If.... (1968) - film review

The summer holidays over, the boys at an old public school return for the start a new term, which for most will consist of abject misery and abuse meted out to them by their seniors.  One of the older boys, Mick Travis, has found an interest in revolution and guerrilla warfare during the summer and begins to provoke the school prefects, or Whips, by casually challenging their authority.  In the end, the patience of the Whips is exhausted and they attempt to bring Travis and his two fellow conspirators to heel by giving them the thrashing of their lives.  Far from crushing Travis’ rebellious nature, this humiliation hardens his resolve to end this reign of oppression...

One of the major achievements of British cinema in the 1960s, If... is both a satire on the old public school system, one of the country’s most archaic institutions, and a powerful allegory on Britain’s class-ridden society at a time when discontent, particularly amongst the young, was beginning to transform into rebellion.  The school setting  provides an effective microcosm for British society, in which privilege stems from rank not intellectual ability, and rank is exploited to the full by those who have it.   Some would argue that things have not changed much since, that Britain is still pretty much governed by a self-serving upper-crust elite who constantly play the system to their advantage.

If... is the best and arguably the most important film to be directed by Lindsay Anderson, a leading figure in British New Wave cinema of the sixties and an emblematic figure in the prevailing counter culture.  The film won Anderson the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969 (interestingly, the festival had been cancelled the previous year as a gesture of solidarity with students and strikers who had risen up in open revolt against the French government, albeit without machine guns and grenades).

Jean Vigo’s classic French film Zéro de conduite (1933) provided both the inspiration and the structure for the film.  (Appropriately, Vigo was the son of a renowned anarchist.)  There are also similarities with Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and Week End (1967), films which, like If..., argue that violent revolution might be an acceptable, indeed the inevitable, means for achieving a desired political change.  Although Anderson denies being influenced by contemporary events, the film does appear to mirror the political uprisings which took place in the United States and Paris in 1968.

Although the film was originally intended to be shot entirely in colour, Anderson decided to shoot several sequences in black and white.  This was partly for budgetary reasons but also because of the limited time available for the shooting of the chapel scenes.  The mix of colour and black and white appears to be completely arbitrary, in much the same way as the switches between fantasy and realism.  The effect is to reinforce the impression of a well-ordered world that is slowly fragmenting into anarchy as the forces of individualism begin to assert themselves.

If... marked the screen debut of Malcolm McDowell, in a career-defining role that presages the one he would subsequently play in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) – the juvenile delinquent with an unmistakable psychopathic streak.  McDowell would reprise the role of Mick Travis in two sequels directed by Lindsay Anderson, in which his character would continue his one-man crusade against the British establishment: O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982).  These films paint a depressing picture of a Britain in which change for the better is constantly inhibited by bureaucratic inertia and political complacency.  Plus ça change...

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