God you’re ugly

If… [1968]

Dir. Lindsey Anderson
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan

• There’s something indecent about you Travis. The way you slouch about. You think we don’t notice you with your hands in your pockets. The way you just sit there looking at everyone.

I was about fifteen the first time I saw If…. We had just gotten cable and it played in a cycle for several weeks. I couldn’t figure it all out because so much of it was completely absurd. What did it mean when Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and Johnny (David Wood) are handcuffed together as they run through the square? What did it mean when the Head Master pulls out a giant drawer and the Chaplain is inside it? What did it mean when Travis wrestles with The Girl (Christine Noonan) in the café? I couldn’t be sure. But I completely related to the images of youth vs. age, and the defiance of growing older and being assimilated into the “order” of adulthood.

If… takes place in a British college where hierarchy, routine, discipline and rules are what life is made of. The students are being molded as foot soldiers for the system, clones and drones in which to keep the machine and collective running. Some of these students revel in their roles, some simply go along, and others, like Travis, are constantly devising a way out or a way to change or destroy the system.

McDowell is a screen presence that doesn’t have to say anything to impress. His face is at once hideous and handsome, an image director Lindsey Anderson (This Sporting Life) plays with at the beginning of the film. When we first meet Travis, he’s a mystery, his face literally hidden from us with a scarf. When he removes the scarf, a mustache is revealed, forbidden by the school. Travis trims it off, his friend commenting on his bizarre looks, a cinematic moment for both the hero of the film and McDowell.

Johnny:
God you’re ugly. You look evil.

Travis:
My face is a never fading source of wonder to me.

Travis is like an English Holden Caulfield from “Catcher In the Rye”, if not in personality, then as a spirit born to question authority. When being disciplined by Rowntree, the head whip, for their subversive attitude, the “Crusaders” are asked if they have anything to say. The others keep quiet. But Travis doesn’t roll like that.

• The thing I hate about you Rowntree is the way you give coke a cola to your scum and your best “teddy bear” to Oxfand, and expect us to lick your frigid fingers for the rest of your frigid life.

At College House, sexual aggravation abounds, as there are no women, except for the elderly nurse and the Head Master’s wife (who walks around the school naked when no one is around). The girl that Travis and Johnny meet after stealing a motorcycle, seems to be both real and a aberration. In the absence of females, an atmosphere of male prison hierarchy rises, with The Whips having their pick of Juniors (teddy bears) as assistants.

Anderson and cinematographer Miroslav Ondrícek (Amadeus) create a poetic world, some moments in color, others in black and white, while “Travis’s Theme” (what sounds like a South African choir, the congas synchronized with Travis’s free beating heart) plays through out. The third act takes on a surreal atmosphere, funny and horrific, often producing absurd imagery that resembles the work of Richard Lester or Jean Luc Godard. The ending is remarkable and foreshadows the tragedy of “Columbine” by thirty years. Although Anderson’s take on the “Crusader’s” ultimate destructive act is completely insane, it doesn’t dilute or undermine the emotional impact of the scene.

If… is a great coming of age film and great satire. Released around the same time as other great sixties films of rebellion like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider, but not mentioned enough in the same historical sense. Anderson and McDowell would go on to make two more films featuring the character of Mick Travis, O’ Lucky Man (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982).