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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Disturbing and Dangerous,
By
This review is from: If... (VHS Tape)
This movie with Malcolm McDowell is a strange and bizarre piece of work, and prior to the modern day obsession with serial killers, this one is ahead of its time. I saw this film many years ago, and it still stays in my mind as a "trip." Of course being made oin l968, it is thematic for the times. It's got the music of the 60's and the styles and the language, but the character is out there, and the ending...you've got to see it to believe it. And this is many years before the Columbine massacre. All in all, though, I'd classify this movie in the dangerous realm, but interestingly provocative. Recommended!! (Not for the kiddies, though!)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Nihilist fantasy - silly story, good acting,
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This review is from: If... (DVD)
Youth desires freedom - always has, always will. This movie, with some strong acting, captures that yearning. And it has the only attractive homosexual scene (romantic rather than explicit) that I've ever happened to see. Beyond that, the story gets silly. Yes, there were some harsh boys' schools, already reformed or gone when this film was shot. As a larger social analogy, "If" attacks a society that was at worst boring, at best wonderful, but hardly evil - Britain in the Sixties could not be classified as Stalinist or Hitlerian. Beyond our teens, most of us outgrow that sweet, intense need for anarchy. We accept with some degree of grace the limitations that define the human condition, usually through love for our spouses and kids who need us to behave in responsible ways. Other individuals (including an awful lot of artistic types) never do manage to mature. Most of the immatures just continue fantasizing like juveniles - that part of myself is still drawn to this film. Other immatures collapse over time into genuine nihilism, usually through intoxicants but sometimes violence, breeding sorrow and destruction for anyone unfortunate enough to love them. Incidentally, If is an exceptionally overpriced DVD (at the time of writing) for no apparent reason beyond corporate greed. So let's machine gun the capitalist pigs.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Already a Lucky Man,
By
This review is from: If... (VHS Tape)
When i got out of the Navy and moved to Atlanta in 1972, there was a great hole-in-the-wall cinema (174 seats, one broken) called "The Film Forum". George and Mike Ellis served the best fresh popcorn in town, and ran movies you just didn't see anywhere else in the early 70's -- I first saw "The Boys in the Band", "The Ruling Class" and "Phantom of the Paradise" at the Film Forum. I saw so many great films there that i can forgive them for running "Harold & Maude" about every fifth week...In addition to two shows a night every evening of their regular feature for that week, they also ran a special $1 midnight movie on Fridays and Saturdays. (In later years, "Rocky Horror" became the midnight standard for a couple of years.) And that is where i saw "...if..." for the first time. I've been an anglophile most of my life (beginning at a rather tender age with "Swallows & Amazons"), so i had some idea of what English Public (private) School life was likely to be like, and may have understood what was happening here more quickly than some of my firends who saw it with me. In the context of what starts out as a pretty starightforward-appearing school film, Anderson & MacDowell give us a rather Marxist allegory of modern class struggle, steadily but almost imperceptibly moving from realism to a surreal parable of revolution. The final sequences, with the little old lady with the submachine gun blazing away screaming "Bastards! Bastards!", the school prefects organising the "good" (loyalist) students to fight the Revolution and pitched battle raging, have stayed with me ever since, even when i wouldn't see the film for years at a time. MacDowell (in his first real feature role) gives an incredible performance that both foreshadows and (in my opinion) *over*shadows his next role, as Alex in "A Clockwork Orange". "Clockwork" was hailed, pretty much rightly, as a view of a disintegrating society tearing itself to pieces -- "..if.." covers much the same ground, and does it better and more memorably in miniature than Kubrick's huge canvas and broad brush strokes. MacDowell's Mick Travis and his friends are pretty much decent if disaffected characters; but the System, which cannot tolerate any variances, must either grind them down or drive them to rebellion -- they choose the latter, and you will never think of school in the same way again after you see their gradual radicalisation and the result. ((Don't believe the stories about not having enough money to print the whole film in colour being the reason for several black&white scenes in the film -- the real reason is that for the scenes shot in chapel they were not able to set up lights and had to shoot by natural light, which came in through a big stain-glass window. They tried some test shots on high-speed colour stock, but the results were hopelessly grainy and the colour values shifted constantly as the angle of the sun changed. So they decided to just go ahead and use B&W for those scenes, and, when Anderson saw how the B&W footage cntrasted with the colour, he decided to use B&W at other points to keep the audience off-balance as the film slipped from realism to surrealism.))
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