If…
Lindsay Anderson (1968)
Lindsay Anderson’s anti-establishment satire strongly appealed to the late 1960s’ ‘revolutionary’ zeitgeist. If… won the Cannes Palme d’Or in May 1969 (a few weeks before ‘Something in the Air’ topped the UK singles chart) and soon became a cult classic. In later years, it has repeatedly appeared in all-time-best-British-film lists. It spawned two further Anderson pictures, O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982): all written by David Sherwin, they are now known as the director’s ‘state of the nation trilogy’. Nearly sixty years on from its original release, If…, though bleak, is still highly entertaining, even when it doesn’t quite hang together.
The film, set in an English public school, runs nearly two hours. For most of that time it’s a ruthless and, despite the lampooning agenda and bizarre details, essentially realistic dissection of the ethos of its setting. Anderson describes a network of tyrannical hierarchies, sexual exploitation and abuse; a place governed by absurd but adamantine rules, professing Christianity of a decidedly military stamp. He and David Sherwin mix withering sarcasm with moments of more engaging subversive humour to express their loathing of public-school culture. Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), the main character and the main source of that humour, is the dominant personality in a group labelled ‘Crusaders’ in the cast list. (‘Crusaders’ was also the working title of the script that Sherwin originally wrote with John Howlett.) Mick and his sidekicks, Johnny (David Wood) and Wallace (Richard Warwick), despise and resent the school’s status quo. They drink vodka in their study; newspaper and magazine photos of freedom fighters from around the globe, feature prominently in the artwork covering the study walls. The four house prefects, known as the Whips and led by Rowntree (Robert Swann), are the bane of the Crusaders’ lives (as well as their contemporaries: the boys are presumably meant to be seventeen or eighteen, although only one of the seven actors concerned was under twenty when the film was shot). The housemaster (Arthur Lowe), a mild and biddable fellow, is easily persuaded by the Whips to give them free rein in enforcing discipline.
If… stages a series of confrontations between Mick’s group and authority figures but Anderson and Sherwin know that, to give the piece political force and urgency, they must convince the audience of Mick’s evolution from rebellious poseur to actual, lethal dissident – from lounging by images of armed revolutionaries to wielding real automatic weapons. A pivotal episode takes place one evening in the gym, where Rowntree and the other Whips (Michael Cadman, Peter Sproule and Hugh Thomas) punish the Crusaders’ bad behaviour by caning them. Soon afterwards, during a school military drill, Mick, Johnny and Wallace fire live ammunition in the direction of other boys and the staff involved. According to the school’s Church Militant ethos, the chaplain (Geoffrey Chater) leads the drill exercise. When he fearlessly approaches the three Crusaders, demanding they drop their weapons, Mick fires a shot, then another. He doesn’t shoot to kill but the chaplain is reduced to an abject, squirming figure, helplessly trying to protect himself. No one is injured in the incident, but the headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) takes it ‘seriously – very seriously indeed: the Reverend Woods might have been quite badly hurt …’ The three boys’ punishment, in line with the headmaster’s self-vaunted liberal side, is a form of community service. They’re ordered to clear out the contents of a storeroom beneath the school hall. These include, as well as a taxidermied crocodile and vulture, a cache of firearms.
By now, Anderson is interrupting the narrative with surreal moments. When the boys leave the school grounds for their military drill, the housemaster’s wife (Mary MacLeod) wanders naked through a deserted dormitory. In his office, the headmaster, instructing the Crusaders to apologise to the chaplain, opens a drawer in a large bureau to reveal Revd Woods, who sits up to shake hands with his assailants before lying down again for the drawer to be shut. These brief discontinuities, bringing an anything-could-happen feel to proceedings, help pave the way for If…‘s grand finale. On Founders’ Day, the school hall is packed with staff, pupils, their parents and various dignitaries. The guest of honour is an old boy and retired army general (Anthony Nicholls), whose keynote speech is rudely interrupted: a fire that the Crusaders have started beneath the hall smokes everyone out. There’s worse to follow once they’ve made it outside the building as Mick, Johnny and Wallace, perched on the roof opposite, open fire on the gathering. Under the ex-general’s command, the establishment fights back, with weapons from the school armoury, but the rooftop fusillade and the carnage continue. The headmaster appeals to the Crusaders to listen to reason and gets a bullet between the eyes. The film’s closing image is of Mick, still firing. It’s not a freeze frame but another picture of a freedom fighter worth its place on the study wall.
The three insurgents are joined by two others for the final showdown. Earlier in the film, Mick and Johnny skive off from school, nick a motorbike from a showroom and head into the countryside. They stop at a roadside café. Mick and the girl (Christine Noonan) behind the counter there have sex on the café floor (though this may well be Mick’s fantasy). The (nameless) girl reappears to help with the storeroom clear-out and the Founders’ Day attack: it’s she who calmly fires the handgun that does for the headmaster. The Crusaders’ other co-optee is Philips (Rupert Webster), a blonde-haired junior who has a miserable time as the Whips’ servant and sex object until Wallace befriends him. It must be said that, even as a trio, the Crusaders aren’t entirely credible. Johnny seems to find the school’s rules and priorities ridiculous rather than infuriating though he’s just about plausible as Mick’s comrade (or his motorbike passenger, at least). In contrast to the Whips’ homosexual aggression, Wallace is gently gay, as summarised in a shot of him lying asleep in bed with Philips, his arm protectively around the younger boy. As such, Wallace is less a determined non-conformist than a natural misfit. The story is really all about Mick. It’s no coincidence that, in the caning sequence, with the Whips meting out punishment to each of the Crusaders in turn, the camera stays outside the gym and on Mick, listening to what’s happening inside, as Wallace and Johnny are flogged. When it’s Mick’s turn, the camera enters the gym with him. His attitude results in double the number of cane strokes from Rowntree – just as, earlier on, when the boys are taking cold showers, another Whip, Hugh Thomas’s Denson, sadistically insists that Mick stand under the shower for longer than anyone else.
If… could only have been made by men who themselves were privately educated. It’s not just that Lindsay Anderson (Cheltenham College) and David Sherwin (Tonbridge School, where Malcolm McDowell was a near-contemporary) know their subject from first-hand experience. They also don’t seem to realise that Mick Travis’ attitudes are, in their different way, as entitled as those of the Whips. Mick isn’t altruistic or politically motivated – he just doesn’t like being told what to do. He steals the motorbike because he feels like it. (That freedom ride into the country, even though it briefly provides the viewer, as well as Mick and Johnny, with a welcome change of scenery from the school, comes over as a bit of a cliché of contemporary anti-establishment cinema.) The Crusaders’ recruits – a female and a boy whose facial beauty is strikingly feminine – no doubt represent groups marginalised in a patriarchal society. But Mick’s own attitude towards the girl on the café visit is hardly enlightened, while he and Johnny are seemingly blind to Wallace’s authentically different sexuality. All in all, Mick’s eventual conversion to action man feels imposed by the filmmakers rather than organic to the story they’re telling.
Like Mick, the director and the screenwriter are clearer about what they hate than about what they propose instead. It might be argued that this weakens the film as the allegory – with the school a microcosm of British society – that it and subsequent parts of the state of the nation trilogy purport to be (most explicitly in the title of the last and least successful of the three films). Yet this hardly detracts from If…’s emotional effectiveness. Anderson and Sherwin knew how much their target audience was predisposed to root for Mick Travis – something you can appreciate by sharing, even now, Mick’s hatred of the cultural system he defies. If… is presumably named for Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If-‘. (Was the replacement of the dash with ellipsis meant to imply sardonic disapproval of Kipling’s paean to masculine self-control? Not sure that works: those three dots impart a slightly wistful quality – if only …) Within cinema history, Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) is Anderson and Sherwin’s obvious inspiration.
The alternation of black-and-white and colour sequences, with more of the latter than the former overall, is a puzzle: it’s hard to infer a pattern to these, in terms of a particular sequence’s mood or even physical setting, except that scenes in the school chapel are all in monochrome. (The cinematographer was Miroslav Ondříček.) As well as dividing up the narrative through chapter headings (culminating in ‘Crusaders’), Anderson punctuates the action with bursts of well-known hymns, sung by a church choir. Marc Wilkinson supplied the original music but the Missa Luba ‘Sanctus’ is by far the best-known element of the If… soundtrack. The film zips along, except that the build-up to the final battle is rather protracted.
Even though the staff are conceived as caricatures, there’s plenty to admire in some of the playing of these roles. Peter Jeffrey’s headmaster is splendidly smug. As the boys’ housemaster, Arthur Lowe (in the same year that he first took command of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard) is almost touchingly inadequate. Revd Woods, walking round a class of boys, gives one a clip around the ear, thrusts his hand inside the shirt of another: until the chaplain’s humiliation on the military drill, Geoffrey Chater is a monstrously assured and complacent figure. (Other teachers are played by Ben Aris, Graham Crowden and Charles Lloyd Pack.) It’s a pity that Mona Washourne, as matron, has next to nothing to do. The role of the girl is limited, too, but still seems more than Christine Noonan’s acting talents can cope with. Noonan’s blank prettiness makes her an oddly compelling camera subject. When she opens her mouth to speak her few lines, she’s just wooden.
Among the boys, David Wood is likeable and humorous as Johnny. As Wallace, Richard Warwick gives off an extraordinarily sweet-natured quality (which would also be the hallmark of his contribution to Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976)). Rupert Webster is physically well cast as Philips: he might almost be auditioning for Tadzio in Death in Venice (1971) but Webster did very little screen acting after If… (The observant will spot in minor schoolboy roles at least three actors who did more – Robin Askwith, David Griffin and Brian Pettifer.) Hugh Thomas is the most impressive of the Whips. You feel his Denson must have ended up a Tory MP: he has a grubby censoriousness that suggests several cabinet ministers of the later years of the twentieth century. Reprimanding Travis, Denson tells him to ‘take that cheap little grin off your mouth’ and proudly points to the school motto on his blazer: ‘ “I serve the nation”: you haven’t the slightest idea what it means, have you? To you it’s just one bloody joke’. Mick’s response – ‘You mean that bit of wool on your tit?’ – is one of the film’s funniest lines, perfectly delivered.
Malcolm McDowell, blending egocentric wit and charming belligerence, is outstanding. He would reappear as Mick Travis in O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital: Lindsay Anderson has much to be grateful to McDowell for – and vice versa. This was the young actor’s big-screen debut and he caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick: McDowell’s astonishing work in A Clockwork Orange (1971) means that we too should be grateful to the man who made If… His leading man apart, Anderson’s greatest casting coup may be the extras filling the seats in the school hall on Founders’ Day. Their faces, clothes and attitudes are entirely convincing as those of real parents of boys in private education. Anderson and his production designer, Jocelyn Herbert, chose the director’s alma mater, Cheltenham College, and Whitgift School in Croydon as their filming locations. Did Lindsay Anderson recruit parents with sons at these places as extras? You’re bound to wonder, if he did, what kind of film they thought he was making.
21 September 2025