangely combines innocence and youthful openness with cynical scornful almost reptilian contempt for humanity. I believe that "If..." was the reason Kubrick offered the part of charming psychopath Alex to the young actor.

If.... fmovies. To get the most out of this film you have to be English, male and a teenager; in 1979 when I first saw it I was all three. In the years that followed I would catch it wherever I could, be it on television, in the college bar or in some local, flea-ridden rep cinema. Now, of course, I own the video. Every few months I dig it out and watch it, and more than any other film or book it reminds me what it was like to be young and rebellious and have my whole life ahead of me.

This was to England what The Wild One or Rebel Without A Cause was to America. Show it to your teenage sons; they'll remember it for the rest of their lives, and one day they might even thank you for it.

To dispel an old myth, while I'm here. Some scenes in the film are in black and white while most of the film is in color. The reason for this has nothing to do with art; they were short of money, and black and white was cheaper in those days.

Enjoy.

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.

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.