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if....
Retrospectives
- August 2003
UK, 1968. Directed by Lindsay Anderson. Written
by David Sherwin; from the original script "Crusaders" by Sherwin and John
Howlett. Photographed by Miloslav Ondricek. Edited by David Gladwell. Music
by Marc Wilkinson. Released by Paramount. 111 minutes.
Starring Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick,
Christine Noonan, Rupert Webster, Robert Swann, Hugh Thomas, Peter Jeffrey,
Mona Washbourne, Arthur Lowe, Graham Crowden, Geoffrey Chater, Mary
McLeod.
My first year of secondary education was spent
in a private school. I left quick-smart when the year was up, and despite
my eternal tendency to think to the past and convince myself it was better
than now, I did not look back for a second. This place wasn't a boarding
school, and the kids didn't come from billionaire families, but still, it
sucked. The clichés were all true -- halls that stank of British
tradition, teachers walking around in Batman robes, students smugly convinced
of their born superiority, Latin lessons we were expected to take
seriously.
Lindsay Anderson's "if…." was
my favourite movie back then, and still it has a place on my top ten list.
It takes place somewhere in some boarding school, somewhere in the English
countryside, and it studies the place and people with razor-sharp sarcasm
and anger that explodes in an ending of violence. The movie is not about
school, really: It's all about society and the British class system, and
the rebellion of the last act is supposed to be a metaphor for revolution.
But an allegory cannot work through symbolism alone; we go to the cinema
to watch and be moved, not to decipher and ponder. There is a story here
that works on its own terms, and the subtext, crackling in the background,
just gives it that extra kick.
This was the movie that started Malcolm McDowell's
career. Three years later he would dazzle the world as the star of "A Clockwork
Orange", and here, as Mick Travis, one of the long-haired rebels of College
House, we can see the beginnings of the same impossible grin, dead-staring
eyes and psychotic charm. His crew includes Johnny (David Wood) and Wally
(Richard Warwick); the movie probably spends as much time with other characters,
but somehow we know that these guys are the stars of the
picture.
They're the ones who sit around and look uncaring,
grinning their way through the place and plastering their studies with alcohol
ads, glamour spreads and photos of foreign freedom fighters. They stand aside,
while those who surround them are the put-uponners or the put-upon. You've
got the prefects, chortling at the teachers' sides, leering at younger boys
and deciding which ones to use as homosexual playthings. There are the first
years, lost in a new world and trying to look like they can handle it. There's
the chaplin, a psychological mess, caning and pinching boys at random in
math class, leaning forward with pervy fascination when sexual thoughts are
brought up in the confessional. Mrs. Kemp is the name of the housemaster's
wife, one of those women who looks to have been left lonely by the cold life
that has been made for her. Graham Crowden plays the history teacher who
tries to get his students to think about the moral choices that lead to war;
they stare at him "like a row of Christmas puddings".
Sometimes the movie plays like a black comedy.
The head boy's idea of keeping order is to insist that the younger lads run
in the corridor. The preacher is intent on sinking fangs of Christian guilt
into his flock: "Jesus Christ is our commanding officer. If we desert him
we can expect no mercy. And we are all deserters!" The headmaster (Peter
Jeffrey) thinks he's a man of fairness and dynamism, when he's really just
talking bollocks, passing it off as wisdom, and letting nobody else get a
word in. "Education is a nubile Cinderella," he declares, nodding to himself
-- "It's sparsely clad and much interfered with! Britain today is a powerhouse
of ideas, experiments, imagination; on everything from pop music to pig breeding,
from atom power stations to miniskirts, and that's the challenge we've got
to meet!"
"if…." unfolds in a series of vignettes,
capturing the drab rhythm of the school, and building it to boiling point.
McDowell's boys don't escape the movie's commentary: They're as spoiled as
everyone else, amazed at the sight of "real blood!" And in their sessions
of slouching, they throw around phrases that aren't nearly as deep as they
think: "One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place;" "Violence
and revolution are the only pure acts." What matters, though, is that we
share their frustration at the system they're locked into. They might be
smartass little punks, but they're better, and better company, than those
they fight against. If you're looking to sum up anti-establishment youth,
that's more or less the truth.
Anderson's camera style is realist; he was one
of the most famous British filmmakers from the documentary tradition. But
"if…." is not a realist movie -- there are moments of flat-out surrealism,
like when the headmaster pulls the chaplin out of one of his office drawers,
or McDowell makes love to Christine Noonan on the floor of her coffee shop.
It's got a lot of mood and presence to it, and the soundtrack reverberates
with traditional hymns, excerpts from 'Missa Luba' and bits of Congolese
rebel music.
Then there are the two features which inspire
the most distinctive reflection: The fact that the film moves from colour
to black-and-white, and that mysterious title, "if…." Both came from
accidents. Anderson had to shoot the movie for a quarter of a million pounds,
was under pressure to film it in colour, and yet couldn't afford to process
a feature film's worth of colour stock. The name was under debate ever since
the writing of the screenplay. Anderson didn't like "The Crusaders", nobody
could think of anything better, and eventually his secretary said in
exasperation, "Why don't you just call it IF?"
Having said that, I think it's possible to ruminate
about the colours and the name without going crazy or drifting into pretentious
waffle. The movement between colour and monochrome makes you sit up and notice;
you're thrown off balance, and it adds to the feeling that something is gonna
give. It stops the visual style from getting repetitive, certainly a risk
when so much of the running time takes place inside the cold walls of a few
old-fashioned buildings. We're submerged in the spaces, and sort of distanced
from them at the same time, locked into a rhythm of noticing their textures
and what they stand for. When you visit places like this, they have the same
effect.
The title: A reference to Rudyard Kipling, and
his patriotic poem? So say a lot of people, and I like the irony of that,
but it's hardly a definitive answer. You could hold to a simpler explanation,
which to me has more power, and that's the idea that the movie is saying
'what if?' What if…. our schools erupt in violence like this, like the
French student revolts that took place just before the movie's release?
If…. we keep living this way, no wonder there's social upheaval going
on.
But "if…." speaks for itself, as a sensory
and emotional experience. To describe it in text makes it sound like an obliquely
hardcore art movie, full of little references about politics and history.
To watch it is to feel it, and be stunned by how it moves to that amazing
hail of bullets at the end. Thirty-five years after its release, it does
not look irrelevant or dated; it's not a relic of the rebellious sixties,
or about a Britain whose values have been overhauled. It still has something
to say about repression, unfairness and the hate it causes. It still pretty
much captures the way school can feel, and yes, school really is as good
a microcosm as you're ever likely to find. At the time, the poster quote
called it "a hand grenade of a film" that "makes you laugh even as your blood
chills". I like that.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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