Here's a rebellion fantasy for those of you with an antiauthoritarian streak, but who'd rather relish your episodes of anarchy vicariously. It's a much healthier way to go about it than turning on your co-workers or classmates with an automatic weapon. The basic idea of filming rebelliousness in the context of a boarding school originated with Vigo's fine French short Zero for Conduct (1933), which the French authorities immediately banned. Here, the idea is reworked in the context of a British public school of the sixties, by the innovative British director, Lindsay Anderson.

Historical Background: Like several of the French New Wave auteurs, Lindsay Anderson was a critic before becoming a filmmaker. Born April 17th, 1923, in Bangalore, India, Anderson was son of a Scottish major general. After being educated at Oxford, Anderson co-founded the film magazine Sequence, which was influential until its demise in 1951, advocating radical changes in the British approach to filmmaking. In the fifties, Anderson worked in London, writing film criticism for Sight and Sound and The Times. Anderson's first products as a filmmaker were documentaries, beginning with Meeting the Pioneers (1948). He won an Oscar for the short documentary Thursday's Children (1954). Anderson helped organize the so-called Free Cinema movement in the mid-fifties, along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Gavin Lambert. The precepts of the movement centered on greater relevance in documentary cinema to the everyday lives of ordinary British citizens and the freedom to tackle socially controversial subjects. Later, the initiatives encompassed in the Free Cinema movement spilled over into feature films, becoming the British New Wave.

Anderson's first feature film, This Sporting Life (1963), was fairly impressive. Then, following two less substantial efforts, he had great success with If… (1968), which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. This biting satire of the sixties would ultimately be loosely linked with two other films by Anderson, as a kind of social satire trilogy, all starring Malcolm McDowell. The second film in the series, O Lucky Man! (1973), satirized the seventies while Britannia Hospital (1982) provided the same function for the early eighties. The best of Anderson's films outside of the social satire series might be The Whales of August (1987). Anderson died in 1994.

The Story: At an English public school (equivalent to "private" schools in America) for boys, age-old rituals of dominance and repression play out, as the older boys, called "prefects," torment and humiliate the younger one. As the school year begins, the roguish Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) returns from a summer of drinking in the counterculture. He's wearing a black outfit, with a hat and a scarf covering the forbidden mustache on his face. Before long, he's cut the mustache off, symbolically returning to the life of repression at boarding school. Mick and his two best friends, Johnny (David Wood) and Wallace (Richard Warwick), have the habit of slouching and skulking about the periphery of activities, sporting grins indicative of bemused indifference. To give expression to their rebellious natures, the trio plasters their walls with pictures of glamorous models and actresses, ads for alcoholic beverages, and posters of freedom fighters such as Mao and Che.

In a series of vignettes, viewers discover that nothing about this school is quite right. The Chaplain (Geoffrey Chater) takes a perverse interest in the boys' confessions of dirty thoughts and frightens the younger ones by declaring that "Jesus Christ is our commanding officer and if we desert him we can expect no mercy." The pompous and ineffectual headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) condones the brutal activities of the prefects, who call themselves "whips." Top whip Rowntree (Robert Swann) and his fellows, Denson (Hugh Thomas) and Fortinbras (Michael Cadman), subject the younger lads to beatings and extract sexual favors. One handsome young blond boy, Bobby Phillips (Rupert Webster), gets passed along from one whip to another. Most of the faculty at this school is incompetent, though the history teacher (Graham Crowden) makes a genuine effort to teach the boys to think about moral choices.

One day, Mick and Wallace get away for a day and go joyriding on a stolen motorcycle. They encounter a stunningly nubile waitress (Christine Noonan) at a coffee shop. Mick is soon making surreal love with her on the floor. They're like a pair of aroused tigers. Back at the school, the three rebels are forced to take cold showers for refusing to get their hair trimmed. Later, the prefects summon Mick and his two buddies for additional disciplining. They're "being a nuisance," they're told. It's their "general attitude." They're a "danger to morale." "There's something indecent about you, Travis," says one of the prefects. "The way you slouch about. You think we don't notice you with your hands in your pockets. You just sit there looking at everyone." Mick still has the courage to sass Rowntree, telling him, "The thing I hate about you, Rowntree, is the way you give Coca-Cola to your scum, and your best teddy bear to rouse them and expect us to lick your frigid fingers for the rest of your frigid life." All three of the boys are given a caning, but Mick is subjected to twice the number of blows as the other two. Back in their room, the defiant boys take a blood oath of revolution against the oppressive system.

After the boys disrupt a mock military game with real bullets fired into the coffee machine, they are called before the headmaster and are subjected to the following remarkable speech:

Now, you mustn't think that I don't understand. It's a natural characteristic of adolescence to want to claim individuality. There's nothing unhealthy about that. It's a quite blameless form of existentialism. This, for instance, is what lies at the heart of the great hair problem. I think you boys know that I keep an open mind on must things. Of one thing I am certain. Short hair is no indication of merit. So often, I've noticed that it's the hair rebels who step into the breach when there's a crisis, whether it be a fire in the house or to sacrifice a week's holiday in order to give a party of slum children seven days in the country. But of course there are limits. Scruffiness of any kind is deplorable. I think you'd go that far with me.

The headmaster assigns the trio of hair miscreants to work duty, cleaning out old storage spaces. In the process, they come across canisters of tear gas and a cache of weapons. That leads to the final climactic showdown, during Founders' Day, as the three boys, along with the girl from the coffee shop, take to terrorism with a passion.

Themes: The basic theme of the film is clear enough: repression leads to rebellion. Unhealthy power relationships are rampant in the world and are readily mimicked by young boys and girls in schools and other organizations. I don't think that viewers of this film should get overly worked up about when and how much rebellion is warranted in relation to various degrees of repressive torments. I don't imagine that Anderson is either encouraging or condoning armed attack on an audience emerging from a ceremonial event as a reasonable response to a caning or work duty. No right-minded person would buy into the more flippant assertions of our young rebels, such as "One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place" or "Violence and retribution are the only pure acts." Those kinds of statements are pure nonsense, but Anderson is offering a warning that repression of the masses by the elite of the upper class will inevitably result in violence, some of which might very well be unreasonable and disproportionate. Anderson's message proved quite prescient, actually, since the 1968 riots in Paris erupted shortly after this film's release.

Production Values: The screenplay was written by David Sherwin, based on an original script called Crusaders by Sherwin and John Howlett. Anderson didn't care for Crusaders as a title. The entire film was shot without so much as a working title. Finally, one of Anderson's secretaries suggested calling if simply, "If . . .," and that was that! Some people imagine that the film was named after Kipling's rather jingoistic poem by the same name, but there's no apparent connection. My personal suggestion as to what the rest of the implied sentence might be is the following: "If you're going to subject people to brutal repression, sooner or later they will rebel." Certainly, the history of the British Empire demonstrates that relationship.

The dialog is potent and witty. The satire and sarcasm is razor sharp, cutting deep slices into the British class system and the English tendency to prize obedience, sacrifice, and sadistic repression. The boarding school in which the story transpires is, allegorically, a stand-in for society at large. Viewers can pay as much or as little attention to the subtexts as they like because the story by itself is entertaining enough.

On the surface, the film has some of the characteristics of documentary, which comes as no surprise given Anderson's background as a filmmaker. On the other hand, the film is anything but realistic. Some scenes entail surrealism and it's not always possible to tell which scenes may have been fantasies in the minds of one or more of the boys and which are supposed to have actually happened.

The most startling element of the cinematography by Miloslav Ondricek is that it switches back and forth between color and black-and-white or sepia segments (depending on your print). Viewers and reviewers tried to cognize some pattern and meaning in the switches – until Anderson revealed that it was simply a matter of money. The studio very much wanted the film in color but Anderson didn't have enough funding (a mere quarter of a million pounds) to process color film for all the scenes. That's a pitiable reason, but the mixing of formats had little effect on my enjoyment of the film. Since I watch a lot of both black-and-white and color movies, the transitions were perhaps not as startling for me as they might be for someone who rarely watches black-and-white films. It has one small side benefit, keeping viewers off-balance and, thus, alert. The soundtrack is an interesting mix of traditional church choir music and counterculture-related sounds, such as excerpts from Missa Luba and Congo rebel music.

Malcolm McDowell is one heck of an actor. I already knew that from A Clockwork Orange (1971), but here he is three years younger and already an exceptionally talented performer. I'll have to check him out, now, in O Lucky Man! (1973). I'll entertain other suggestions from readers. McDowell manages a confident swagger without sinking into stereotypes. The shit-eating grin makes a contribution, along with that dead-eye stare. I don't know what's any prettier than rebel charisma! Richard Warwick does a pretty fine job as well, as Mick's pal Wallace. Warwick later appeared in The Bed Sitting Room (1969) and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). Robert Swann is coldly malicious as Rowntree and Peter Jeffrey suitably vacuous as the Headmaster. Jeffrey's resume includes Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and The Return of the Pink Panther (1975). Christine Noonan had the right sort of animal magnetism for her role.

Bottom-Line: If… is one of the best British film of the sixties and captures the spirit of that time. You might also want to consider that its title isn't going to use up much room in your computer database. The film is rough around the edges, in some respects, but innovative and entertaining enough to warrant four-stars.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age