Back to School Month: If... (Dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1h 51m, 1968)

By the time that Mick Travis, Lindsay Anderson's everyman, appears in the role that would catapault Malcolm McDowall from first-time actor to counterculture icon and subsequent muse of everyone from Kubrick to Tinto Brass in a six-decade career, the film has already shown, in remarkably verité detail, the power structure and the inequality of public school life, where the cruel Whips, Sixth Form prefects use the youngest boys, the "scum", as practical slave labour and sexual favourites. Travis's introduction, scarfed and hatted, only his eyes showing, is that of a disruptive force, who, together with his two comrades, Wallace (Richard Warrick) and Knightley, (David Wood), rage against the structure and very being of the school, leading to a spectacular, if unreliably real ending in which the trio and their allies massacre the school in one of 60's cinema most cathartic, if shocking endings. 

 Unquestionably, this is McDowall's film-he would go on to play Travis in two films by Anderson that retain the same group of characters, albeit unrelated by narrative; O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982), not to mention films as wide apart as the cult, if somewhat disappointing Tank Girl (1995) and the seminal A Clockwork Orange (1971). To consider that this is McDowall's first screen role is unthinkable-he springs, almost fully formed into the film, a young man at once eccentric-his first few scenes only highlight this as he and his friends consider a number of bizarre and grotesque images from magazines to form the strange, and unnerving collage that grows throughout the film to capture the trio's outsider status and their revolutionary spirit.

Anderson, certainly leaves us in no doubt as to what our heroes are railing against-the Whips, led by the sadistic Rowntree (Robert Swann) are power-mad, cruel, and in the case of the figure of Bobby Phillips (Rupert Webster), whose appearance in the film sits somewhere between Death in Venice's Tadzio and Dreyer's Joan of Arc (1928), in his angelic, innocent appearance that is slowly corrupted by the influence of the Whips, who trade him between the group, before he eventually disappears and reappears with the outsiders in the group. Nowhere is the power of the Whips, compared to the feeble and often feckless teachers-at one point, one of the Whips practically reminds one of the teachers that they should be in bed soon-seen better than in the scene where Travis and his two friends are beaten.

It is this that instigates the first shooting, during a school cadets exercise, and a brutal assault on the chaplain, and eventually leads to the second shooting that closes the film. Here, Anderson's cinematic eye is on full display-shooting only, in a locked off shot that captures the entire entrance hall to the gymnasium, where Wallace and Knightley disappear, and we only hear their beatings, before Travis enters-here the camera swaps to in front of McDowall, eventually holding on a close-up on his face as blow after blow descends. It is as shocking as it is real, and yet, it is this that sparks the trio into revolutionary action

For the trio, undoubtedly are, in Anderson's eye, revolutionaries. As they move from encounters with the Whips to petty theft of a motorcycle to increasingly hostile clashes with the Whips and the other figures of school authority, to the film's denouement, the film paints our heroes as quasi-revoltionaries-they are dubbed Crusaders in the film's credits, they look up to revolutionaries-their study is full of images of African guerillas, North Vietnamese soldiers and the like, and the film's finale shows them clad in camouflage and bullet bandoliers, a veritable arrival of the counter-culture as insurgency. This carries through to the very feel of this film, in which the outsiders, the collision of the late 60’s counterculture face-first into the archaic aged apparatus of the English public school system, the long-haired, African choral-listening oddballs threaten to upend and cast to the wind centuries of tradition.

This is, after all, a film made as Paris erupted into riots in 1968, an event that left a colossal impact on cinema on both sides of the Atlantic, and a film that magpie-like, takes elements from both French verité and the French New Wave alike. Anderson's early documentaries take influence from this school of cinema, presaging the turn of British cinema into social realism by over a decade, and it is this twinning this style with the strange and surreal that forms the heart of If... For example, there are two strange, almost dreamlike sequences, the first of which involves Travis and a girl he becomes acquainted with in a café, which cuts, unexpectedly and jarringly to the duo wrestling naked, in a moment as profound as it ridiculous-If, certainly, is not short of amusing moments. The second is altogether more unsettling, as a naked teacher wanders the halls during a rugby match, slowly processing through the dorm rooms to pick up or caress objects

That these are lent a further surreal element by the film's sudden switch into black and white-an aesthetic choice masking the film's low budget, and in the case of some interior shots, a lack of suitable lighting to make the sequences work in colour-only adds to the dreamlike state of sections of the film, including the key sequence when the quintet (including Philips and the girl), find a cache of weapons that they they use in the film's finale. The finale itself is dreamlike, a war movie practically dumped into the last ten minutes of If... as stacks of ammunition are blasted, bombs detonate and elderly women fire back yelling one-liners. It's a satire, an imagined revenge against those who wronged Travis and his friends, an imagined uprising against authority, an imagined massacre.

If..., in sharp contrast to St Trinians, still feels prescient, still feels fresh-the General's speech that immediately precedes the massacre, real or imagined, seems ever-more the cry of the Little Englander, eager to return to a halcyon age that never existed, the public schoolboy that seems to have stumbled into power, as the smoke rises around them, blithering on regardless. It is a film about the riling of the counterculture against the structure of power, against cruelty and the corruption of power, on a small and universal scale, introducing one of the greatest British actors of the 20th century.

Rating: Must See