Lindsay Anderson (1923 - 1994), the director of If… , was held by his contemporaries as amongst the greatest of British post-war film makers. Although he only completed eight features for the cinema, between 1957 and 1992 Anderson directed 33 plays for the British stage, from Shakespeare, Gogol and Checkov to contemporaries like Christopher Logue and David Storey. With the latter he would collaborate repeatedly and make his feature film debut, This Sporting Life (1963), which would win its star, Richard Harris, an Oscar nomination.
As well as his work with the theatre, Anderson was a prolific critic, founding the influential film journal, Sequence in 1947 with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz. From his writing, which was later to include a fantastic book based on his fractious encounters with John Ford, there would eventually grow the Free Cinema movement.
Rejecting the stuffy artifice of Ealing’s studio bound comedies and sentimental period pieces, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti, the members of the Free Cinema, would advocate a proto kitchen-sink approach that would aim for a greater intimacy with it’s subject matter.
Announcing a programme of their films at the National Film Theatre, comprising Anderson’s documentary about Dreamland amusement park, Reisz’s piece on a North London jazz club and Mazzetti’s docudrama about deaf mutes in the then bombed out wasteland of East London, the group’s manifesto promised, “No film can be too personal.
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.”
With modest budgets scrounged from the BFI Experimental Film Fund, these very British films and documentaries would take their subject matter from quotidian existence even as the rhetoric of their makers showed a kinship with the “dangerously continental” ideas of Cinéma vérité . Just as Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Bazin were to do a few years later in Paris with Les Cahiers Du Cinema, Anderson’s group used the platform of their magazine to gain the freedom to operate largely outside the commercial constraints of the film industry.
The director would also develop an association with the so called “angry young men”, writers and directors associated with The Royal Court Theatre in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, such as John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney and Arnold Wesker and these combinations of influence, documentary, theoretical and theatrical, can all be found in the proto-punk If…, which would win its director the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969, its Jacobin sneer of youth and revolt heard loud and clear.
If… is a film very much of its time, the political unrest of ’68 was being felt in cities across the world and Anderson’s iconoclastic hymn to rebellion pulled much of its imagery and rhetoric directly from the headlines, even the recurrent musical motif, "Sanctus", from an African style version of the Latin Mass, had been a chart hit in Britain a few years earlier.
The film follows its protagonist, Mick Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, as he returns to the privileged enclave of an English public school, a semi-militarised zone in which the scions of the ruling class enact absurd rituals of hierarchy and status, enforcing discipline with vicious beatings for minor infractions whilst apparently dismissing routine sexual exploitation, the theft of a motorbike and the mock assassination of the school’s chaplain as high jinks (if deeming them worthy of comment at all).
In many ways Anderson was an unlikely rebel. Born in Bangalore, the son of a Scottish major general and Indian mother, he had a privileged upbringing and education, himself attending Cheltenham College (where If… was to be shot) and later reading Classics and English Literature at Oxford. He was to work as a cryptographer in the final year of World War II and, in an early sign of rebellion, nailed a red flag to the ceiling of the junior officer’s mess on hearing of the Labour Party victory in the election of 1945.
A complex man of many contradictions, Anderson remained fiercely in the closet until his death. Though a staunch socialist he would retain an affection for the institutions his work ruthlessly mocked and something of that ambivalence can be seen in If….
David Sherwin’s screenplay (originally titled The Crusaders) drew on his own schooldays but the style of the film was very much Anderson’s. It’s fractured, almost surrealistic atmosphere owed much to Jean Vigo's somewhat more sentimental 1933 French classic, Zéro de conduite combined with a guerilla-style approach that emerged from the reality of shooting on location at Cheltenham College using its actual pupils.
The school had been presented with a dummy script and the film’s (still shocking) ending, which was to be shot after the term had ended, had to remain a closely guarded secret. Even the transitions from colour to black and white (which now seems a Godardian nod to filmic artifice) were initially a result of technical and budgetary constraints. Later McDowell would recall that a letter from the headmaster to Anderson had sat unopened for years, the director embarrassed by the recriminations he imagined it contained.
In If… Anderson succeeds in drawing often startling performances from a group of actors he had worked with often on stage and screen, indeed the film was the first of a loose trilogy that would follow the life of its protagonist until his demise. McDowell’s performance as Mick Travis was to capture the attention of Stanley Kubrik who would cast him as Alex in A Clockwork Orange three years later. The actor recalled that, uncertain of how to approach the part, he had solicited Anderson’s advice and Alex’s ironic smile was the same as Travis’ had been as left the school gym after a savage beating.
The pyramidal hierarchy of Masters, Prefects, Fags and Scum that If… depicts bears an uneasy and anachronistic relationship to the world outside of itself, to quote Sherwin’s dialogue, “Help the House ... and you'll be helped by the House.” Though it remains in charge, the grip of authority is always threatening to slip, its sniff upper lip curling into a snarl.
As a would be revolutionary, Travis’ insurrection is more Nietzschian than Marxist and perhaps it is no surprise that British Prime Minister, David Cameron, himself a product of this system, should regard the film (X-rated and considered contraband for many years in British public schools) as amongst his favourites. No doubt Travis, as a self regarding nihilist, would have found himself right at home with the Noblesse (dis)oblige and excessive sense of entitlement of the Bullingdon Club.
Anderson’s satire today feels slightly Pythonesque, a quaint Hogwarts world where Flashman is still in charge and Tom Brown’s Schooldays are endlessly rerun. With the arch existentialism of its anti-hero Travis embodied in lines like, “One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place,” it is sometimes hard to see the protagonist as any less odious than the pompous self-deception and intellectual bankruptcy of the establishment he confronts.
Pitched against the glowering no-compromise intensity of youth, the school inevitably falters but there is a sense that perhaps it is only a misstep - a more ruthless crop of killers has been bred. The pyramid is under new management. Consider it a hostile takeover.