if...

8 October 2018

if…. 1968

• Director: Lindsay Anderson
• Based on the novel: no
• Cast: Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, Rupert Webster, Robert Swann, Peter Jeffrey, Mona Washbourne
• Personal “oh yeah him/her” reaction, i.e. have seen this actor in:
• Malcom McDowell – Doomsday, My Life So Far, Bopha!, O Lucky Man, A Clockwork Orange
• David Wood – Longitude, A Family at War
• Richard Warwick – Jane Eyre, Hamlet
• Christine Noonan – O Lucky Man
• Robert Swann – Shackleton, The Madness of King George, Hamlet, Upstairs Downstairs
• Mona Washbourne – O Lucky Man, My Fair Lady
• Why? It made a deep impression on me the first time
• Seen: Once before. Now 6 October 2018      

       British boarding schools. Hogwarts notwithstanding, this one leaves me appalled, amused and horrified all at once. A jungle of sadistic bullying boys and staff, petty tyranny, obsession with sex, death and violence, rigid religious and military traditions.

       The male British upper class is absurd. They would be laughable if they didn’t have so much power and make life so miserable for the rest of us. The generation of the boys in this film have been ruling England for decades.

       A trio of students, Travis (McDowell), Wallace (Warwick) and Knightley (Wood), fancy themselves rebels with posters of Che, secret smoking, theft of motorbikes and an attitude. The attitude is not appreciated by the whips, head house boys, who beat the three boys viciously with sticks as rightful punishment for which the trio must thank them politely.

       The ending is violent and, the first time we saw it, shocking. Since then school shootings have become all too common.

       It’s fascinating in a way but now I wonder what the point was. Hal: ‘It didn’t go deep enough, and it didn’t work as well as they wanted it to work.’

2* of 5 (Hal gave it 1½ *)