Movies - If...

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	Movies - If...

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If.... is a 1968 cult film by British director Lindsay Anderson, based on David Sherwin's original script, "Crusaders".

The film stars Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, a character Lindsay used in two sequels. Arthur Lowe, Peter Jeffrey, Richard Warwick, David Wood, Christine Noonan, and Rupert Webster (as the pretty young boy Bobby Phillips) also take starring roles.

It was filmed at the time of the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968. Cheltenham College, Anderson's old school, was used for outside locations. At one point in the film Mick Travis' words are: "There's no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only pure acts".

The film has surrealist stretches interspersed throughout and is often compared to Jean Vigo's French classic Zéro de Conduite
.

It won the 1969 Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2004 the magazine Total Film named it the sixteenth greatest British film of all time.

The film is set in an English public school. The earlier part of the film shows fairly realistic scenes in the school as the pupils return at the start of a new term, although some of the older boys are played by actors in their twenties. At first this is a rather disjointed collection of scenes of school life and does not have a clear narrative thread, although it serves to show the school in a negative light with some strange customs and traditions.

Eventually the film develops a clearer narrative thread, with the action concentrating on a small group of older boys who have some clashes with the school authorities. At the end they revolt bloodily against the establishment around them.

The film is a study of revolution against an autocracy that denies individual freedom, a revolution symbolized by the youths asking "When do we live?" They begin by discovering erotic freedom in Mick's affair with a local waitress and Wallace's romance with a junior boy.

A single piece of music recurs constantly in the film, the Sanctus from the Missa Luba.

Trivia

In one important sequence, Mike Travis fires rubber darts at a number of photos he has on his wall, including, for example, Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister at the time. One of the photos he has on his wall but does not fire a dart at is actually Lenin, although most people will not have recognised him, since he is without a beard and wearing a cap to cover his bald head, in a photo taken for a false identification when he was on the run in the middle of 1917.

Sequels

O Lucky Man!
(1973)
Britannia Hospital
(1982)

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