O’ Lucky Man!

O’ Lucky Man!

1973

Directed By Lindsay Anderson
Written by David Sherwin
Based on an original idea by Malcolm McDowell
Cinematography – Miroslav Ondricek
Music by Alan Price

It may be 1973, but it goes in the 60s Retrospective series.
That’s because it’s a (kind of) sequel to If …. (linked)

CAST:

Malcolm McDowell – Mick Travis / Coffee plantation thief
Ralph Richardson – Sir James Burgess / Monty
Rachel Roberts – Gloria Rowe / Madame Palliard / Mrs Richards
Arthur Lowe – Mr Duff / Mayor Johnson / Dr Munda.
Helen Mirren – Patricia Burgess / Casting Assistant
Graham Crowden – Stewart / Professor Millar / Meths drinker
Peter Jeffrey – Factory chairman / Prison governor
Christine Noonan – coffee factory worker / Mavis in nightspot
Dandy Nichols – tea lady / neighbour
Mona Washbourne – Neighbour / court usher / Sister Hallett
Phillip Stone – Jenkins / Interrogator / Salvation Army Major
Mary Macleod – Mary Ball / Vicar’s wife / Salvationist
Michael Bangerter – William / Interrogator / Assistant / Prisoner
Wallas Eaton- John Stone (coffee factory) / Colonel Steiger / Prison warder / meths drinker / film executive
Warren Clarke – Master of Ceremonies at nightspot / Warner / Male Nurse
Michael Medwin – army captain / power station technician / Duke of Belminster
Geoffrey Palmer – Examination doctor / Basil Keyes
Anthony Nicholls- general, judge
Brian Glover – Plantation foreman / Power station guard
Jeremy Bulloch- Sports car driver / Sandwichboard man
Bill Owen – Superintendent Barlow / Inspector Carding
David Daker- policeman at accident/ man at party / Munda’s servant / policeman
Edward Peel / policeman at accident / Power station guard / Policeman in court
Geoffrey Chater bishop, vicar
Ben Aris -Mr Macintyre / Dr Hyder / Flight lieutenant
James Bolam – Attenboough / Examination doctor
Anna Dawkins- Becky
Brian Pettifer- Biles
Hugh Thomas – Mr Greasy (coffee factory) and as prisoner and as hopeful at audition
Ian Leake- Streaky (roadie)
Lindsay Anderson – as ‘film director’
+
Alan Price- keyboards, vocals
Colin Green – guitar
Dave Markee- bass guitar
Clive Thacker- drums

I’ve been wanting to do O’ Lucky Man! for a long time, what with If …. being one of our all-time best movies. After doing the If …. review I even found our VHS tape and linked up a VHS machine to an older TV, but the quality was too poor by modern standards. For many years (between 2009 and 2020) there seemed no in-print DVD. Then in mid-2020 it was reprinted and its in excellent quality. I’m still not sure why they need to break it into two DVDs, each with lots of extras rather than a film DVD and an extras DVD as normal. It is three hours long though and a break is welcome.

The film was based on Malcolm McDowell’s own experiences as a coffee salesman. It appears that Anderson had wanted to make a film about Alan Price touring which collapsed so the two ideas were combined. Five years had passed, during which Malcolm McDowell had starred as Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

The central character played by McDowell, carries on from If …. as Mick Travis. The cast take multiple roles. Several of them had appeared in If … and they appear to reflect that in their new characters, so that Peter Jeffrey, the headmaster in If …. is always an authority figure, first the factory chairman then the prison governor. Geoffrey Chater, the militaristic chaplain in If … plays a bishop, then a vicar. Mona Washbourne, the matron in If … plays the hospital sister. Graham Crowden, the eccentric history master becomes the crazed scientist Professor Millar then the suicidal Professor Stewart. Ben Aris, the inept new teacher joins Travis as a salesman. Christine Noonan who was “the girl” in If …. appears twice, once on the coffee production line, and once in the strip club scene. Mary MacLeod, Mrs Kemp, the housemaster’s wife in If …. who likes to walk naked through empty dormitories, becomes the randy landlady Mrs Ball, then the breastfeeding vicar’s wife. Arthur Lowe, as Mr Kemp, the housemaster in if …. starts in a similar role in the factory then … well, see the plot summary.

Two from If …. stay in the same roles throughout … Biles (Brian Pettifer), the younger boy who was bullied and rescued by Travis, and Denson (Hugh Thomas), the priggish prefect. They’re with Travis in the coffee factory, in prison and in the final audition scene. Biles keeps his name, though “Denson” is called Mr Greasy in the coffee factory. I’m sure we’re meant to see them as their If …. characters.

The film is an allegory on Imperial Britain, and very far from a subtle one either.

The time scale

I guess it’s 1973. I’d forgotten its date, and thought it earlier. I noticed that Mick Travis’ car, a Ford Anglia Estate, is 1965 (C reg.) The latest car you see is a J reg (1971). I’m not a registration nerd, but a friend had one of the last Ford Anglias built, so I know they’d stopped making them in 1967. A budget 1965 sales reps car in 1973? In those days it would have been rusting and knackered at eight years old. I also had the feeling that the storyline takes place only a year or so after If ….

Does it move deliberately backwards? At the start people discuss an imminent Christmas, then after Travis escapes the military camp, we see a harvest festival. He walks away through deciduous trees in full green leaf and walks into the Miller Institute with young trees in Spring bud.

THE PLOT

The film is broken frequently by the Alan Price song sequences and then solid black screens, sometimes with titles (The North, The South) break it up. I’m breaking it up with my own titles.

Coffee plantation

There’s a silent black and white film opening sequence … always annoying on our surround system which seems to need the amplifier waiting several seconds to leap into life. You wonder if it’s going to. “Once Upon a Time” says the title, and we see labourers picking coffee beans while armed overseers swagger about (It looks just like the recent stories about avocado farms in Kenya!). Malcolm McDowell with long moustaches takes a few beans. Title: “Coffee for the Breakfast Table.” He is seen by an overseer and arrested.

We see a fat magistrate who finds him “Guilty.” The overseer binds McDowell’s wrists to a block. He lifts a machete and chops downward and McDowell gives in a silent scream. The title NOW appears. Clearly nothing will change.

The title sequence is Alan Price in a studio, and the various songs will be interspersed throughout.

Factory

Mr McIntyre (Ben Aris), Travis (Malcolm McDowell), Mr Greasy aka Denson (Hugh Thomas)

The film story opens in the factory of Imperial (geddit) Coffee where Travis is a trainee salesman. With him are Biles and Denson, and Mr McIntyre (the inept If … teacher). They’re being shown the ropes. Coffee is brought from Nigeria, packed and sent back to Nigeria. Travis is sycophantically eager to please, and the best able of the group to SMILE when shaking hands … this will be a circle to the very end. He sees the “girl” from If …. on the packing line and tries to start chatting.

Peter Jeffrey as the Company Chairman with happy coffee picker painting

The women are after young Mick, including his tutor. An address by the chairman is interrupted by news that an area salesman has “deserted” and fled. Travis is chosen to take the job … it would normally take years. So he is appointed rep for the Northeast.

The accident

On a foggy road, a sports car roars past him and disappears in a bank of fog. There’s a crash … it has hit a van full of groceries. Travis finds the driver, dying. The van’s contents are strewn over the road. Two policemen arrive. They don’t need a witness, they say, he should clear off. He starts to argue and they threaten to arrest him for manslaughter … our word against yours. He decides to go … they present him with a biscuit barrel from the van. As he drives off, they start filling the boot of the police car with the groceries. i.e. looting. Police corruption and lies.

Salesman

Travis drives north and arrives at the guest house where his predecessor lived. He still has a drawer full of stuff in the room. Travis never finds out what happened to him. Mrs Ball the landlady is set on seduction. Travis heaves boxes of coffee into corner shops, finally getting to a grand hotel. The manager is Mayor Johnson (Arthur Lowe). Johnson asks him if he’ll continue the usual arrangements as with his predecessor. Travis is eager to agree.

Johnson: You’ll be replacing your previous colleague … Sad business that. Still, I take it the arrangements will be … as were.

ASIDE: Early 70s. Just about when I saw the film first. I was put in charge of tape purchasing for the group of ELT schools I worked at … we had multiple language laboratories and went through cassettes by the hundred. I contacted the shop that supplied them to buy 1000, and had that same question, ‘Are we continuing the usual arrangement?’ I asked what it was, and it was about a week’s wages in cash per order. The cassettes were way over-priced too. Being young and honest, I went straight to my managing director and told him. We switched to buy direct from the manufacturer at about one third less per cassette. When the manufacturer’s rep delivered them, he added a box of a dozen, ‘For you. A little gift.’ I put them straight in the general stock. Sweeteners were rife at that time. I remember bells ringing when I first saw it.

So this is the corruption sequence. Johnson takes Travis to a private club. He meets a police superintendent who has “the girl” (Christine Noonan) on his knee. She is introduced as Mavis.

Bill Owen as Superintendent Barlow, Christine Noonan as Mavis

Another woman sits on Travis’ knee. The whisky is flowing. They’re watching a porn film involving a Santa. Then the strip begins, with everyone chanting ‘Chocolate sandwich!’ Travis joins in.

‘Chocolate sandwich!’ Arthur Lowe as Mayor Johnson

Two girls and an Afro-Caribbean man. I thought it looked like Bony M (but with two white girls) until they all undressed and started writhing on the stage. The penny dropped … chocolate sandwich.

Travis staggers back to his guest house with a case of Bells whisky … the sweetener … to find Mrs Ball in his bed. The next morning he has a phone call … he has to go to Scotland.

Ralph Richardson as Monty, Malcolm McDowell as Travis

His neighbour in the guest house, Monty (Ralph Richardson) presents him with a gold lamé suit he has made. Travis sets off.

The power station

Or is it a secret military installation? Travis imagines he’s going to get an order for coffee. He is immediately grabbed at the gate, beaten about and dragged in for interrogation and forced to sign a ‘confession’ (which includes stating his headmaster was right to expel him, for an If … link).

While this is going on the tea lady drifts in and out in a pink overall and pinny (Dandy Nichols). There is an alarm and everyone runs out … the tea lady releases him and he joins them. There’s an explosion, he reaches the gate, his car catches fire and explodes.

He is running up and down ash covered slopes with burning trees. The ash slope was Pasolini’s Theorem perhaps!

Secret military Imperial shenanigans, then.

The church

Travis has rescued his gold suit from his burning car. He finds his way to a church in open countryside, where a Harvest Festival service is in progress.

Geoffrey Chater as the vicar (he was the chaplain in *If …*)

He faints in a pew and wakes. He sees the harvest festival bread and goes to eat it. The vicar’s wife (Mary MacLeod who was Mrs Ball) stops him. She has a baby and two kids. She sends the kids out and breastfeeds the starving Travis. I’m starting to note the film history bits … that’s the ending of The Grapes of Wrath novel, but John Ford wasn’t able to put it in the film version.

The vicar’s wife sends the kids to escort Travis to the main road.

The Millar Institute

Travis hitch-hikes. A limousine picks him up asks him if he wants to earn £100. They drive him to the Millar Institute. Travis tries to negotiate more … he gets hooked up for lots of tests.

Graham Crowden as Professor Millar (the mad history teacher in *If ….*)

Millar: Now, I would just like you to sign this release form.
Travis: I hereby consent to lease the Millar Research Clinic all physical experimental rights in my body for one week for the sum of £100.” Well, I’d like to help Professor Millar, but £150 is definitely my minimum price.

The professor tells them to sedate him, but Travis only pretends to be asleep. He creeps out and finds someone shuddering in a room … he lifts up the sheets. The man’s head has been attached to a sheep’s body. Travis escapes, leaping through the glass of an an upstairs window.

On the road with the band

Travis escapes on a push-bike but is driven off the road by a group van. This is Alan Price and group on their way back to London.

Alan Price as … er … Alan Price … welcomes Travis on board

The van is a Commer with a camper conversion, so with only the band, not their gear. Hmm. The Commer was indeed the standard British group transport at one time. Once the Ford Transit arrived in 1965, the Commer with its narrow wheelbase and wonky handling fast fell out of favour. I can’t see any band, however poor and amateur, using it in 1973. They put Travis in the back seat where he finds Patricia (Helen Mirren) lying down. Yet another female attracted to Travis. I love the band members playing chess on the table in the van. Yeah, right.

Helen Mirren as Patricia, the rich hippy

Back in London at the band’s flat, Travis wakes to find the bed empty. He is told that Patricia is on the roof, as she is painting the chimneys with Om symbols. She offers him champagne for breakfast and explains that daddy is extremely rich.

He asks where she got the champagne … from home, she replies.

Patricia: Daddy owns so much that he rarely misses anything.
Travis: You’re lucky. I’ve got to get there on my own.
Patricia: And where?
Travis: Right to the top!
(pointing to a skyscraper in the distance]
Travis: How much is a building like that worth?
Patricia: The ground rent is £810,000 a year; it cost ten times that to build, and every three years its value increases by 20%.
Travis: How do you know?
Patricia: My father owns it.

Sir James Burgess & Zingara

Travis visits her father on the pretext of rescuing his daughter from a life of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Sir James (Ralph Richardson) is tied up with Professor Stewart (Graham Crowden) whose life he has ruined and who wants to commit suicide, which he does by leaping out of the skyscraper window holding onto Sir James’ PA, William. They plunge to their deaths. Sir James reads a bland prepared obituary to staff, then they have 15 seconds silence. Travis finds that Sir James now assumes he is the PA.

Travis with Sir James Burgess (Ralph Richardson)

Enter the heavy bit. With a very obvious parallel. They are off to see Dr Munda (Arthur Lowe), the dictator of Zingara. Dr Munda wants them to invest in Zingara and shows a tourist film of beaches and hotels. Sir James wants to know about insurgents and security. Colonel Steiger (Wallace Eaton) gives a talk in a South African accent. He is a mercenary who was successful in “the Congo.”

Col Steiger: … blanket bombardment by artillery and aircraft, followed by landings of airborne policing detachments, employing scorched earth and random elimination techniques. My men are professionals experienced in guerilla warfare. The rebels are amateurs, inexperienced and weak in defence.

They can deal with the rebels but they need “honey”- he shows slides of what “honey” can do. It is napalm. We see horrific real slides of bodies (from Vietnam or Cambodia, in fact). Dr Munda was at Oxford with Sir James. He wants Sir James to secure large supplies of “honey” and then to invest in Zingara tourism.

OK. Easy parallel. The Kennedy family invested heavily in Vietnamese beach real estate in the 1950s. President Diem was a Joseph Kennedy house guest. This is … OK, don’t believe me, but it is … a major cause of the Vietnam war. Zingara is Vietnam … but it is also East Africa specifically. Dr Munda’s assistants are Asian Indian … which fits Uganda under Idi Amin, or Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. The educated Oxford man might fit Tanzania too. Sir James asks how Dr Munda’s brother, Peter is. He was at Oxford with them.

Dr Munda: Peter? In detention alas. I was urged to hang him but for once I was weak.

A very bad idea indeed: Arthur Lowe as Dr Munda

Here we are discovering just why the O’ Lucky Man! DVDs disappeared for years. Lindsay Anderson decided that Arthur Lowe in blackface greasepaint should play Dr Munda. Lowe could play anything, but it is a racist stereotype and an unfortunate casting idea. I imagine the reason was that Arthur Lowe was “rich corrupt politician” having been the mayor in the earlier sequence. Sensibilities about blackface were slight in 1973, but Lowe does look ridiculous.

So Travis is dispatched to the RAF base to hand over the paperwork as drums of “honey’ (napalm) are loaded into an RAF aircraft. Our other post-Imperial shame – selling weapons.

French lobby card: the dinner party. Dr Munda checks the gold bars

Back at Sir James’ house there is a dinner party to do the final deal with Dr Munda. Travis is despatched to get a case from the safe. It is full of gold bars. He finds Patricia in embrace with the Duke of Bedminster, her fiance, who flees. She kisses Travis. Back in the dining room he is asked to witness papers. Enter the fraud squad, led by Bill Owen (taking his second police role) and Travis is holding the case of gold.

‘Trust me!’ mouths Sir James. Travis does and is whisked away under arrest.

Justice

In court, Travis is found guilty and sentenced to five years. While awaiting the verdict, the judge goes off for a bit of whipping on his naked back (by Matron … now a court usher). As we know from The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes, judges are all masochistic perverts. More Imperial Britain establishment.

Court usher Mona Washbourne whips the judge, Anthony Nicholls

We cut forward five years. Travis has been a model prisoner, loved by warders and by the warden who gives him a book of poetry on release … but …

Governor: I’ve sensed the spark of idealism in you and I can move mountains, you know that, hmm. Oh, for a man like you, Travis. Michael, for a boy like you, you’re still young! Everything is possible. The world is your oyster. I can see you stripped, building motorways. You have eyes like Steve McQueen. Did anyone ever tell you that?

He kisses Travis on the forehead.

Biles and Denson are released along with him. Travis is now a humanist, a do-gooder, giving money to the Salvation Army while being robbed by down and outs (Denson – Hugh Thomas again).

He makes a daring attempt to get through an upstairs window and persuade a young mother not to kill herself.

He helps in a soup kitchen … and takes soup to the down and outs, who include Patricia and the Duke of Bedminster. I love the graffiti: Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.

The meths drinkers attack him and beat him up and roll an oil drum at him.

He wanders through brightly-lit London and sees a sandwich board man with a call for a film audition. Lindsay Anderson is himself playing the director of the film. Biles and Denson are waiting for casting too.

The audition … Biles in front of Travis, Denson next to him

Travis is given various props to hold, including a pile of schoolbooks and a gun. When asked to smile Mick continually asks why (remember he was the best smiler at the start). Anderson slaps Travis hard with his script book . A slow look of understanding crosses Mick’s face.

Schoolbooks? A gun? This was the audition for If …. then. He will be a star.

The end scene is the classic Shakespeare theatre ending … a dancing party which includes the entire cast.

CRITICS

The Anderson/Sherwin/McDowell trilogy that began with If…. and concluded with Britannia Hospital (1982), all three films featuring McDowell as an everyman named Mick Travis. Despite the shared name, he isn’t really the same character and the stories aren’t sequential; they do however jointly illustrate, through fantasy and comedy, the sobering reality of how our institutions succeed in squelching all that is best in us. Remarkably, the derangement infecting the larger world Travis discovers looked to my 18-year-old eyes like satiric, paranoid excess, but now that I’ve arrived at the age Anderson himself was when he made the film, the same derangement disconcertingly resembles daily life as I often perceive it. It’s the film’s triumph that Travis’ entanglements with monsters here don’t turn him into one; nowhere else in cinema will you find such a bleak worldview infused with such infectious, ebullient, indomitable joy, attentive to the magical propensities of life even when at its darkest.
Tim Lucas, Sight & Sound

O Lucky Man! is a colossally weird film, but at the same time it’s so deliberate and formal that it lacks the abandon of, say, a proper Ken Russell phantasmagoria. It’s simultaneously insane and tame.
Peter Hanson: Every 70s Movie site

Overall

When we saw this in 1973 I went with the highest expectations, because of If …. I was disappointed, and the VHS tape in 1993 reinforced the feeling that it was too long, too disjointed and suffered from the reality / absurdity interface. Sometimes, the absurd in British comedy tries so hard it falls over itself. In recent years I’ve listened to The Goons and watched classic Monty Python and the years have eroded what was once hilarious into something just silly. O’ Lucky Man was mixing real with the odd excursion into the absurd. Watching it now, it has worked far better than I originally thought. Perhaps we’re more experienced with that line between real and fantasy.

Perhaps we couldn’t take our rebel Mick Travis from If …. becoming a sycophantic, career-focussed product of capitalism, but the film skewers aspect after aspect of Britain’s post-Imperial hangovers, and does so well. It also contrasts the Sir James Burgess vast wealth with the poverty of London in the final sequences.

The Zingara sequences would have been so effective, even today, if not for the disastrous idea of putting Arthur Lowe in blackface which is just too uncomfortable for a 2020 audience. He won Best Supporting Actor in the 1973 BAFTAs for it too.

So much better than I remembered, and also the number of times that I’ve seen If …. caused interest as each actor re-appeared. Another thing, my recent reviews of A Very Peculiar Practice had me focussing much more on Graham Crowden. Helen Mirren, who we wouldn’t have thought about in 1973, is superb.

SOUNDTRACK

Alan Price won the BAFTA for Best Soundtrack, and was a Golden Globe nominee for the soundtrack. He wrote and sang every song. I was dubious about the ancient Commer van in that by 1973, Alan Price was so well-known, apart from so many hits with The Animals, solo and with Georgie Fame, he was appearing weekly with Georgie Fame on The Two Ronnies TV show. He went on to act the lead himself in Alfie Darling in 1975.

Alan Price had championed Randy Newman’s songs in the UK, recording several. The influence here is strong, especially on Poor People I’ve had the album for years, not that I bought it new.