If.... (DVD)

A review of the Paramount DVD. If.... is a classic British film from 1968, directed by Lindsay Anderson (not a woman, in spite of his girly name). It's about life in an absurdly constrictive public school, and three sixth formers who try to rebel against the system. It's very 1960s, but while it sometimes seems a bit gauche, especially in some of its dialogue, it's a lot of fun. It was filmed in a real public school at Cheltenham, where Anderson himself had been taught. The genuine locations help enormously. This feels like a school; even if most people won't have been to an über-posh boarding school there's still something here to ...

With If... Lindsay Anderson reached out to the peak of achievement in the British cinema and made a film which must count as one of the most powerful ever made by an English director. A study of a rebel in an English public school, it showed an individual making a protest against authority, a cry which turns eventually into anarchy and armed insurrection, with parents, masters and prefects subjected to guerrilla gunfire from the rooftops on Founders' Day, an ending recalling Jean Vigo's classic Zero de Conduite, which had more than one resemblance to Anderson's film. The school, with its archaic, meaningless customs, its pseudo-progressive headmaster ...

If?is one of those films which puts a hook into everyone who sees for any number of reasons. It tells the story of a young adolescent student played by Malcolm Macdowell of Clockwork Orange fame who rebels against the disciplinarian boarding school which he attends in what is a microcosm of the class war which was being waged in the 1960?s in Britain when the film was made. Coincidentally, If? was also made just before the Paris student riots of 1968, and heralded a major crisis in the British education system prompted by various people who thought the film too provocative for the student audience it was aimed at and tried to have it banned. Unfortunately, this action ...