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| The revolutionary spirit of the sixties.... |
Lindsay
Anderson’s most successful film
was never made to cash in on the revolutionary fever of the late sixties although
it was made around the same time as the Paris uprising in May 1968. In fact the idea for the film first
surfaced in 1966 when Seth Holt, a British Film Director who directed feature
films for Hammer Studios, brought the idea to Lindsay. The script he showed him
was written by John Howlett and David Sherwin and was about their experiences
of life in an English public school. The pair had been working on the script
for a number of years but nobody seemed interested until they brought Crusaders, the name of the initial script,
to Lindsay. Not too impressed with the original he decided to meet with the two
authors and it was agreed that he along with Sherwin would collaborate and see
if they could produce a less naive piece of work. The Indian born director and
writer was able to include his own dire experiences of life at his old
school, Cheltenham College
and of society in the intervening years although he has said it was not
autobiographical. With Lindsay’s input it became a must more intimately
personnel experience more in the tradition of Free
Cinema, with a story written free from outside interference. When the
revised script was completed it was shown to Michael Medwin and Albert
Finney who had started their own production company Memorial Pictures. It was following
this tie up that the title was changed to if....
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| ....coupled with the innocence of youth. |
With
the help of This
Sporting Life (1963) casting director Miriam Brickman the actors was
chosen. Auditions took place and it was Brickman who suggested auditioning
Malcolm McDowell for the main lead Mick Travis, in what was to be his debut
feature film and a role that led to Stanley Kubrick casting him as Alex in Clockwork Orange (1971). Arthur
Lowe was cast because of his work in This
Sporting Life, Mary McLoad and Graham Crowden were chosen because of their
previous work with the director at The Royal Court Theatre. It was arranged for
Polish DOP Miroslav Ondricek to return to this country from Prague to work on
the film after previously working on The
White Bus (1967). Union regulations stipulated that that you must have a ‘reserve’
British cameraman. This is how the award winning Chris Menges came to work
on the film. As with most British movies finance was impossible to obtain from the
UK but fortunately Medwin and Finney impressed Charles Bludhorn, the head of US
Paramount Pictures, enough to provide the funding.
As far
as the British censor was concerned the only problem seemed to be the short
nude scene in the roadside cafe involving Christine Noonan and McDowell. He surprisingly
allowed a glimpse of Mrs Kemp’s pubic hair as she wanders naked down the
dormitory corridor but made the boys cover their private parts in the shower
scene. In Greece, under the Colonels, the entire last sequence was cut
which obviously destroyed the film, with Portugal refusing to show the film at
all. Out of the Communist country's it was Poland that seemed to have the
biggest problem with the film. Other countries made various cuts but the
USA gave it an X certificate and passed it un-mutilated.
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| The converted cloisters of the British education system. |
Popular
with students and young people, even with it carrying an X certificate, it did
reasonably well in this country, it was in the US, Europe and in some Communist
countries that it did its best business. Lindsay maintains it is by the vitality of emotional impulse, the urgency of what needs
to be said rather than star names and a big budget production, something
that’s not always recognised by the British public.
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| "You must remember gentlemen to shake my hand after I've beaten you senseless" |
Although identified with the sixties the film could have
been made at any time. Intentionally
there were no contemporary references in the film deliberately to make it difficult
to date. Partly filmed at Lindsay’s old school Cheltenham College, the film won the Palme d'Or at
Cannes in the 1969 Film Festival, which at the time seemed to legitimize
the spirit of revolt that has swept through Europe. The film was a wonderfully scurrilous
attack on the absurdities of the public school system combining an
observational style with modernist techniques for example chapter headings and
abrupt jumps between colour and black and white (which some have said was for
economic reasons and not for art sake) and the gradual shift into a sort of
fantasy, or for some, wishful thinking! The whole film is a metaphor for
British society and an attack on authority, with a form of education that lead
to conformity and dullness but was expected to produce our bigoted ruling
classes including membership of parliament and the House of Lords, the church
which has always been deemed the Tory party at prayer and of course those that
commanded the armed forces and sent young men and women to war. The London Film Festival showed
the film and it was nominated for a prize that was given at that time by the
BFI but as Lindsay opined in 1994 'just
as the British were not interested in financing the film, they were not
interested in acknowledging it'
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| Mrs Kemp with her clothes on! |
'The basic tensions, between hierarchy and
anarchy, independence and tradition, liberty and law, are always with us'[1].
It’s a story about freedom and its
romantic connotations. The world rallies
as it always will, and brings its overwhelming firepower to bear on the men who
say 'no'[2].
Still true to this very day. Was Mick
Travis right when he said Violence
and revolution are the only pure acts?[3]
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