IF Midnight Cowboy won the Best Picture of the Oscars in my birth year, IF, by Director Lindsay Anderson is celebrated as the winner of the Cannes’ Palme D’Or of that same year. The film stars Malcolm McDowell before his Clockwork Orange fame. BBC Scotland’s feature of the film quoted British officialdom’s disdain of the film as “vulgar”. Actually if we show this to teenagers of today I’m sure many would find the narrative slow, the acting stiff and the dialogues dry, owing to a generation of films that followed, about teenage decadence that made the theme passe. To imagine how it scandalized British society of that era, I just recall my days at an exclusive girls Catholic College run by nuns. It really does create rebels.
Reel.com reviewed it thus:
Shot both in color and black and white, If …. is naturalistic and fantastical, as well as horrifying and comic, as it expresses the trio's experience of this arbitrary world. While a strong thread of homoeroticism runs through the film as the whips obsess over pretty Bobby (Rupert Webster) (though it is Wallace who captures the boy's attention with a slyly seductive gymnastics routine), But the strongest thread is violence, the soul-crushing routine violence, the hazings, bullying, and punishments (Mick and his friends are whipped, not for anything they do, but for their attitude) that make up campus life and the surreal war games the cadet corps play. Under these conditions, it should come as no surprise when Mick begins behaving in the manner that he looks when the movie begins, as a fellow student puts it, like "Guy Fawkes back from the dead."
Shot both in color and black and white, If …. is naturalistic and fantastical, as well as horrifying and comic, as it expresses the trio's experience of this arbitrary world. While a strong thread of homoeroticism runs through the film as the whips obsess over pretty Bobby (Rupert Webster) (though it is Wallace who captures the boy's attention with a slyly seductive gymnastics routine), But the strongest thread is violence, the soul-crushing routine violence, the hazings, bullying, and punishments (Mick and his friends are whipped, not for anything they do, but for their attitude) that make up campus life and the surreal war games the cadet corps play. Under these conditions, it should come as no surprise when Mick begins behaving in the manner that he looks when the movie begins, as a fellow student puts it, like "Guy Fawkes back from the dead."
A parallel was made of this film and the riots of May 1968 in Paris while another recalled a more recent Columbine College shooting similarity in the United States.
For my own shallow observation, having learned only through American school standards and thus utterly ignorant of the British boarding school system, the film blasted me to only one familiar setting: Hogwarts! There was the so-called Headmaster; there was the Head of House; professors in long black gowns, and even the gothic school architecture. Then there were the three misfits with their nemesis teacher and schoolmates. I won't be surprised if J.K. Rowling said IF was one of the inspirations for her famous series.
Photo by http://www.reel.com/
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