My introduction to Lindsay Anderson was being shown the 1968 film If…. in (judiciously edited) half hour portions at secondary school in the 70’s in a lesson called ‘Design for Living’, a rather random class which was used to dispense whatever we had in the way of sex education, and anything else they thought we might need. I remember none of it, except the film.
It seems an odd thing to show to a class of teenage schoolboys – a film which ends (SPOILER ALERT) with a school’s headmaster being shot in the head – an eventuality which, moreover, is not exactly presented as a tragedy.
And the teacher taking this class was in fact our headmaster, whose stated reason for showing us this was to demonstrate the deficiencies of public schools (as opposed to comprehensives like ours.)
Our headmaster was something of an eccentric, and ironically would not have seemed at all out of place in a public school – he might almost have modelled himself on the teacher played by Graham Crowden in If….
I’m not sure that the intended message came across – if anything, If…. made public school look rather exciting – but the film has stuck in my memory possibly better than my own real education and, I can only suppose, instilled in me an appreciation for eccentric films, the kind that veer arbitrarily from colour to black and white and feature a chaplain kept in a drawer.
Earlier this year, an Anderson retrospective at the BFI offered me a chance to relive those days and reaquaint myself with his follow-up, O Lucky Man!, which I remember seeing just the once on TV, probably in the 80’s.
But first I saw The Old Crowd, Anderson’s 1980 take on an Alan Bennett play for the BBC. I had had a choice between this and a screening of Paul Tickell’s 2000 film Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry at the Horse Hospital (not – anymore at least – a horse hospital but a ‘three tiered progressive arts venue’ near Russell Square). But even though this last was attended by both Tickell and Luke Haines, who did the soundtrack, I opted for the softer chairs of the BFI.
It is possible that I saw The Old Crowd when it was first shown, but I don’t remember it. My main ‘memory’ of it was of reading Clive James’ review of it in one of his collections of TV criticism – and what I mainly remember of that was his outrage at Anderson’s explanation of his working method: that he had gone through the script and ‘taken out the jokes’.
It’s a notion that strikes me in itself as perversely funny. James was not the only naysayer, according to Anderson’s reminiscences, quoted in the BFI programme notes. Almost all the critics were hostile, occasionally ‘apopleptic’. The notes begin with Anderson questioning whether the British really have a sense of humour.
Well it may be that I don’t. The audience seemed to find The Old Crowd funny, and applauded at the end, but I felt that, to the extent that the thing was successful, it was in generating a sense of unease.
The characters are improvising a dinner party in an unfurnished house while the world falls apart outside – things have got so bad that Valentine Dyall has to carry a sword.
The servants are hired actors (or possibly something even less wholesome). An old woman upstairs, mother of the host or hostess, watches a TV showing instructional films on eye surgery. Peter Jeffrey tells an unresolved anecdote about a boy on a bus cradling a severed hand (not his own). Jill Bennett gets off with one of the ‘staff’. There’s a rubber glove in the stew and ‘rabies in Burgess Hill’; occasionally, you get glimpses of the camera crew. (People laughed at this too, perhaps recalling Mrs. Brown’s Boys.)
It’s civilization as a faltering performance: a bad play. And it is not easily distinguishable from a bad play. The seasoned performers here don’t have a great deal to work with in terms of character and dialogue and a certain desperation shows through, but I suppose this adds to the sense of what Anderson calls ‘strain, menace, disintegration’.
It certainly strips Bennett of any cosiness, which may have been why everyone was so outraged at the time. But the reception it met with here seemed to redeem it – or were the audience merely reacting to an idea that the play had been ‘misunderstood’ and was now rehabilitated? They had come prepared to laugh and were determined to do so; someone even laughed at a crack in the wall.
I felt that it was a collision of two distinctly different sensibilities that didn’t really come off, not then or now. Anderson went on to make Britannia Hospital (the third part of his ‘State of the Nation’ trilogy after If…. and O Lucky Man!) which is essentially a Carry On film with the jokes taken out. Not an improvement, it turns out.
Maybe Anderson gradually lost his sense of humour. 1973’s O Lucky Man! manages the balance between humour and horror, order and chaos, very nicely, and even at 184 minutes doesn’t outstay its welcome.
If…. was very much of its time, anticipating the 1968 student revolts in Paris, but doesn’t date because it remains largely within the hermetic world of the public school – for example, the closest we come to ‘popular music’ is a Congolese choir singing the Latin Mass. Not that the school is untouched by modernity – headmaster Peter Jeffrey is a blandly ‘progressive’ character, which doesn’t save him from a bullet in the head. Indeed, it guarantees it.
O Lucky Man!‘s hero, also called Mick Travis and played by Malcolm McDowell, is less privileged and more naive. He goes out into the ‘real’ world to sell coffee and while the world in question is that of the early 70’s it doesn’t feel entirely unfamiliar, with its radio voices talking about mental health and foreign wars.
His odyssey as a salesman begins in the lawless North, where he takes in a sex show observed by such familiar, or soon to be familiar, faces as Bill Owen, James Bolam and Michael Elphick; Warren Clarke is the MC. Wide-eyed Mick then winds up being tortured in a military facility, a procedure that is interrupted, but not really disturbed, by the arrival of the tea lady (Dandy Nichols). He escapes when the place, luckily (but alarmingly), blows up.
Then, volunteering to be a guinea pig in clinic run by mad scientist Graham Crowden, he narrowly escapes being turned into an actual pig, before returning to London and becoming involved with Helen Mirren’s slumming-it rich girl and, moreover, her father (Ralph Richardson), who is trying to set up a millionaire’s playground in an African country called Zingara, and is hoping to use a toxic substance euphemistically known as ‘honey’ to quell local resistance to this plan.
Rather suddenly becoming Richardson’s aide when the previous one falls out the office window (along with Graham Crowden, now playing a manic Scotsman) Mick finds himself doing time for his boss, before emerging from prison, an experience from which he emerges ‘educated’ and a ‘model prisoner’, and oddly more naive than when he started out.
Anderson casts the same actors in different roles (giving rise to some interesting hybrid credits – Jeremy Bulloch, who plays an unfortunate victim of Graham Crowden’s experiments, comes up as: ‘Young man – sports car/Transplant/Sandwich board’.)
The most extreme example of this is Arthur Lowe’s third appearance here. Initially he plays a pompous coffee factory official not a million miles away from Captain Mainwaring, and then a corrupt Northern mayor not dissimilar to Mainwaring’s less respectable twin brother, as whom he appears in one memorable Dad’s Army episode. His other role is that of Dr. Munda, president of Zingara – yes, Arthur Lowe blacks up.
And pulls it off, conveying the essence of the character while letting us know that, actually, it’s Arthur Lowe – he seems to be doing two accents at the same time. While this won’t wash nowadays, it adds to a certain eeriness that clings to these recurring figures, a dreamlike quality. And celebrity is the dream – in the end it is presented, ironically, as a sort of universal panacea, with Mick, after his spell in prison and failure as a ‘do-gooder’, finding his ‘happy ending’ when he is picked to star in a Lindsay Anderson film.
By the end I may have been hallucinating familiar TV faces, as I’m almost convinced that a character called Lord Belminster, initially played by Michael Medwin, is impersonated by Bill Treacher (Arthur Fowler from EastEnders) in a late scene where he reappears (if indeed, as Helen Mirren’s character insists, it is him) as a meths drinker. I can’t find any confirmation of this, but it works for me.
The music here comes from Alan Price, with the film joining him and his band in the studio as he performs songs that reflect wryly on Mick’s progress. Not an especially showy or fashionable figure, Price is probably about right for this – the songs aren’t very exciting or memorable but engaging enough to provide a solid backdrop that doesn’t disrupt the fundamental impression of ‘ordinariness’ that is crucial to the film’s success. Bowie wouldn’t have worked.
The opposite is true of the score for Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, which may be the high point of the film and which had a life of its own as a Luke Haines album before the film’s release – into a black hole. In spite of some positive reviews (‘If you don’t like this stop going to the cinema’, said the Sunday Times) the film seemed to disappear.
You can, however, get a secondhand DVD (with an unattractive cover) very cheaply on Amazon. Having missed out on the Horse Hospital, this is what I did.
Based on B.S. Johnson’s novel, published in the year O Lucky Man! came out, CMOD-E is another account of a young man ‘starting out’. But Christy doesn’t get much further than that, at least geographically speaking. He doesn’t need to – he already has it all worked out.
Nick Moran plays Malry, leaving school with a hunger for money and sex but few prospects. A bank job* having failed to work out, he ends up in a sweet factory – which, although this film is apparently set in the ’90’s, when it was made, looks to be marooned in the ’70’s.
Our pallid protagonist is possessed by a big idea about arranging his life according to the double-entry bookkeeping system, which becomes a way of avenging himself upon the world for perceived and actual slights.
To begin with his ‘credits’ are minor acts of vandalism but they escalate into terrorist acts, ending with the (accidental) detonation of a bomb on a London bus, in which incident he is fatally injured. Though by this stage he reckons himself – by his own perverse method of calculation – a millionaire.
One might have expected Malry to start out as a sympathetic character before becoming increasingly questionable, but the film doesn’t do anything quite that obvious – rather, Malry is hard to warm to throughout and you are never quite sure what to make of him, or the film.
He’s good to his Mum (Sally Anne Field), difficult as she is, and is capable of love and a healthy sex life** in his relationship with girlfriend Carol (Kate Ashfield). But he is also a mass murderer, capable of causing the deaths of thousands of random London citizens by poisoning the waters of a reservoir. His justification being that governments and businesses do far worse.
At the same time he seems too ordinary to serve as ‘hero’ or ‘villain’. He is not overtly angry but eerily complacent – we might be looking at the sociopathic underside of the new laddishness of the ’90’s (or the old laddishness of the ’70’s for that matter). Neil Stuke plays his best friend, a more ostensibly engaging incarnation of the lad – but arrogant, self-centred and empty.
There are also flashbacks to Renaissance Italy, where the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping, Fra Luca Pacioli (Marcello Mazzarella) hangs out with Leonardo Da Vinci (Mattia Sbragia). These sequences are quite well done, though never seem entirely to fit with the rest of the film, even as they add to the feeling that it is adrift in time – even the ‘modern day’ scenes seem caught in some sort of limbo between the 70’s and the new millennium.
There’s a feeling that Malry needs the internet to truly realise his ambitions, though even without it he manages to provoke a war in the Middle East. One man can make a difference, it seems.
Maybe the film’s chief strength is that it doesn’t settle – on a time, a place, a view of its character – so it retains its potential for relevance. That bus bomb, not being very effectively realised, feels like an echo of something else, past or yet to come – Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) or the 2005 London terror attacks.
‘Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals’ says a graffito at the end of O Lucky Man!, a turnaround from, and a comment on, the final shot of If…. (a snarling Mick Travis shooting into the camera). CMOD-E brings us back to the figure of the rebel, the disruptor – the difference now is that the face of rebellion is slack, nearly disinterested, and the only aspect of ‘revolution’ that survives is getting even, which is done within terms set by the system.
If my thesis is that Britannia Hospital isn’t up to the job (though maybe I should see it again) perhaps that leaves a vacancy for the third part of Lindsay Anderson’s ‘State of the Nation’ trilogy, a position CMOD-E might be considered for.
Or then again perhaps not: the position can never be filled, the trilogy never concluded, though every now and again some obscure manifestation will occur.
The latest film to claim O Lucky Man! as an influence is Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East, (written by critic Nick Pinkerton) which has Talia Ryder’s protagonist Lillian going AWOL from a school trip to Washington and falling in with various eccentrics, such as Earl Cave’s ‘art-ctivist’, Simon Rex’s white supremacist academic and a couple of black filmmakers (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri) who dress her up in period costume and star her alongside hot property Jacob Elordi, at which point these worlds start to collide and the film set turns into a massacre.
Then she winds up in a training camp for Islamic terrorists who exercise to Culture Beat’s Mr. Vain before falling amongst Christians (Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers playing an abbott). The religious stuff, which seems a bit tacked on, is perhaps the weakest element of a film that is, for the most part, as beguilingly enigmatic as its heroine.
Lillian’s main action is to steal some money (which has catastrophic consequences for several characters). Mostly, she allows herself to become a mirror for other people’s fantasies while giving nothing away herself – is this sociopathic shallowness, or a sensible survival strategy for life in an increasingly volatile USA? At the end news is coming in of a terrorist incident at a football stadium possibly caused by one of the groups Lillian has encountered – or by someone else entirely, does it even matter?
Unconcerned (or energised), she slips away while everyone else is staring at the TV.
We are, obviously, no longer in the UK. But Baudrillard said that in America the dreams of Europe are realised – in an ‘orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition and circulation’ – so perhaps this is exactly where Anderson’s trilogy should go next.
I wonder if the real story here is about the triumph of narcissism, which used to be a stage you were meant to grow out of and now is very much on the main stage, inseparable as it is from the question of identity (not just marginal identities but ‘national identity’) – identity now being the secular version of the soul. Thus the evolution of ‘Mick Travis’ into a star, and the unshakeable self-satisfaction of Christie Malry.
The Sweet East suggests a qualified optimism about this situation, with everyone free to express their own take on the situation (even if it might result in someone else being shot in the face), creating a buzz that is the hum of life itself.
Anderson’s own take on all this would have been grumpier I think but, speaking as my own main audience, I am happy to acknowledge my own narcissism. I wouldn’t even like to say what this entry is really about, except (to quote Witold Gombrowicz): me.
*A job in a bank, not a criminal act
** If the use of a vacuum cleaner in the act qualifies as ‘healthy’. By the way, an Amazon reviewer of the DVD recommends keeping it out of sight as people spotting the title may take it for porn.
Recent Comments