Learning on ScreenIf….
If…. 2014. GB. Blu-ray (Eureka / Mastes of Cinema); DVD (Paramount Home Cinema). 107 minutes + extras. £15.99
About the reviewer: Michael Open was Director of the Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast from 1968 to 2004 and for 10 years was the editor of Film Directions magazine. For many years he was the Northern Ireland Editor of Film Ireland Magazine.
Arguably the major omission from DVD coverage of British films of the latter half of the 20th Century has been Lindsay Anderson’s seminal work, If…. (1968). Written by David Sherwin (who went to Tonbridge School) and John Howlett, this famous fable about a revolt in an English public school was shot, largely, in Anderson’s own school, Cheltenham College. With the release of this new Blu-ray, we can now continually remind ourselves of the film’s magnificent achievements.
It follows the fortunes of three friends, Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), Johnny Knightly (David Wood) and Wallace (Richard Warwick) in the lower sixth form of an un-named public school, but the real subject of the film is the very nature of public school life and the way that it mirrors the class system then, and perhaps still, endemic to British society. Mick and his friends suffer injustice, in the form of a gratuitous beating, from the sadistic head whip (prefect), Rowntree, and determine to rebel and teach the establishment a lesson.
What makes If…. an endless source of pleasure for the cinephile is the virtually seamless integration of its three main elements, its theme of revolt against the oppressive establishment, its poetic visually expressive style and its almost flawlessly light touch in sketching a truly fabulous basketful of archetypal characters. There are too many of these to adequately catalogue here, but they include Biles an unpopular boy who is the object of every unkind remark and cruel victimisation it is possible to imagine, and Phillips, the exquisitely beautiful object of the homo-erotic fantasies of half the school. At the apex of the hierarchy are Rowntree the cruel authoritarian whip who has the priceless line ‘Markland, warm a lavatory seat for me. I’ll be ready in three minutes.’, and smarmy Denton who complains that their ‘homosexual flirtatiousness is so adolescent’ while clearly having the leanings himself.
Anderson had, like his own cinematic idol, John Ford, a magnificent eye for imagery, and in IF…. it manifests itself not just in the spectacular visual tour de force of the first shot we see of the magnificent school buildings in the morning mist, but almost everywhere. This is not cinematic prettiness but sheer visual wonder, as in the low angle slow motion shot of Phillips as he gazes at Wallace’s graceful performance on the high bar in the gym.
The method of Anderson and his cohorts in attacking the injustices that the school perpetuates is iconoclastically satirical, but this is resolutely not a hatchet job on public schools. It is clear that the filmmakers (or Anderson at least), for all of its institutionalised cruelty and its attack on personal freedom, love the school as much as they loathe what it represents, and this is where the poetry comes in. There is nothing didactic in Anderson’s approach. Even the hateful Rowntree is seen as somewhat compassionate in his dealings with the bewildered new boy Jute. It is a film that, in the manner of Chaplin, another of Anderson’s idols, makes absolutely everything dynamically expressive towards its own goal – think of the magnificent montage of the whole house listening to Rowntree’s merciless assault on Travis.
The extras include an audio commentary by Malcolm McDowell and David Robinson, former Times critic and friend of Anderson, which contains a host of informative and often moving and funny anecdotes together with insights into the director’s methods.
Films first seen at an impressionable age frequently disappoint in retrospect. If…., which might have seemed just an opportunist manifestation of its revolutionary times, though far from perfect, inverts this tendency and, freed of those socio-historical trappings, reveals itself as a true and timeless classic.
Michael Open
