If ….
Directed by Lindsay Anderson
UK release December 1968
60s FILMS REVISITED
Screenplay by David Sherwin
Based on “Crusaders” by David Sherwin and John Howlett
Music by Mark Wilkinson
Produced by Michael Medwin, Lindsay Anderson, Albert Finney (uncredited)
The 60s films revisited series continues …
CAST:
“The Crusaders” (rebels)
Malcolm McDowell – Mick Travis
David Wood – Johnny
Richard Warwick – Wallace
Christine Noonan – The Girl
Rupert Webster – Phillips
“The Whips” (prefects)
Robert Swann – Rowntree, head boy
Hugh Thomas – Denson, also cadet under officer
Michael Cadman – Fortinbras
Peter Sproule – Barnes
Staff:
Peter Jeffrey – Headmaster
Arthur Lowe – Mr Kemp, Housemaster of College House
Mary McLeod – Mrs Kemp
Mona Washbourne – Matron
Geoffrey Chater- chaplain
Ben Aris – John Thomas, new teacher
Graham Crowden – history master
Charles Lloyd Pack – classics master
Anthony Nicholls, General Denson, old boy
Boys
Sean Bury- Jute, new boy
Brian Pettifer- Biles, the perennial victim
Guy Ross – Stephans, the dormitory monitor or sub-prefect
Robin Askwith – Keating
Philip Bagenal – Peanuts, the stargazer
Nicholas Page – Cox
Robert Yetzes – Fisher
David Griffen – Willens
When I started reviewing (or re-viewing) late 60s films, If ….was held back because I know it so well. We had the VHS video, then the DVD and now the Blu-ray. I saw it when it came out, and have seen it many times since. I’d rate it as the best of the era. I know too that Lindsay Anderson insisted the title has four dots after If …. Never fewer.
The writers, Sherwin and Howlett had been at Tonbridge public school. For American readers: a “public” school in England dates back centuries and is a highly elite private school, where most pupils are boarders. At the time of If …, probably all were boarders. A school was divided into residential houses, each with its own housemaster. So in If …. the boys are all members of College House. The houses would be residential, for dining, and the sports competitions would be between houses.
The writers started work on the story way back in 1960, as Crusaders, and it took them eight years to get the film produced. David Sherwin describes the genesis in his autobiographical diary, Going Mad in Hollywood:
‘Remember what Wordsworth said, “poetry is experience recollected in tranquility.” We’ve got to write from experience. And the only experience we’ve got is that Nazi camp- Tonbridge. Our schooldays.’
‘Jesus, you’re right,’ says John Howlett, ‘And it’s never been done. Not the real truth. The torture! The keen types!’
The summary on the back of the DVD:
This incredible film takes a look at a British boarding school and three unruly seniors who fail to conform. If …. Is an amazing blend of fact and fantasy which features a young Malcolm MacDowell in his first film. The students at College House are kept in line by tradition, strict discipline and prefects. Director Lindsay Anderson is careful to document the repressive conditions and the painfulness of rebellion as he builds to his surreal and violent ending when the students have their day. It is a marvellously funny movie, but it’s also profoundly disturbing and deep.
The film’s release at Christmas 1968, followed the year of university sit-ins. According to Sherwin, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella with Jane Fonda had just flopped badly at the box office, the week before Christmas is a dead time, and Paramount shoved If …. onto screens with no expectation of any success. “Hell, take off Fonda, and shove in that crap” (David Sherwin).
(In fact, Barbarella was the second biggest grossing film of the year, according to Wiki. However, as it had opened on October 18th, it was probably doing very little business two months later).
It was there because Paramount had just realized they had not fulfilled their “Eady” quota, imposed by Harold Wilson, of British-made films for the year. It took off. Why?
Well, I had been in the sit-in at Hull. It was the year of Prague Spring, The Paris Riots of May 1968 which left student bodies floating down the Seine, thrown over the bridges by the CRS (CRS = SS was the sign), The Grosvenor Square Vietnam demonstration.
Malcolm McDowell said:
When the film came out it caused an eruption, because nobody had ever questioned the public school system before quite like this. So, the revolution scene at the end tied with everything that was going on in Europe. It just happened to be 1968, the year of the student riots in Paris. It was amazing; we were shooting on the roof with me firing the gun at the parents, and Lindsay [Anderson, the director] had a copy of The Times and on the front page was a student on the roof of a university with an automatic machine gun. It was like a still from our film. Shortlist, 2015
In the film Travis decorates his study with violent images, an African soldier with machine gun is central. Che Guevara is on the wall. It reflects society. The ineffectual housemaster, Mr Kemp (Arthur Lowe) delegates all authority to the Whips, the four senior prefects, and really doesn’t want to know how they exercise it, except to remind them mildly that the headmaster doesn’t want too much thrashing. When they do thrash the three central figures, it is a powerful scene, particularly when Head Boy Rowntree keeps thrashing Travis. He is out of control.
L to R: Denson (Hugh Thomas), Rowntree, head boy (Robert Swann), Mr Thomas, new teacher (Ben Aris), Housemaster Mr Kemp (Arthur Lowe), Mrs Kemp (Mary Mcleod)
When I first saw it, I was three years out of school. In my case a state boys’ grammar school, but we had a CCF (Combined Cadet Force) in imitation of elite public schools, and had to report in full battledress uniform every Friday from the third year on. We were persuaded (misled?) that if conscription ever returned, our CCF exam certificates would fast track us into officer-training. I’ve kept mine just in case. We had a terrifying tall thin headmaster in a blue three piece suit, though he never aspired to the businessman liberalism of Peter Jennings’ headmaster in the film, whose lines Anderson claimed were based on a 1967 pamphlet by the head of Eton. At my school, only the headmaster and his deputy could cane people, but there were a few older teachers who would smack you hard across the head, and sneer, ‘So, tell your parents to sue me,’ and hit you again.
The chaplain (Geoffrey Chater) and new boy Jute (Sean Bury). 1968 was early to point out that blokes in dog collars should not be left alone with young boys.
We had a history master who fondled boys’ hair and backs (whilst dripping snot on them) but he never went further than the spine, unlike reports from friends at Catholic schools. In our school, prefects could give lines, but no physical punishment, and their only badge was a school tie in reverse colours and a prefects’ room. It was a state school, so totally unlike the vicious public school prefects poncing around in coloured waistcoats in If …. Our prefects’ authority was strictly limited. When we were in the second year 6th(age 17 to 18 as in the film) prefects were boys in our year, but none of my friends were prefects. One prefect threatened us with lines for declining to stand outside in the rain at break as was the rule, and two of his classmates took him on one side and explained very softly the consequences to him on the way home, which would be even more dire if he decided ever to mention their threats to staff.
The whips
Fashionably, Anderson mixes colour and black and white. I laboured to work out if there was any significance in the switches. If there was, I lost it. The three “sexual” scenes are black and white (Travis and The Girl’s magnificent “tiger fight”, the housemaster’s wife wandering naked through the dormitory, touching bowls and things, and very briefly, Wallace and the younger boy Phillips happily asleep in one single bed). But so are many other scenes. Incidentally, the story had evolved from Crusaders in which Travis had been the one with the boy, and Johnny the one with the girl.
Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) steals the bike
The major “Girl” scene follows from Travis and Johnny stealing a motor bike ((in colour) and riding to a transport café (interior in black and white), where Travis kisses “The Girl” and gets hit, and they end up playing tigers with growls before writhing naked on the floor. Sherwin describes the auditions. 5000 males applied. Christine Noonan was only the second girl they saw, and she instantly got the role. Sherwin says they saw an almost gypsy look. I recall seeing her the first time. She seemed “real” not “actressy” and in height, build and hair looked like an ex-girlfriend.
Christine Noonan as The Girl
Then the guys had to audition by doing the tiger fight with her. McDowell, a total newcomer, got it right away. Not having had long with the script, he had had no idea she was going to hit him at full strength when he tried to kiss her. He’d only looked at his lines, not hers. So he reacted.
Back to David Sherwin:
I call to Lindsay, ‘I wouldn’t bother to go on auditioning. You’ve got Mick and the Girl.’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t bother, would you, Sherwin? That’sa brilliant way to cast a film. Piss off.’
I repeat,’They’re brilliant.’
‘Then fucking well tell them. Their names are Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan.”
The “tiger fight”
The sex sequence got the film an X rating (and was cut in some countries).
Knowing that hanky-panky was out of the question with his wedded co-star, McDowell cheekily proposed to Anderson that he and Noonan perform some of their wrestling in the nude. (“It’s up there with the one from WOMEN IN LOVE,” he says of the sequence, “it was quite risqué for its time.”) Anderson demurred from suggesting it to Noonan himself, but was agreeable if she had no problem with the idea. McDowell promptly approached his co-star and opened, “Lindsay has asked me to ask you…” to which she replied in her broad Eastern accent, “Oy don’t moynd.” Within minutes, they were both starkers and making cinema history. For his part, McDowell remembers feeling as though he had “died and gone to Heaven.” Tim Lucas, Video Watchblog, 2007
The censors allowed the scene of the naked Mrs Kemp in exchange for removing scenes with visible male genitalia in the showers.
Johnny (David Wood), The Girl (Christine Noonan), Travis (Malcolm McDowell), scissors, stone and paper.
What No crash helmets!
Then many surreal scenes are in colour … the three riding round a field on the motor bike (the Girl is standing between them like a circus act), shooting the chaplain, seeing the chaplain emerge from a morgue drawer in the headmasters office, the ending). I’d guess the tiger fight and sex in the café is surreal / wishful thinking and that’s black and white.
Coming from the store-room: L to R Phillips, Wallace, Johnny
When they are punished by having to clear the storeroom below the hall, where they find the grenades and guns, the Girl is suddenly with them. That’s black and white. No, I can’t see any method in the switches. Incidentally, people see finding the guns, bazooka and grenades as definitely surreal. I didn’t. In 1966 I worked in a museum, and while rooting around the attic we found a tea chest full of World War One grenades. We played catch with them before calling the police. They were live.
The chapel. Rowntree centre
On the DVD audio commentary, Malcolm McDowell explained that they only had the use of the chapel for the wide shot for a short time, so Anderson did not have enough time to light it for colour and opted for black and white, liked the effect, and decided to shoot other sequences in black and white … OK, maybe. The wide shot of the whole chapel is black and white, but closer in sections are colour. If you look at stills online, pictures from the same scenes appear in both colour and black and white. I have my doubts about loading cameras with different film stock – OK, nowadays changing colour to B&W is easy. It wasn’t then.
Attitude: Johnny (David Wood), Wallace (Richard Warwick), Travis (Malcolm McDowell)
Our 2019 mid teenage viewers were troubled / irritated by the colour / monochrome switches, and also over what was real and what was surreal. I think in late 1968 I placed “real” on more than I would now. A particular question was over the chaplain. On the CCF training day, they shoot out the tea urn with real bullets. Then they appear to shoot the chaplain, though he is squealing and bloodless as they threaten to bayonet him. They then are up before the headmaster and told they’ve been naughty boys, and he opens a morgue drawer to discover the chaplain sitting up to get an apology. In the final Speech Day scene, the chaplain is alive.
The CCF manouevres day. The chaplain (Geoffrey Chater)
Founders Day with parents invited is addressed by old boy General Denson (Anthony Nicholls). We assume that the whip, Denson, who is Cadet Under Officer, is related,perhaps his son. These things and priviliges run in families. The Cadet Under Officer was the title of the Head Boy of the CCF. Masters took the role of teachers.
In 2019, the ending is a problem. It’s the proto-type school shooting. The three rebels are joined by sexual partners (or perhaps fantasies). “The girl” with Travis, the blonde and pretty younger boy Philips, for Wallace. In both cases, sexual freedom lines up with revolution. They dress as guerrillas. Put smoke or tear gas under the Speech Day stage, then gun down the parents, staff and boys running out of the hall. In 1968-69, this presented as a surreal image. To our teen viewers this week, it was real. The news is full of it. The American school shootings. Automatic weapons. It is no longer a fantasy moment.
Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and The Girl (Christine Noonan). The firing of guns has colour and black and white sections
The parents and boys fight back too, including fierce older women. They get rifles from the CCF (mysteriously loaded) and we’re into a firefight which they will win by strength of numbers, but the credits roll before we see that. I remember being irritated that though they shot the headmaster (the Girl did it with a revolver) they failed to bring down the real bastards, the Whips (prefects). We see both Rowntree and Denson firing back, and those are the bastards you want to go … but, but you really shouldn’t think that. In late 68 we definitely did because I guess we interpreted it as Saturday morning pictures with cap guns and cowboy films. There is very little blood too – just a tiny circle on the headmaster’s forehead. Now? It’s uncomfortable. No longer a subject for humour. Anderson was prescient.
Headmaster seated, General Denson standing as smoke fills the hall
The parents return fire
Watching this week, for the n’th time, I realized for the first time that the headmaster and old boy general include “her royal highness” in their lords, ladies and gentlemen introductions. She must be the ancient crone in red with a bunch of flowers.
For 2019, it’s quite short – 107 minutes on the DVD box, 112 on the blu-ray, 111 on line. Thats a positive discipline that recent directors abandon.
THE CHARACTERS BY THEIR LINES:
enforced cold shower
Mick When do we live? That’s what I want to know?
War is the last possible creative act.
One man can change the world. With a bullet in the right place.
The Girl I’ll kill you. Look at my eyes. Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and my eyes get bigger and bigger. I’m like a tiger.
Rowntree (Head Boy): Markland, warm a lavatory seat for me. I’ll be there in three minutes.
Last summer, this House got a reputation for being disgustingly slack … if there’s any repetition of that deplorable lack of spirit, I shall come crashing down on offenders.
Kemp (housemaster) The headmaster doesn’t like too much thrashing …
Headmaster: Of course some of our customs are silly. You could say we were middle class. But a large part of the population is becoming middle class and many of the middle class’s moral values are values that the country cannot do without. We must not expect to be thanked.
(just before he is shot) Cease firing! Boys! Boys! I understand you! Listen to reason and trust me!
Denson: It’s not just a matter of setting an example. If we can’t set an example who can? That’s why we’re given our privileges … Anyway, this homosexual flirtatiousness is so adolescent.
THE CRITICS
It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969.
David Sherwin says:
The British ambassador arrives foaming with fury. If …. is an insult to the British nation. It must be withdrawn from the Festival. Lindsay (Anderson) replies that is an insult to a nation that deserves to be insulted and tells the ambassador to bugger off. Anyway, the film can’t be withdrawn. It is the official British entry.
In 1999 the British Film Institute rated it “12thgreatest British film.”
In 2004, Total Film rated it “16thBest British film of all time.”
In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors and writers rated it “9thbest British flm ever.”
It has a 97% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes
The Guardian says David Cameron listed it as his favourite film. Well, he did go to Eton.
I was surprised looking around to find that elsewhere the film meets less than universal approval. This is the poster where they put both sides:
QUOTES:
Allegorical treatment of school life with much fashionable emphasis on obscure narrative, clever cutting, variety of pace, even an unaccountable change from colour to monochrome and vice versa. Intelligence is clearly at work, but it seems to have suffered from undigested gobs of Pinter, and the film as a whole makes no discernible point.Halliwell’s Film Guide 1983
Other reviewers are more positive:
The movie is a chronicle of bizarre details — Mick’s first appearance wearing a black slouch hat, his face hidden behind a black scarf, looking like a teen-age Mack the Knife; the hazing of a boy by hanging him upside down over (and partially in) a toilet bowl, and a moment of first love, written on the face of a lower form student as he watches an older boy whose exercises on the crossbar become a sort of mating dance. As a former movie critic, Anderson quite consciously reflects his feelings about the movies of others in his own film. “If . . . ,” an ironic reference to Kipling’s formula for manhood, uses a lot of terms most recently associated with Godard. There are title cards between sequences (“Ritual and Rebellion,” “Discipline,” etc.), and he arbitrarily switches from full color to monochromatic footage, as if to remind us that, after all, we are watching a movie. Vincent Canby, New York Times 10 March 1969
School dinner: L to R: Travis & Jonny, Mrs Kemp, Wallace & Stephans (Guy Ross)
From the first frames, we understand director Lindsay Anderson’s hatred for the school system (he shot on location at his alma mater). There is a hierarchy at work here, the prefects (or “whips”) force the first years (known as “scum”) to do their bidding. Not five minutes into the film, we witness a whip imposing his authority by telling a scum to “warm up a lavatory seat for me, I’ll be ready in five minutes.” The scum walk reluctantly to “the sweat room,” a place filled with desks where the students keep the bulk of their personal belongings, including the magazine cut outs that litter the walls. The foreshadowing comes alive here, as we see Alberto Korda’s infamous portrait of Che Guevara. As the audience is beginning to get the gist of things,a mysterious figure enters the building, dressed head to toe in black, his face covered with a scarf. The students know him instantly, “Hallo, Mick!” we hear in the halls. Catching The Classics, Clayton R. White
THE MISSA LUBA
Les troubadours du roi Baudoin gave the Philips record label a Continental air in the early sixties. The classic Missa Luba LP finally became popular six years after its release when it was featured in Lindsay Anderson’s film If ….
Karen had a copy of Missa Luba, bought in 1969, and I was surprised she had it when we first met. Add it to her first Spencer Davis LP and Ravi Shankar, and I was impressed. She said it was her favourite film. We copied the LP onto CDR. Years later we wanted to find out more about the recording on the internet. We soon stopped. It seems the combination of Belgian Catholic priests, lithe young Congolese boys and spiritual music used in a film featuring savage beatings in British public schools attracts some very dubious followers. It is a wonderful piece of music, and no, you wouldn’t have found Sanctus on a transport café juke box in 1968. But Mick Travis does.
LOCATIONS
Cheltenham College was used for the main public school. Lindsay Anderson had been a pupil. The school interiors such as the dining room, were filmed at Aldenham School near Elstree Film Studios.
THE CAST …
Malcolm McDowell went on to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, (cast after Kubrick saw If ….) plus the loose sequels to If …., O Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital. In those films, McDowell is called Mick Travis, other characters reappear but they are different stories.
The rest of the younger cast failed to make a huge impact, which is surprising. David Wood who played Johnny became a major screenwriter. I would have guessed Christine Noonan as a future star, but no.
The older cast … Arthur Lowe, Peter Jennings, Geoffrey Chater, Graham Crowden were already well established. Ben Aris as the young teacher went on to Hi-de-Hi, as did David Griffin, here in a minor role as a boy.
A SEQUEL
From IMDB:
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
SEE ALSO:
The actual sequel:
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
Oh, Lucky Man! (1973)
I haven’t seen the film since it’s release, and now I’d like to see it again. I remember enjoying it, partly because I’d attended a grammar school which had tried to emulate the ways of the school portrayed. I see Malcolm McDowell is still performing prolifically. I enjoyed his 2007 film lecture Never Apologize where he talks about his relationship with Lindsay Anderson, though I couldn’t agree with his inflated opinion of O Lucky Man.
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