When it was released in 1968, Lindsay Anderson’s bellow of righteous outrage was described as “a hand grenade” of a movie. Some critics and many politicians were made thoroughly queasy at its apparent message of total, uncompromising revolution. The fact that, across the Channel, the student population was busy building the barricades can’t have helped.
And while a quarter of a century may have withered its agitprop politics somewhat, the mischievous spirit of anarchy that typified the best of Anderson’s work still dazzles.
Shot in both colour and black-and-white — not for any artistic reason, but because the cash-strapped director ran out of the more pricey colour stock — If… is a gleeful acid-attack on the kind of public school of which Anderson himself was a product, as well as a metaphorical demolition job on the stultifying mores of English society.
A documentary filmmaker by training, Anderson effortlessly blurs the line between the genuine surrealism of public school life and the stylised fantasy sequences that express the sexual and social repression that constantly threatens to explode.
It’s a fascinating structure which leaves you unsure as to whether the fantastically violent final reel is for real or an extension of the schoolboy anarchist’s (a fabulously swaggering McDowell) fervid imagination.
Whichever, it’s a deliciously subversive piece of filmmaking which drips with wit and venom. And with the British film industry today churning out too many knock-off gangster movies and puke-inducing rom-coms, If… is both exhilarating and depressing. It shows us what British movies could be like if only Anderson were still around to put a rocket up them.