if....

Film Review by Sam Lewis | 05 Jun 2014
Film title: if....
Director: Lindsay Anderson
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick, Robert Swann, Peter Jeffrey, Christine Noonan, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Rupert Webster, Hugh Thomas
Release date: 9 Jun
Certificate: 15

Lindsay Anderson’s if... centres on an elite boarding school populated by subservient pupils and fascistic ‘whips’ – head boys who rule the institution with an iron fist. Malcolm McDowell plays Mick Travis, one student who marches to his own drum. It doesn’t take long to spot he’s a troublemaker: his hair is too long, his shoulders too slouched, his walls plastered with iconic figures of rebellion – Guevara and Lenin.

Mick targets the school hierarchy for retribution, which is carried out with aplomb in a blistering magical-realist finale. However, the real target here is the British establishment – blithe, complacent and complicit. The film’s beauty is not so much in the anger and passion – though those are powerful enough – but the flourishes and flights of fancy that lift it beyond British social realism and into the realms of the kind of cinema pioneered a decade earlier by the French New Wave: anarchic, funny, and incandescent with rage. [Sam Lewis]

Released on DVD and Blu-ray in a dual format package by Eureka! Entertainment, as part of the Masters of Cinema series

http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk