if....

For other uses, see If (disambiguation).
if....

British cinema poster
Directed by Lindsay Anderson
Produced by Lindsay Anderson
Michael Medwin
Screenplay by David Sherwin
Story by David Sherwin
John Howlett
Starring Malcolm McDowell
Richard Warwick
Christine Noonan
David Wood
Robert Swann
Peter Jeffrey
Music by Marc Wilkinson
Cinematography Miroslav Ondrícek
Edited by David Gladwell
Production
company
Memorial Enterprises
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
Release dates
  • 19 December 1968 (1968-12-19) (UK)
Running time
 111 minutes
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Latin
Budget $500,000[1]
Box office $2.3 million (rentals)[2]

if.... is a 1968 British drama film produced and directed by Lindsay Anderson satirising English public school life. Famous for its depiction of a savage insurrection at a fictitious boys boarding school, the X certificate film was made at the time of the May 1968 protests in France by a director strongly associated with the 1960s counterculture.

The film stars Malcolm McDowell in his first screen role and his first appearance as Anderson's "everyman" character Mick Travis. Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, and Robert Swann also star.

if.... won the Palme d'Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.[3] In 2004, the magazine Total Film named it the sixteenth greatest British film of all time.

Plot

Set in a British public school (a fee-paying boarding school) in the late 1960s, the film opens as the pupils return for a new term. Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), Wallace (Richard Warwick), and Johnny (David Wood) are three non-conformist boys in the lower sixth form (the penultimate year). They are watched and persecuted by the "Whips", upper sixth formers given authority as prefects over the other boys, while the younger boys, the juniors, (whom the prefects degradingly call "Scum") are made to "fag" (act as personal servants) for the Whips. The Whips also make the juniors the subject of homosexual flirtatiousness.

Early scenes show the school's customs and traditions. The headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) is somewhat remote from the boys and the housemasters. Mick's housemaster, Mr Kemp (Arthur Lowe), is easily manipulated by the Whips into giving them a free hand in enforcing discipline. Some members of the staff are shown behaving cruelly or bizarrely.

One day, Mick and Johnny sneak off campus and steal a motorbike from a showroom. They ride to a cafe staffed by The Girl, and Mick has a fantasy nude wrestling encounter with her. Meanwhile, Wallace flirts with a younger boy Bobby Philips.

The three boys drink vodka in their study and consider how "one man can change the world with a bullet in the right place." Their clashes with school authorities become increasingly contentious. Eventually, a brutal caning by the Whips spurs them to action.

In a surreal sequence, they discover a cache of automatic weapons while cleaning out a storeroom. The Girl appears and together they commit to revolt against the establishment. On Founders' Day, when parents are visiting the school, they start a fire under the hall, smoke everyone out of the building, and open fire on them from the rooftop. Led by the visiting General who was giving a speech, the staff, boys, and parents break open the Combined Cadet Force armoury and fire back.

The headmaster tries to stop the firefight and calls for peace. The Girl produces a gun from her belt and shoots the headmaster through the forehead. The battle continues, and the camera closes in on Mick's face as he keeps firing. The screen fades to black, gunfire is heard, and "if...." is seen in red letters.

Cast

Production and locations

David Sherwin's original title for the screenplay was Crusaders, during the writing of which he drew heavily from his experiences at Tonbridge School in Kent. In 1960, he and his friend and co-writer John Howlett took it to director Seth Holt. Holt felt unqualified to direct but offered to produce Crusaders. They also took it to Sherwin's hero, Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray, who liked it but had a nervous breakdown before anything came of it. Holt introduced Sherwin to Anderson in a Soho pub.[4]

The school was Anderson's alma mater, Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire, but this was not made public at the time under the agreement needed to shoot there. The then headmaster, David Ashcroft, persuaded the school governors to agree that the film could be made. As a result, shooting started in mid-March 1968 and lasted for 3 weeks during term-time. The boys who appeared in the film were actual students at the school who had time off lessons to take part. In one scene, Peter Jeffrey (as headmaster) gives a series of speeches to the school prefects some of whom were real. The College received a facility fee of £1,000 per day over the 20 days.

Aldenham School in Elstree, Hertfordshire, was used for later scenes filmed after previous summer commitments prevented further shooting at Cheltenham.

The J&H Packhorse Cafe no longer exists. It was situated on the A5 just south of Dunstable in Bedfordshire. The original site of the Cafe is now on the "Packhorse Place Industrial Park" behind the petrol station just south of the Kensworth turn.

The sweat room scenes were filmed in the School Room in School House at Aldenham School (though they were redesigned for the film). The dormitory scenes were also at Aldenham – specifically The Long Room for the junior boys and the room with the wooden partitions called Lower Cubs (short for cubicles). The shower scene and toilets were in School House changing rooms.

The painting in the dining hall is of Aldenham School's founder, Richard Platt. The Hall scene was an amalgamation of both school halls at Cheltenham and Aldenham.

Carew Manor, in Beddington, Surrey, was used for the opening staircase scene and for several other scenes. It was filmed during the summer when the school had closed for holidays.

Some scenes were shot at the former Trinity School of John Whitgift in central Croydon before it was demolished to make way for the Whitgift Centre; pupil extras from Whitgift School were engaged at the princely sum of £5 per day.

Anderson originally approached Charterhouse School and later Cranleigh School for permission to shoot the film: negotiations were going well until the schools discovered the content of the film and pulled out.

The outside shots of the school including the final showdown on the roof were that of Cheltenham College. This was filmed after term ended.

The Speech Day interior was filmed inside St John's Church on Albion Street, Cheltenham. The church was later demolished.

The motorbike shop was filmed at the Broadway Motor Company on Gladstone Rd, Merton, London SW19. The garage is now a Wetherspoons pub.[5]

Much is said of the film's use of black and white sequences. In the audio commentary to the 2007 DVD release, Malcolm McDowell confirmed that lighting the chapel scenes for colour filming would take much longer than they would if they were lit for black and white.[6] The time they could use the school chapel was limited, so Anderson opted to shoot those scenes not in colour. Liking the effect this gave, he then decided to shoot other sequences in black and white to improve the 'texture' of the film. As a child, he was impressed watching a gangster film which started in black and white and then turned to colour.[7]

The black and white sequence featuring Mrs Kemp (Mary MacLeod) walking naked through the school was allowed by the then Secretary of the Board of the British Board of Film Censors, John Trevelyan, on the condition that shots of male genitalia from the shower scene were removed.[8]

Stephen Frears is credited as an assistant to the director while Chris Menges is credited as a cameraman.

Sources and influence

The film's surrealist sequences have been compared to Jean Vigo's French classic Zéro de conduite (1933). Anderson acknowledged an influence, and described how he arranged a viewing of that film with his screenwriters, David Sherwin and John Howlett at an early stage in production planning, though in his view the Vigo film's influence on "if..." was structural rather than merely cosmetic. "Seeing Vigo's film gave us the idea and also the confidence to proceed with the kind of scene-structure that we devised for the first part of the film particularly."[9]

A single piece of music recurs in the film, the "Sanctus" from the Missa Luba. This version of the Latin Mass in African style, sung by a choir of Congolese children, had been on the UK Singles Chart in the 1960s.

The final gun battle was parodied in a 1970 episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus entitled "It's A Living (or: School Prizes)." The parody is presented as "if" – a film by Mr Dibley", in which Dibley is played by Terry Jones.

McDowell's performance in if.... caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick, who subsequently cast him in his 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Additionally, McDowell used his performance in if.... in his inspiration for the Clockwork Orange protagonist, Alexander DeLarge. Having been given the script by Kubrick, McDowell was unsure on how he would play the part of Alex, and so he contacted Lindsay Anderson, asking for advice. McDowell relates the story:[10]

Anyway, he said 'Malcolm, this is how you play the part: there is a scene of you, a close-up in if...., where you open the doors to the gymnasium, to be beaten. You get a close-up.' I said 'that's right.' He said 'do you remember...' I said 'yes. I smiled.' He said 'that's right. You gave them that smile. That sort of ironic smile,' he said 'and that's how you play Alex.' And I went 'my god, that's brilliant. That's brilliant.' That's all I needed and that was enough, and that is a brilliant piece of direction for an actor.

if.... currently holds a 97% 'fresh' rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus "Incendiary, subversive, and darkly humorous, If.... is a landmark of British countercultural cinema."[11]

Sequels

if.... is the first movie in the Mick Travis trilogy, all starring Malcolm McDowell as everyman character Mick Travis:

These two movies, however, do not follow the same continuity of the first film and have little in common other than the main character of Mick Travis and several identically named characters in similar roles. At the time of Anderson's death he had completed a final draft of a proper sequel to if...., but it was never made. The sequel takes place during a Founders' Day Celebration where many of the characters reunite. Mick Travis is now an Oscar-nominated movie star, eschewing England for Hollywood. Wallace is a military major who has lost his arm. Johnny is a clergyman. Rowntree is the Minister of War. In the script Rowntree is kidnapped by a group of anti-war students and saved by Mick and his gang, though not before Mick crucifies Rowntree with a large nail through his palm.[12]

See also

References

Bibliography
Notes
  1. ↑ Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England, Stein and Day, 1974 p402
  2. ↑ "Big Rental Films of 1969", Variety, 7 January 1970 p 15
  3. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: If....". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 6 April 2009.
  4. ↑ DVD review, Total Film.
  5. ↑ 'If... Film Locations' at Gloucestershire On Screen
  6. ↑ If.... (DVD audio commentary to the film). Lindsay Andersen. Los Angeles: Paramount Home Entertainment. 2007 [1968]. PHE 9395.
  7. ↑ Sutton (2005).
  8. ↑ http://film.thedigitalfix.com/content/id/65418/if.html
  9. ↑ Extract from letter written in 1976 by Lindsay Anderson to Jack Landman in which he discusses the parallels between If.. and Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite (LA 1/6/3/8), The Anderson Collection, University of Stirling, accessed 14 February 2008
  10. ↑ Archived 21 November 2008 at the Wayback Machine.
  11. ↑ if.... at Rotten Tomatoes
  12. ↑ Sutton 97–102.
Further reading
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