9° FESTIVAL INTERNAZIONALE CINEMA GIOVANI
Retrosective - New British Cinema 1956-1968
IF...
by Lindsay Anderson
Country: UK
Year: 1968
Duration: 112'
The children return to the college at the beginning of the school year Mick, Johnny, and Wallace are the three "crusaders", rebels against the school's rigid structure, dominated by the older boys, the authentic "armed wing" of the teachers. The first episodes of the older boys' violence against the younger students explode with the very first lessons. Mick, Wallace, and Johnny take up the defense of the newly arrived students and confront the older boys who react with violence, arriving at the point of condemning them to be whipped in public, At their wits' end, the three "crusaders" swear a blood oath against the authorities of the school and the older boys. "A man can change the world with a bullet in the right place", says Mick. When the rector forces them to clean out an old school warehouse, the "crusaders" discover an old stock of arms from the second world war. On school-fair day, when all the authorities and the parents come together the "crusaders" gather up the arms and begin to fire from the roof. The students and the dignitaries organize to answer the fire. The film ends with a close up of Mick who keeps on firing.
"lf... is so fulI of patchy, obscure, muddled elements that we often cannot be sure if our view of the rebels matches Anderson's. The film reeks of material insufficiently absorbed and attitudes not fully formulated. Nevertheless, too much in the movie fails to jibe with the 'revolution' that the twin media of reviews and publicity condition us to expect. The film questions and undermines the values and tactics of the rebels too thoroughly to function as a pamphlet, and this is fortunate. In the end, the interesting complexity of lf... attacks society all the more trenchantly for being so impervious to change that it forces many wouldbe reformers to become as evil as it is." (Michael Dempsey, If…, in "Film Heritage", n. 1, autumn 1969, p. 20)
Biography
film director
Lindsay Anderson
Lindsay Anderson (Bangalore, India, 1923 - Angoulême, France, 1994) graduated in 1948 from Oxford, where he was captivated by theater. He was one of the first collaborators of the magazine “Sequence” and the founder along with Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson of Free Cinema. He directed several short films, like O Dreamland and Every Day Except Christmas, and his debut feature film was This Sporting Life (1963). In 1968 he made If…, which won the Golden Palm at Cannes, and then dedicated himself primarily to theater and television. He later directed films such as O Lucky Man! (1973), Britannia Hospital (1982) and, in 1986, The Whales of August, the last film he directed for cinema.
FILMOGRAFIA
Meet the Pioneers (mm, doc., 1948), Three Installations (cm, doc., 1952), O Dreamland (cm, doc., 1953), Thursday’s Children (cm, doc., 1954), £20 a Ton (cm, doc., 1955), A Hundred Thousand Children (cm, doc., 1955), Every Day Except Christmas (mm, doc., 1957), This Sporting Life (Io sono un campione, 1963), The White Bus (mm, 1967), If... (Se..., 1968), O Lucky Man! (id., 1973), In Celebration (Celebrazione, 1975), Look Back in Anger (1980), Britannia Hospital (id., 1982), The Whales of August (Le balene d’agosto, 1987), Glory! Glory! (tv, 1989), Is That All There Is? (mm, tv, 1993).
Cast
& Credits
Director: Lindsay Anderson.
Plot: David Sherwin e John Howlett.
Screenplay: David Sherwin.
Fotografia (Eastmancolor e b/n): Miroslav Ondricek.
Editor: David Gadwell.
Art director: Jocelyn Herbert.
Costume designer: Shura Cohen.
Music: Marc Wilkinson.
Aiutoregisti: Stephen Frears, John Stoneham, Stuart Baird.
Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Mick Travis), David Wood (Johnny), Richard Warwick (Wallace), Christine Noonan (la ragazza del bar), Rupert Webster (Phillips), Robert Swann (Rowntree), Hugh Thomas (Denson), Michael Cadman (Fortinbras), Peter Sproule (Barnes), Peter Jeffrey (il rettore), Arthur Lowe (Mr. Kemp), Mona Washbourne (la matrona), Mary MacLeod (Mrs. Kemp), Geoffrey Chater (i cappellano), Graham Crowden (il professore di storia), Charles Lloyd Pack (il professore di latino), Anthony Nicholls (il generale Denson), Guy Ross (Stephans), Philip Bagenal (Peanuts), Richard Davis (Machin), Brian Pettifer (Biles), Sean Bury (Jute).
Production company: Lindsay Anderson e Michael Medwin per la Memorial Enterprises Films.