If....

Fifty years ago, in May 1969, Lindsay Anderson’s if…. was chosen to compete at the Cannes Film Festival. In his candid, witty memoir, Going Mad in Hollywood, screenwriter David Sherwin recalls the initial reception for the film:

‘The British Ambassador arrives foaming with fury. if…. is an insult to the British nation. It must be withdrawn from the Festival. Lindsay replies that it is an insult to a nation that deserves to be insulted and tells the Ambassador to bugger off. Anyway, the film can’t be withdrawn; it is the official British entry.’

At the official Palais screening, no one from the Festival turned up to greet the filmmakers. “Normally there’s a spotlight that comes on and lights up the director,” Anderson complained. “We were left alone. Nothing. No one to introduce us to the audience.” Sherwin occupied himself by exploring La Croisette and the beach scene, observing “naked old men […] holding little dogs as they watch girls being photographed.” Malcolm McDowell, who plays Mick Travis, the film’s iconic leading role, admitted he couldn’t afford his hotel phone bill. Sherwin had only enough money to pay for a taxi back to the airport. Their fling in Cannes already over, they scuttled back to London. One week later, on May 27, Sherwin’s phone rang at two in the morning. A drunken voice told him, “‘We’re going to be rich…’ if…. has won the Grand Prix. Joy and disbelief. We’ve won!”

Sherwin had written the first draft of his screenplay about an English public school almost a decade earlier, in 1960. He collaborated on it with his friend John Howlett when they were both undergraduates at Oxford. They called the script Crusaders and based it on their school days at Tonbridge. Over the next few years, they approached various British producers. Sherwin recounts in Going Mad in Hollywood how it was received: “The noble [Lord Brabourne] is straightforward. Crusaders is the most evil and perverted script he’s ever read. It must never see the light of day […] [A]nother well-heeled producer, Ian Dalrymple, who had been head of the Crown Film Unit […] says we should be horsewhipped.” A copy of Crusaders was mailed, care of Warner Brothers, to Nicholas Ray (Sherwin’s favorite film was Rebel Without A Cause) and actually reached him. The star-struck Sherwin was summoned to a bizarre meeting in Grosvenor Hotel, where Ray explained he couldn’t make the film because he was too American. He predicted Sherwin would “have a great future in Hollywood.”

The first British film industry figure to respond positively to Crusaders was Seth Holt, a talented Ealing Studios director. He realized the film needed a director with a public school background, so he suggested his friend Anderson. It was the perfect choice. Anderson was a classic child of the British imperial class. His father, a Scot and a soldier, was born in Northern India, his mother, a formidable memsahib, in Queenstown, South Africa, and Anderson himself in Bangalore. He was raised to replicate his father’s social class and profession. The writer Gavin Lambert, Anderson’s lifelong friend, was schooled with him at Cheltenham College. In his affectionate biography Mainly about Lindsay Anderson, Lambert remembers how their school “specialized in preparing sons of officers for Sandhurst […] The most typical and respected Old Cheltonians served the empire and got together for nostalgic far-flung dinners (black tie and medals) from Nairobi to Bangalore.”

Although Anderson rejected this deeply conventional colonial background, its very English brand of emotional repression left him troubled. He once wrote how his father “was not very keen on his sons”; his parents divorced when he was a teenager, and Anderson never saw his father again. Anderson poured both halves of his contradictory character — liberal and authoritarian, generous and controlling — into his obsessive love of film. The leading advocate for the British New Wave or Free Cinema movement, Anderson had been a ferocious critic for Screen magazine and had received great acclaim for This Sporting Life, his debut feature, which was based on the novel by Northern English working-class author David Storey.

Not surprisingly, given Anderson’s formidable reputation, Sherwin was nervous and late at their first, fateful meeting at the Pillars of Hercules, Soho. To Sherwin’s surprise, Anderson resembled “a young gnome […] with an odd but humorous smile.” He describes the encounter:

    His first words are: “The Script is very bad.” He adds that the boys and masters are only thinly sketched. They need to be truly imagined and with more humour. […]

 “Have you read Georg Büchner?” I ask the gnome.

 “Yes.”

 “It should be like Woyzeck.”

 “Yes. Poetry is the key.”

 “And the epic.”

 “Exactly.”

 With this mutual flash of understanding my and Lindsay’s destinies change …

Anderson suggested that Sherwin and Howlett work with him on shaping a new draft, under contract to Holt. Anderson realized the writers, 20 years his junior, might have a problem opposing him with “enough confidence” but concealed any creative doubts by laying down the law. In a letter to Sherwin, he writes with typical abruptness that the script needed new characters, incidents, relationships: “You have (excuse me for writing like a school report) a fecundity of imagination, but it seems to operate rather without an organic sense. […] Sometimes a whole idea is valuable, sometimes a couple of lines, sometimes nothing.” But the same letter also reveals how clearly Anderson saw the radical political possibilities of the script’s subject: the chance to depict the British public school as “a strange sub-world, with its own peculiar laws, distortions, brutalities, loves [and] its special relationship to an […] outdated conception of British society.”

Howlett and Holt soon withdrew from the project (they disliked the script’s more radical direction), but Anderson and Sherwin continued working together “with no thought of pleasing anyone but ourselves.” The new draft interwove epic and fantasist elements, with both men agreeing on an outline of each scene before Sherwin wrote it. Working together so closely, the two developed an intimate, co-dependent relationship. It lasted 25 years, right up until Anderson’s death. Whenever Sherwin’s strife with his girlfriend sent him spiraling off on an alcoholic binge (which was frequently), Anderson would act as mentor and disciplinarian, comforting him while at the same time strictly limiting Sherwin’s intake of barley wine.

In addition to their shared love of Büchner’s drama, Sherwin and Anderson were influenced by French director Jean Vigo’s early silent film Zéro de conduite, set in a boy’s boarding school. Sherwin records how they watched the film together “not for its anarchistic spirit (we had plenty of our own) but for Vigo’s poetic method, episodic, fragmentary, charged.” Vigo’s classic work also gave Anderson a sense of a possible ending although somewhat different in tone. Whereas in Zéro de conduite the naughty schoolchildren throw tin cans and old shoes at the teachers, the enraged and alienated rebels of if…., as the film came to be called, open fire with stolen machine guns and hand grenades on teachers and governors celebrating Founders’ Day.

Despite the audacity of the new script — or rather, because of it — every UK film company turned the project down. One agent winked at Sherwin behind Anderson’s back and said, “God. It’s shit.” One day, as Anderson was trudging downcast round Soho, there was a shout of “Lindsay” from an upstairs window. It was Albert Finney. Thanks to the huge success of Tom Jones, Finney had been able to set up his own production company and was editing Charlie Bubbles, his first film as a director. Finney was happy to show the script to his partner, public school–educated Michael Medwin, who agreed to co-produce it with American finance. At this point, the United States oil conglomerate Gulf and Western enters the story in the shape of its owner, Charles Bluhdorn. The billionaire tycoon not only decided to buy Paramount, but his wife also happened to be a great fan of Finney: “A word from Mrs Bluhdorn to Mr Bluhdorn. A phone call from Mr Bluhdorn to Paramount in London. if…. is financed by Paramount and neither of the Bluhdorns ever read the script.”

Anderson was determined to shoot as much of the film as possible at his alma mater, Cheltenham College, and so he made Sherwin launder the script to gain permission. The title Crusaders was deemed too subversive. Sherwin asked Medwin’s secretary, Daphne Hunter, if she could think of something “very old-fashioned, corny and patriotic.” She suggested “If—,” Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, which celebrates the “stiff upper lip” rectitude beloved of late Victorian empire builders. Anderson took one look, smiled in agreement, and added the crucial four dots.

Right from if….’s first shot, the influence of Bertolt Brecht on Anderson is apparent. A still of Cheltenham College Chapel is the background over which the sound of boys singing is heard. It mixes into laughter and then deep chanting accompanied by African drums. We move from a traditional hymn to the pagan mass of the Missa Luba, which is repeatedly played by the protagonist in the film. There’s also the use of Brechtian “intertitles,” which break up the narrative flow and mark numbered chapters throughout. The first part, “College House — Return,” introduces leading man Mick in a deliberately theatrical way. He enters the film dressed like a highwayman, with a black cloak and a wide-brimmed black hat and scarf hiding his lower face. Anderson portrays Mick as a classic late adolescent dreamer, like his friends Wallace and Johnny, but he is also self-aware and ironic, deliberately spouting slogans that romanticize rebellion: “Violence and revolution are the only pure acts”; “One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.” Mick’s self-absorption and adolescent sexual fantasies are equally rhetorical. “My face is a source of never-ending wonder to me,” he declares, addressing his own reflection in a mirror. Examining a pin-up picture of a model, he announces: “There’s only one thing you can do with a girl like that — walk naked into the sea together as the sun sets, make love once and then die.”

Like Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Mick isn’t an overtly political protagonist with a thought-out program of change. He is more the embodiment of the frustrated outcry of youth held back by a repressive adult world, with the school a microcosm of Britain as a society deaf to the voices of a new generation. “When do we live?” he asks Johnny and Wallace. “That’s what I want to know.” Fifty years ago, the entire British establishment was dominated by the products of the “strange sub-world” of the public school. Anderson uses the film’s third chapter, “Discipline,” to flesh out this world, introducing the headmaster, teachers, chaplain, and senior boys who are the prefects, aptly named “Whips.” These figures all stress, as though Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” was still current, the over-riding importance of duty, tradition, and servility. When Lambert first viewed the film, he immediately recognized his Cheltenham College headmaster in the smug authority figure who tells Mick, “You’re too intelligent to be rebels.” The teacher shown interfering with a pupil and the chaplain’s medieval belief in original sin (“We are all corrupt and we all deserve to be punished”) were also drawn from Anderson and Lambert’s shared school days.

The film’s most inspired creation is the arrogant, reactionary Whips — the senior boys who punish their own generation. Anderson chose to dress them in archaic costumes: black tailcoats, embroidered waistcoats, and starched collars. They force “Scum,” the younger boys, to toast muffins or serve them tea in the bath. Supercilious and self-important, preserving their privileges and “the stability of the school” at all costs, the Whips seem contemporary. Forerunners of today’s “young fogies,” they’ve mutated over 50 years into the Jacob Rees-Moggs and Boris Johnsons of the current Tory party. In Brexit Britain, the prominence of such figures reveals just how deep this warped sense of English identity and history runs. Despite decades of economic neoliberalism, which has dissolved much of the stratified class system of traditional British society, there’s still a powerful strain of imperial nostalgia in the culture.

The starkness of Anderson’s depiction of these persistent subcurrents is enhanced by the use of black and white. Miroslav Ondříček, the Czech cinematographer whom Anderson had previously worked with on his short film The White Bus, told him he couldn’t guarantee the consistency of the color in the chapel scenes, due to limited lighting equipment. Anderson, with characteristic chutzpah, decided to shoot the scenes in black and white instead. Liking the look, he then chose to shoot more scenes in black and white, helping to increase the bleakness of the modern roadside café or the attic room where the new teacher is housed. Sometimes Anderson shifts to and from black and white to disorient the audience, as in the fencing scene between Johnny and Mick, which moves into color at the point when Mick’s hand is cut and he becomes entranced by the drip of blood. But Anderson also uses black and white to give the film a lyrical interlude, as when Phillips, the beautiful younger boy, stops to gaze down at Wallace exercising in the gymnasium. Anderson, who spent a lifetime repressing his own homosexuality, gives full rein to the homoeroticism in this scene, using slow motion to underscore the character’s growing sexual attraction. He also echoes this in the black-and-white cinematography of the surreal café scene, when Mick and Christine start to mate like wild cats. “Look at my eyes, I have eyes like a tiger. I like Tigers,” Christine says. Mick snarls; she snarls back. They pretend to claw each other. A jump cut later they are writhing fully naked on the floor in mock sexual congress. We switch back to color in a pastoral landscape, with Christine standing on the stolen motorbike, first resting her hands on Mick’s shoulders, then flinging them outward in a gesture of abandon.

Anderson had used the demanding café scene to audition actors for the roles of Mick and Christine. Sherwin remembers how an unknown McDowell turned up without a script, claiming someone had nicked it before he had time to learn his scene. But, on stage, his eyes become suddenly intense, his movements precise yet natural:

  [McDowell] without warning, not looking at the script, he grabs [actress Christine Noonan] round the neck, pulling across the wide table and kisses her hard and long. […] [T]he girl rears up and smashes him in the face with her fist […] Bites, blows, bodies thumping on the boards. Struggling on the floor, [McDowell] tries to turn to the next page [of the script] to see what’s coming next. The girl tears into him, tugging out his hair, ripping the script in two. Maddened he retaliates, wrestling, breaking the girl’s bra under her sweater.

Their audition was so strong that Sherwin told Anderson there was no point carrying on: “You’ve got your Mick and the girl.” McDowell admitted that the reason he had acted the fight so well was that he didn’t know he was “going to get knocked out just for kissing her. I was absolutely stunned, and then I thought, right — I’ll give it her back.” His performance in the film was just as natural. Stanley Kubrick, who went to see if…. five times and thought it a perfect film, subsequently cast McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, where the actor essentially reprises his iconic role as permanent alienated rebel.

In the sixth chapter of the film, titled “Resistance,” the three would-be rebels — Mick, Wallace, and Johnny — swear blood brotherhood and cry, “Death to tyrants!” and, “England, awake!” They are then punished for attacking the chaplain during a military exercise and made to clear out the basement, which is full of rotting Union Jacks, old maps of the British Empire, and a stunted fetus in a jar. It’s here, amid the detritus of Britain’s past, that they discover a stockpile of machine guns and ammunition left over from World War II. Anderson elegantly turns the symbols of repression back upon themselves. The English tradition is about to destroy itself with its own tools.

The final part of the film retains the original title, “Crusaders.” At the school’s Founders’ Day, “national hero” General Denson addresses the packed chapel, flanked by the self-satisfied headmaster, a visiting bishop in full ceremonial costume, and a baronet in medieval armor. Anderson arranges a tableau of church, army, and aristocracy, a feudal display of the ancient regime. As the general defends tradition and privilege, smoke drifts up through the floorboards. The entire school, with its honored guests, panics and spills outside, half-suffocated from the smoke. From his position on the chapel roof — wearing a combat jacket and accompanied by Wallace, Philips, and Johnny — Mick opens fire with a machine gun.

The general issues orders to fight back. A comically ferocious mother yells, “Bastards! Bastards!” as she grabs a gun and returns fire. The headmaster presents himself as a peacemaker and walks toward the rebels. Anderson makes sure he receives a bullet right between the eyes. The last shot closes on Mick as he looks ever more determined. The main title is repeated, this time drenched in blood red letters.

Anderson later said he felt if…. was only emotionally revolutionary: “Intellectually I don’t know.” The four dots he added to the title underscore its ambiguity — “if” as something conditional, a film about what could happen or what we might like to happen. By remaining open, it surpasses Jean-Luc Godard’s more closed, polemical 1970s cinema. The film manages to hover between satire and belief, naturalism and expressionistic dreamscapes, a permanent document of revolt.

It is interesting to note the immediate historical context of if….: the mass demonstration at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, “les événements” in Paris, and other student protests erupting in New York, London, and Rome. The film intuitively reflected a sense of the zeitgeist. But there are no images of Black Panthers, Che Guevara, or other icons of late ’60s student protest on Mick’s walls. Instead, his study room collage (selected by Sherwin) includes Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream and a photo of a beardless Lenin from 1917. The soundtrack also isn’t of its time. Anderson deliberately excluded the contemporary in order to let the film inhabit and represent its own skewed picture of English social reality. It obeys only the rules of its own radical internal poetic logic.

In Going Mad in Hollywood, Sherwin observes how close if…. came to being shelved and never shown. When the Paramount executives saw the finished product they were appalled and planned to delay distribution. But by December 1968, Paramount had failed to show their annual quota of British films. Their Barbarella was proving a disaster at the UK box office, so they had to replace it with something, preferably British. Two nights after if…. was released in central London, the queues stretched for half a mile. It had become a cultural phenomenon. Youth, said Anderson, is “a matter of spirit, attitude and feeling.” This was precisely what he had captured on film, and the public responded. Anderson, Sherwin, and McDowell spent Christmas just watching the crowds. It was, according to McDowell, the happiest time of Anderson’s life.

Twenty-five years later, at Anderson’s memorial service, McDowell recounted how Anderson approached the key scene of Mick’s beating. Confronting the Whip, who is eager to begin the thrashing, Mick looks at him with calm contempt. When the cane is first brought down, Mick manages not to wince. The beating grows ever more vicious. But Anderson chose to film the scene behind Mick, cutting to images of the sadistic, salivating Whip. Mick’s face is only shown once the beating is finished. When he turns to face the camera, Mick is shown wearing the same cool, insolent expression. It is a timeless homage to youth, to its cocky, rebellious attitude, its refusal to bend or submit.

As then, so now: the film is “a bullet in the right place.”

“A Bullet in the Right Place”: On the 50th Anniversary of Lindsay Anderson’s “if....” By Alex Harvey . Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2, 2019.

1

COLLEGE HOUSE

Lindsay Anderson's If... has returned to cinema's for it's 50th anniversary and I was very excited to catch it on the big-screen - in a evocatively worn 35mm print - recently at the GFT as part of their Spirit of 68 season.

 On it's London premiere, in December 1968, the film looked to have bottled the fevered mood of the moment. It formed part of artistic statements that seemed to have the heavy shadows of the year's new stories at every turn, work such as Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night in literature, Nigel Kneale's The Year of the Sex Olympics on UK television and, in white-hot run of album releases, The Beatles (AKA The White Album), Beggars Banquet, Waiting for the Sun and Electric Ladyland. This was creative that seemed to complement the turbulent 12 months that had seen student protests in America against the ongoing war in Vietnam, the May civil unrest by protesting students and striking workers in opposition with President de Gaulle's riot police, the Soviet Union's clashes in ruling Czechoslavakia and protests in spots as diverse as West Germany, Italy and Mexico.

2

COLLEGE

n the late 90's/early noughties, late-night film scheduling on BBC2 was extremely formative, a sort of de facto film school. The first time I saw If... was a late-night screening and watching it's bold and fresh approach to the school days theme and it's haunting final shot, was a very powerful experience and made me excited about investigating the more bold, adventurous film-making in British film history. For me, Lindsay Anderson will always be mentally tied to Powell & Pressburger. There is something shared in their dream-like visions of England, their fussiness and the heightened mood of the storytelling.

 Having been a co-founder of the 'Free Cinema' documentary movement in the previous decade, and been a key figure in CND, bohemian and Sight & Sound Magazine circles, Lindsay Anderson had followed his peer Karel Reisz in making a wider impact in the popular consciousness with a kitchen sink drama. Anderson's was This Sporting Life, featuring a working-class rugby player protagonist. This followed Reisz's earlier Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which had kick-started this new voice - and trend - of British cinema. Anderson described Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as having 'changed the face of the British cinema overnight...it opened doors that had been nailed fast for 50 years.'  I feel that Reisz's film has an energy that the clumsier This Sporting Life can't match when watched in a modern context. During the making of The White Bus, his short form follow-up to This Sporting Life, Anderson was nurturing his next feature-length project.

Originally named Crusaders, David Sherwin's script had been shopped around since 1960. Anderson read it in 1966, and Sherwin's original co-writer John Howlett was otherwise engaged. This resulted in Sherwin and Anderson finessing the script towards a shooting draft. Sherwin and Anderson took courage from the 1933 short Zéro de conduite, directed by Jean Vigo. Contrasting the repressiveness of the school system with Vigo's artistic visual flair, it set a tone and imagery in Anderson's mind. If... would be far removed from deferential school-set tales with staid teacher-knows-best 'inspirational' plotting.

 In the meantime, funding promised by CBS fell through, especially demoralising for the crew as pre-production had started. Albert Finney, having made his name in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and having been directed by Anderson (the West End play of Billy Liar), used industry connections at Paramount to get the budget - with Finney's production company Memorial Enterprises the production company.

3

TERM TIME

Crucially, for the tone that Anderson and Sherwin were looking to capture, Miroslav Ondricek was hired as Cinematographer - he'd previously shot The White Bus and was described by Anderson as a 'cherished collaborator' - and the Czech had established his reputation for the cinematography in Miloš Forman's internationally acclaimed Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman's Ball. Ondricek joining the production wasn't without hitches - getting his visa approved was time-consuming and involved Anderson's intervention - but when he did arrive, his outsider's perspective contrasting well with Sherwin and Anderson's insider knowledge.

 Filming took place predominately at Anderson's alma mater Cheltenham College. Shrewdly, to gain the co-operation of the school, a 'dummy' script was drawn up that removed references to the aggression, homosexuality and guns that the shooting script included and would have jeopardised the location agreement. This pitched the film as a 'poetic, humorous view of life seen through the eyes of the boys'.

Instead, the film would be the channeling of Anderson's and Sherwin's anger at the school system, at the paternalistic powers that bring the dreamers, or indeed Crusaders, into line and yet, McDowell later stated that 'only a man who loved his school and loved England could have made a film like If...

If... was being prepared after the Hollywood investment in Swinging London films was being wound down, and would form the last wave of the decade's key British films that saw a shift in mood and tone, to being more confrontational. This would be expressed either in experimental style (Ken Russell's crossover from cutting-edge television work to the big-screen) or in the film that perhaps closely resembles the intentions of If... - Tony Richardson's version of The Charge of the Light Brigade, which looked to create the connotations of Britain's Empirical failure with the contemporary American involvement in Vietnam. In the finer moments of Richardson's film - the performances particularly of Trevor Howard, John Geilguid and Harry Andrews, Charles Wood's satirical dialogue - it does push towards this aim, but it's a loose, unfocused canvas. Reviewing the film under the headline 'Carry On, Cardigan', critic Michael Billington wrote that the film lacks 'is dramatic weight: instead of dealing a death blow to Victorian military stupidity, it offers a series of quick, nervous jabs to the body.'8 It would take If... to successfully combine the surreal-tinged Sixties pop culture, the attacks on the class system and the training the establishment gave to underlings.

4

RITUAL AND ROMANCE

Is the whole film a dream? There are memories of school days, at times poignantly hyper-real, such as the early scenes of Jute (played by Sean Bury) trying to find his way around the school alongside scenes of lyrical beauty such as McDowell seeing The Girl (played by Christine Noonan) from an opposite window at the school; a school she doesn't attend. In changing the title from Crusaders to If..., David Thomson acutely wrote that 'the three dots added to the title can stand for the threshold to fantasy, or an encouragement to everyone to keep hoping  that the walls come tumbling down one day'. Anderson later made a similar amend to the film that reunited him with Sherwin and McDowell, as related by McDowell himself:

 'David Sherwin and I were sitting in the pub trying to think of a title for the script...we came up with 'Lucky Man'. When we, in our excitement, told Lindsay the idea, there was a long pause after which he said 'O Lucky Man!', and grinned sardonically. With one word, Lindsay had given us a magical epic title for our film which took it out of the bounds of naturalism altogether.'

 Looking back on the shoot 25 years later, Ondricek told the BBC series Hollywood U.K. that Anderson wanted the film to look 'natural and fantastic at the same time' and romantic and rebellious flourishes were the attraction to Anderson, as well as the directly relatable nature of the setting and characters. Those moments of lyrical beauty remains very striking such as a pupil stargazing out of a window with McDowell, an acrobatic feat of gymnastics and the school itself standing unconcerned by the passage of time on a brisk, bright spring morning.

This contrast of straining against the firm lines laid out by the School, is subtly expressed in Marc Wilkinson's score. Wilkinson would go on to score The Blood on Satan's Claw to more overtly striking effect, but his original music is a strong complement to the tone being conjured in If..., perhaps it's a shame that Anderson and Wilkinson didn't collaborate after this. To further enhance the romantic nature of Anderson and Sherwin's vision of their Crusaders, shrewd use is made of Sanctus by Missa Luba, an African rendition of Latin Mass. In using this, Anderson was perhaps inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1964 film The Gospel According to Matthew, which also used a selection from the same Missa Luba album alongside blues songs, and more traditional music cues to express a feeling of spiritual belief from different voices, from around the world. Anderson successfully uses Sanctus as an exciting, exotic, expressive song that the Crusaders views and attitude ties in with - everything the School and it's Establishment is not. It's effect on contemporary viewers was so instantaneous as to turn Sanctus into an unlikely chart hit - making the UK top 40 singles chart, peaking at no. 28 in April 1969.

5

DISCIPLINE

In promoting If..., Anderson had spoken and written of his own fondly-remembered school days. But he also noted that 'the problems of young people and their relationship to traditions seem to be more and more important'13 and that his film 'gives you a situation and shows what happens in this particular instance when certain forces on the one side are set against certain forces on the other, without any mutual understanding...of course, I wouldn't deny that my sympathies lie on one side rather than another. But I hope that the sympathy of the film is not a narrow one'

 The pettiness of the Whips punishment of the Crusaders - for example, McDowell having to remain standing under a cold shower longer than the standard time usually dictated by the Whips - is very well expressed, tapping into viewer's own experience of restrictive, oppressive figures - either in or outside of school. Building up to the ferocious cane-beating scene in the gymnasium. McDowell, speaking in 2002, felt that the beating scene was 'honestly, the greatest sequence we shot...this kicks the film into a whole new area'

 It's also interesting to note that McDowell notes that the only time the cast ad-libbed from Anderson's precise direction was his and David Wood's improvised reaction to their wait for their turn being beaten. So proud was Anderson of the scene, that he said to McDowell afterwards 'well Malcolm, if nobody ever goes to see the film, if it's a total disaster, which I expect it to be, we can look back on this day, and on this scene, and say "jolly good work", and that from him, just made your heart jump. But it was extraordinary.'

6

RESISTANCE

In the Fifties, Anderson had been part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Aldermaston marches, with Barry Miles noting that CND 'united the emerging London underground - art students and folk musicians, students and Hampstead intellectuals.'17  Surrealist music accompaniment was provided by the Ken Colyer's Omega Brass Band who 'dressed up in a British approximation of a New Orleans funeral band, they lifted spirits with their rousing rags and marches.'

Anderson and Reisz were involved in producing a short film, March to Aldermaston, which is soundtracked by trad jazz of the period and captures the movement well, the bohemian expression and idealism of the moment. With vocal expression and dissension now freely expressed than at any point since the War, the satire boom was just beginning. An issue the CND movement faced at the time was a sense of perhaps preaching to the converted. For example, when Peter Cook opened his club The Establishment (so named, he joked, because everybody wants to be part of the establishment), George Melly wryly remarked that 'nobody is going to go out into Greek Street feeling more revolutionary than when they went in' and that the audience consisted of 'nice clean ladies and gentlemen of impeccable liberal principles and good SW addresses'.

What the marches did set in motion was the discourse for the Sixties protests, with key figures of the coming decade involved - as well as the Free Cinema filmmakers, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins was the photographer closely associated with the protests. In 1966, he would be part of the team that founded the UFO nightclub and the London Free School. Poet Christopher Logue, an admirer of Anderson's films, recalled that Lindsay had been key to Logue securing his first large-scale reading (at a Free Cinema meeting at the National Film Theatre) and that the marches and CND 'was just in the air, and a lot of people thought that this was the right thing to do...It had a much greater social importance than it ever had politically. People suddenly realised that there were a lot of people who thought along the same lines as they did and that they were humanists in politics and agnostics in religion and that they did want to create a better society. And they struggled hard to do it, and they took on the whole world, as young people are prepared to do. And the result of it was ten good years.'

Ten years later, the crucial casting of Malcolm McDowell as the rebellious Crusader figurehead Mick Travis was fortuitous. McDowell later recalled of his audition at the Shaftesbury Theatre that 'I arrived late...because I was rehearsing Twelfth Night at the Royal Court Theatre. I had run all the way. I was almost denied the reading but finally found myself on stage, out of breath, squinting across the footlights. The reading itself seemed to sneak up on me before i had time to get nervous or, as I was sometimes inclined to be at auditions, angry and on the defensive.'

Naming the lead Crusader Mick Travis gives a contemporary connotation with Mick Jagger's brief flirtation in 1968 with revolutionary attitudes, wherby he declared that he was against private property, wrote the powerful and ambivalent lyrics for Street Fighting Man - that dovetailed alongside John Lennon's wracked Revolution - and attended the 25,000 strong anti-Vietnam Grosvenor Square demonstrations.  Street Fighting Man split opinion on it's release. A month before If... had it's premiere, the New Musical Express' Keith Altham review of Beggars Banquet included his comments that Street Fighting Man is 'Danny The Red's theme song...but maybe you were not in San Francisco or Chicago or Paris or Prague or Berlin, and maybe you think the students are just a coincidence anyway. What do you mean you can't hear the words? Can't you feel it in the air?'

However, for all of the ambiguity of the words in Street Fighting Man, and the unease it's imagery suggested to some, including Altham's key preview, it has stood the test of time as the song that will forever be identified with the chaos of that tumultuous year (for example, being used in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's documentary series The Vietnam War).

 Esteemed music critic Ian MacDonald sagely praised Street Fighting Man in terms that capture the song's hypnotic energy, writing that 'I love this because of Charlie Watts' behind-the-beat drumming with that huge slamming offbeat, and because the guitars sound like wire-string fanfares, and because Jagger's melody sounds like crowds surging back and forth against police lines, and because the production makes everything sound a hundred feet tall. It's just a colossally exciting record. "Dancing in the Street" redone as revolution.'

Keith Richards reflected on this time that 'a different fog descended and much energy was around and nobody quite knew what to do with it...everybody, including me, had these vague, half-baked ideas. You know, "Things are changing." "Yeah, but for what, for where?" It was getting political in 1968, no way to avoid that. It was getting nasty too. Heads were getting beaten...Then it became a "them against us" sort of thing'.

7

FORTH TO WAR

Built into the building tension between the Crusaders and the School's Establishment is the surrealism that seems to recall Spike Milligan's productive work, such as Q5 and Puckoon, earlier in the 1960's and preface Monty Python's Flying Circus (which would debut on the BBC the following year) - especially the scenes with the Chaplin shown as being stored in a slide-out drawer within the Headmaster's office. This contrasts well with the naturalistic colour palette of the film. Anderson, writing for the film's publicity notes, said that 'I would call If... a realistic film - not completely naturalistic, but trying to penetrate the reality of it's particular world. I think Brecht said that realism didn't show what things really "look like" but how they really are. Interestingly, too, I think that the events which have been happening in the world around us as we shot our film suggest that, in working on the script more than eighteen months ago, David Sherwin and I were being, to some extent, prophetic.'

The cast capture the tone perfectly - not sliding into the grotesque of Anderson's later Britannia Hospital - and McDowell's laconic swagger and malice reminds me of another character named Mick in a key work of the decade - Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. McDowell would have been a great fit for the Pinter character's loaded questioning ('Sleep well?) of Davies, the tramp who is being lined up for the titular occupation. The monologues that Pinter gives Mick (played by Alan Bates in it's premiere run and it's 1964 filmed version) is tinged with surrealism that also chimes with If... and it feels that both Mick's are toying with the people the speak to, bored by conventional speech rhythms. For example, not long after having disturbed Davies, Mick properly introduces himself with the below monologue - that could be Mick Travis dialogue if reconfigured to one of the teacher's at his school:

MICK

You remind me of my uncle's brother. He was always on the move, that man. Never without his passport. Had an eye for the girls. Very much your build. Bit of an athlete. Long-jump specialist. He had a habit of demonstrating different run-ups in the drawing-room round Christmas time. Had a penchant for nuts. That's what it was. Nothing else but a penchant for nuts. Couldn't eat enough of them. Peanuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, monkey nuts, wouldn't touch a piece of fruit cake. Had a marvellous stop-watch. Picked it up in Hong Kong. The day after they chucked him out of the Salvation Army. Used to go in number four for Beckenham Reserves. That was before he got his Gold Medal. Had a funny habit of carrying his fiddle on his back. Like a papoose. I think there was a bit of the Red Indian in him. To be honest, I've never made out how he came to be my Uncle's brother. I've often thought that maybe it was the other way round. I mean that my Uncle was his brother and he was my uncle. But I never called him uncle. As a matter of fact I called him Sid. My Mother called him Sid too. It was a funny business. Your spitting image he was. Married a Chinaman and went to Jamaica.

Pause.

I hope you slept well last night.

8

CRUSADERS

Fleet Street critic Felix Barker wrote that the film 'caught with terrifying skill, the atmospher of these sacred institutions. Back to my nostrils came that sickening smell of ink and chalk, the stale food from the dining room. With a shiver I recalled the implacable authority of prefects whose powers cannot be questioned and whose blows must not be complained about.

Time magazine's Stefan Kanfer placed If... among the 'pick of the litter' that had lifted the end-of-era gloom; '1969 was a year of some wretched, boring work. Yet there were at least eight films which aroused enough praise and/or controversy to defend the year, and just possibly, the decade.'

Those eight films referred to by Kanfer are the choices at the end of the year by the members of the National Society of Film Critics and were, Costa-Gavras' political thriller Z; Easy Rider; the societal satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Arthur Penn's near-forgotten Alice's Restaurant; Midnight Cowboy; the movie adaption of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Arthur Schlesinger Jr, special assistant to both JFK and RFK, wrote in his Vogue review that 'If... is a brilliant and disturbing film. The prefects are the old ruling group, continuing to give nineteenth-century orders in a new world of aspiration and anger. The headmaster is a voice of contemporary liberalism, complacent and ineffectual. The rebels are the young anywhere, eventually driven mad by the irrationality and inhumanity of the system. However, If... bestows no maudlin blessing on revolutionary violence. It's mood is clinical rather than sentimental, and it is infinitely more powerful for that reason.'

A negative voice was Pauline Kael, writing in the pages of The New Yorker, who felt that the film paled in comparison to it's primary Zéro de conduite influence:

'Anderson is skilful at scenes of sadism, but when he wants to suggest that his nonconformist heroes have some of the joy of life that the others haven't, he becomes as banal as a TV director and shows them speeding lyrically through the green countryside on a stolen motorcycle...Anderson seems to have lost sight of what was so apparent in Vigo's view, and what was so funny in it - that school is a child's mirror of society. Vigo's vision was a comic metaphor; Anderson's movie has no wings, and his literal-mindedness about the school leads to the climax of shooting up the people in the school.'

The film made profit at the box-office and, was highly thought of in the industry. Stanley Kubrick cast McDowell as Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange because of his performance as Mick and McDowell credits Anderson with helping shape his performance in the Kubrick film by advising he portray the rebellious and contemptuous performance from the If... school gym scene. In May 1969, If... beat out Easy Rider and Karel Reisz's Isadora - among others - to the Palme d'or at Cannes. The festival had infamously been cancelled the year before due to the riots that If... had anticipated and the film's victory was against the backdrop of the British ambassador declaring it an insult to his home nation. David Wood, who plays the Crusader Johnny, was told by a friend based in France that 'if you were to go down the Champs-Élysées now, you would be mobbed, because it's on at about six cinemas simultaneously.'

In essence, this powerful bottling of the atmosphere of 1968 is why If... will stand the test of time, just in the same way that the 'colossally exciting' Street Fighting Man can powerfully summon the provocative, us-or-them battles being fought across the world. Introducing If... in 1987 at the NFT, writer Peter Cowie recalls Anderson giving a speech that hit out at the Reagan-Thatcher era, concluding that 'the sixties remain both a threat and a reproach to the eighties'.

The final shot of If..., preserves Malcolm McDowell in a continuous loop, assembled by editor Ian Rakoff from outtakes to capture the closing image that Lindsay Anderson sought. Perhaps alongside the finale of The Sopranos, it shows us the hero and a cut to black before we view his on-screen defeat and death. Cue that enigmatic title and the beatific healing sounds of Sanctus...

Which side will you be on?: The 50th anniversary of Lindsay Anderson's If...  By Willimam Leitch. William Leitch , December 28, 2018.