I sometimes wish Lindsay Anderson's landmark movie If.... hadn't achieved iconic status - it overshadows other films of his that reflect his Scottish love-hate relationship with Britain. Britannia Hospital is as true today of Britain in the throes of a collective breakdown as it was in 1982 - truer even, since Blair's Britain bears out Lindsay's belief that nothing ever changes in this society, only repeats itself worse.
But If....'s success is what you get when you speak for a generation, even though it's not your own generation, and the timing is coincidental, not intentional. Lindsay was 45 when he directed and co-produced this story of anti-establishment revolution at a posh boys' boarding school, with Malcolm McDowell as the leader of a band of collegiate terrorists firing real bullets at the parents, governors, staff and headmaster on speech day.
The film opened in 1968, just when the radical teenagers of Europe were terrifying the heads of state of several countries. Though the European kids made more noise than sense, they had youth on their side - and liberated youth is what If.... celebrates in all its impulsive, hotheaded call to arms.
Jean Vigo's 1930 film, Z?ro de conduit, which has a similar theme, though it's set in a much more bizarre educational establishment, was the acknowledged template for If.... and Anderson lets his action drift into little patches of surrealism or, as he called it, 'poetic reality', as 'hommage' to Vigo - such as the school chaplain being discovered curled up like a snug collaborator in the head's bottom drawer.
Cheltenham College, Lindsay Anderson's own public school, was the location of the movie's fictional school. It's not generally known that Lindsay's 'revenge' on the brutal regime of the prefects and the authoritarian regime of the staffroom in his time was tempered by nostalgia in his later years - he actually joined the college council, the awful speech-day people seen in the film. I was surprised, too, to learn of the close resemblance between McDowell's rebel and one actual Cheltenham old boy, Anthony Perry, who was there a year or two later than Lindsay.
Perry recently wrote to me: 'I and another boy, who was a chum, were expelled for stealing grenades, dynamite and other useful things from the Home Guard shed and also for opening up the derelict museum and bringing to light some of the items seen in the film. We behaved badly on Junior Training Corps field days and possessed firearms.
When my brother went to college, my rather seedy exploits had grown into my having stolen a Spitfire from an airfield and strafed the school.' Perry concludes: 'If not the basis for David Sherwin's screenplay, my own experience was at any rate its validation.'
If...
Cert: 15
