 cropped-thumb-62x62-29482.jpg)
The film with the odd, unassuming title gives us Malcolm McDowell as what might be a kind of alternate-dimensional version of his Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Here we have a young Mick Travis, headed for his final year of public school (boarding school for Americans). And what a year it will be.
The film at first sets itself up as a kind of pain-tinged nostalgia piece. Sure, the headmaster is strict, the students are rough on each other, and repression is rampant, but is it really all that bad?
Worse than you think, director Lindsay Anderson tells us. For If.... ultimately reveals itself to be a story about pain, fear, and severe humiliation of Britain's presumably upper-crust school system. If.... isn't really surprising until its midway point, when Mick's light-hearted rebellion takes a more serious turn. A die-hard outcast (he's first seen arriving at school with a completely unallowed mustache), Mick's antics become more and more belligerent as the days wear on. Eventually he steals a motorcycle and zips around the countryside with a chum. Then he discovers some live ammunition and opens fire on the students while they're undergoing a surprising military training exercise. This just leads to more beatings (the most savage scene of the film is probably Mick's repeated caning in the school gym), and more rebellion. The cycle is endless.
Or is it? One of If....'s charms is right there in the title: How much is real, and how much is fantasy? Mick encounters a girl in a greasy spoon on his motorcycle adventure and is soon writhing naked with her on the floor. Or is it in his head? As the film wears on, Anderson weaves more and more fantastic elements into the narrative to the point where you don't know whether it's Mick or you that's going nuts. Maybe both. The finale of the film, which I won't spoil here, is so over the top that John Waters would be impressed.
My only complaint with If.... is Anderson's use of black and white and color, which Anderson switches between almost at random throughout the film. It's meant, I suppose, to heighten the sense of confusion and disorientation, but it's more distracting than anything. The commentary track (with a spicy McDowell and a very dry David Robinson) says that he would have shot all in black and white if the studio would have let him. It's hard to believe that's the problem a studio might have with the film. Personally I think it's better in color, but it's great nonetheless, and it stands up well to repeated viewings.
Now on a Criterion DVD, the package includes two discs, with the aforementioned commentary track, plus various extras like a documentary about many of the principals of If.... (shot in 2003) and a 1954 documentary from Anderson about a British school for the deaf.
