If....

BFI Film Classics

by Mark Sinker

Lindsay Anderson's film if...(1968), starring Malcolm McDowell as a schoolboy who leads a guerilla insurgence, imagines how repression, conformity, and fusty ritual at an English public school could lead to anarchy and bloody revolt. Its title is a sardonic nod to Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem, and its story a radical updating of Kipling's 1899 story 'Stalky and Co.,' in which prankish rebels are groomed to police the empire. Released at a time of unprecedented student uprisings in Europe and America, if...provided a peculiarly English perspective on the battle between generations - the perennial war of the romantically passionate against the corrupt, the ugly, the old, and the foolish. Though its emotional surface is authentically anti-authoritarian, its intellectual substance, as Mark Sinker argues, is rooted in a deep familiarity with the symbols of English ruling-class values. No longer a vehicle for shock or dissent, if...is today enjoyed comfortably, even nostalgically, but for Sinker this renders its many knots and paradoxes, the moments of poetry that Anderson argued were cinema's raison d'etre, all the more fascinating.

Genres: Film

88 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 3, 2004

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know the famous moment in Fawlty Towers when Basil’s car conks out when he’s in a tearing hurry and he gets out and yells at it “Start, you vicious bastard! I’ve laid it on the line for you time and time again…. Well I’m going to give you a damn good thrashing!” and he rushes off and grabs a tree branch and starts beating his car mercilessly. Well as I read this book that’s exactly what happened to me, my brain conked out, just wouldn’t work any more, and I jumped out and yelled at it and thrashed it with a tree branch but it just wouldn’t go.

Mark Sinker is too clever for me, he writes in a compacted ultraknowing style like this (here he’s talking about the idea of college) :

Middle-class investment in the system also hides a more idealised act of dissent. The ambivalence we hear in sacred school song is the chantry’s abiding phantom, the ghost of monkish resistance to a power grab long ago; it persists as a psalm sung within, for your own dead soul.

Or

Nakedness has the free pass of anti-censorship novelty in 1968, but animal growling followed by sexplay to hot drum-pop has today long been deeply unspecial industrial ritual.

And there is lots more on every page! I had the feeling this stuff could be translated into English.

I’m used to being towered over by the professors of semiology, deconstruction and Althusserian psychology but Mark Sinker caused a different kind of sinkering feeling – if this is film criticism, I should leave now.

Anyhow, I rewatched the film itself, and it stands up beautifully, you never saw such a parade of homely English faces and such repulsive English upper class manners; and the movie has a whole extra frisson, since the famous fantasy finale, with Malcolm McDowell and his other three “crusaders” perched on the roof, gunning down teachers, fellow pupils and their parents, must now be seen in the context of Columbine and every other horrible school shooting. Was ever a movie so accidentally prescient.

[David Sterritt]

Mark Sinker’s monograph on Lindsay Anderson’s “if….” has some fine passages and gives a fairly balanced assessment of the movie, which is a rocky blend of sociology, fantasy, and pure ‘60s zeitgeist that I’ve always found stimulating, irritating, and oddly memorable. Partaking of a similar spirit, the book is too scrappy for its own good, full of slangy formulations and jokey ambiguities, but occasionally insightful all the same. Bottom line: a mixed entry in the estimable BFI Film Classics series.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely dense post-Columbine take on Lindsay Anderson's second-best film, bringing together both deep knowledge of British public school lore and ultra-dialectical pop theory.