Two Out of Three Ain't Bad
With Criterion's release of the '60s controversy-generating classic 'If...,' two thirds of an unusual film trilogy are on DVD. But the missing piece is indeed in great demand.
Glenn Kenny's The Discophile at Premiere.com
Column #3 06/19/07
The Criterion Collection's release of director Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If… is a remarkable achievement on a lot of levels. The transfer itself, approved by its cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek, renders the film's alternating black-and-white and color sequences (alternating according to Anderson's whims, after Ondricek told the director he could not assure color integrity for sequences shot in a particular location) with equal splendor. The treasure trove of extras, including an early Anderson doc and a commentary featuring the film's star Malcolm McDowell, is also exemplary. And finally, this movie makes one third of a most unusual cinematic trilogy available on DVD for the first time. It marks the cinematic debut of the character Mick Travis, whose destiny here is to shake things up big time at a regimented British public school. He and his cronies cut class, don't cut their hair, steal motorbikes in town, pick up girls (or rather a girl, "the" girl as far as Mick is concerned in this picture; in a scene that blurs the film's "reality" with its free-form poetry — as they do more frequently the further along the movie goes — he brings her back to school on the back of his bike), and so on.
The school has a nasty ingrained social structure, and there's a lot of enforced snobbism and sadism and blinkered reaction to same, but it's hardly hell on earth. Which makes Travis and company's ultimate rebellion against the system, involving machine guns and grenades, a bit of an overstatement.
Which is exactly the point. This groundbreaking movie isn't saying that the veggies that the teachers were pelted with at the end of Vigo's Zero de Conduite weren't enough. It's just saying that the true anarchic spirit thrives on going overboard — that anything worth doing is also worth exaggerating. That's the spirit animating Anderson's 1982 Britannia Hospital, the third movie in the so-called "Mick Travis trilogy" (out in a somewhat-less-snazzy-than-If… edition from Anchor Bay since 2001), albeit in an entirely different way. While the movie itself goes overboard, Mick Travis winds up victimized by its anarchy. Here Malcolm's Travis is an investigative journalist covering, as it were, an important anniversary for a British health care institution and having his scoop pre-empted by a mad scientist who's got some unique ideas about the future of Brit health care and science in general. (Many of its effects and color schemes, not to mention concepts, seem to anticipate the brilliant 1985 gross-out thriller ReAnimator.)
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