If....

If.... is a 1968 British satirical drama film directed by Lindsay Anderson, set in a traditional English public school (in the UK, the term refers to a selective, fee-paying private school), where a trio of student rebels resists the school's rituals and eventually plots violent revolution.^{1 • 2} It stars Malcolm McDowell in his first major role as the anti-establishment schoolboy Mick Travis, and it won the Palme d'Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.^{3 • 4}

Production

Anderson began filming in the spring of 1968, when he was 45, working from a script he was still finishing with David Sherwin when student rebellions broke out at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Columbia University in New York.⁶ At the start of their collaboration, Anderson and Sherwin had been energized by seeing Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite again, not for its anarchistic spirit, Anderson said later, but for its "poetic method" and the way it moved between reality and fantasy without appearing to cross a frontier.⁶

Financing and casting. No British company would finance the film, and it owed its existence to American money from Paramount.⁶ It featured no well-known stars, and McDowell's role as Mick Travis was his film debut and first major role.^{2 • 8} To avoid specific contemporary references, the schoolboys wear stylized, semi-Edwardian costumes, and McDowell's Travis first appears dressed like a revolutionary from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, in a long black topcoat, wide-brimmed black hat, and black muffler across the lower half of his face.⁶

Locations. Much of the film was shot in and around Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, with most location filming at the school there and fragments of the town throughout, including the Montpellier roundabout near the school.⁷ Anderson was himself an old boy of the real college used for filming, and the film's critic-turned-director, only on his second feature after This Sporting Life (1963), brought to the material a knowledge and contempt available only from inside the system he was attacking.^{7 • 8}

Style

The film was shot by cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček, fresh from work with Miloš Forman in his native Czechoslovakia.¹ The film shifts between black-and-white and color footage in a way that appears random, blurring where fantasy ends and reality begins and highlighting the dreamlike old-fashioned quality of the boarding-school backdrop.¹ The black-and-white began by accident: the cameraman found it impossible to light long shots of the school chapel in color, and Anderson decided to film all the chapel scenes in black-and-white, then "shoot a few other scenes in black-and-white when I feel like it".⁶ The school year is structured in titled chapters, and the satire stages every ritual of the school with documentary care before detonating it.⁸

The British Board of Film Classification has consistently certified the film with the advisory "Contains strong violence".⁵

Reception and legacy

The film opened in the UK a couple of weeks before Christmas 1968, replacing Roger Vadim's Barbarella at short notice at the Plaza cinema on London's Lower Regent Street, where queues snaked down the street.² With no stars, no rock music on the soundtrack, and little advance publicity, its reputation spread largely by word of mouth, and it became the unexpected box office hit of the year, taking £40,000 in its first few weeks and quickly earning a national release.²

At Cannes it won the Palme d'Or in 1969, and it was also nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.⁴ The critic Basil Wright wrote in 1974 that it "has the unique quality of being about every public school there ever was; we all, if Old Boys, see it in our own school".¹ McDowell's performance caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick, who later cast him in A Clockwork Orange (1971) because of his role as Mick Travis.⁷

Scholarly readings. The film is widely identified with the revolutionary spirit of 1968, the year of the Paris May riots, the Prague Spring, and mass demonstrations in London and the United States.^{1 • 2} Some scholars, however, have identified it as more ambiguous and less overtly revolutionary than often claimed, and Gavin Lambert, writing in The Guardian, argued that despite the timing, If... is not a political film.^{3 • 6} The public school setting functions as a microcosm of English society: its prefectorial system mirrors class hierarchy, its combined cadet force literalizes the complicity between education and militarism, and its chapel rituals expose the relation between Christianity and social control in England's governing classes.⁸

The Mick Travis trilogy. McDowell played Mick Travis twice more for Anderson in two semi-sequels written by David Sherwin: O Lucky Man! (1973), which extends the satirical allegory into a picaresque journey through British capitalism, and Britannia Hospital (1982), which revisits the institutional critique in the context of the National Health Service.^{1 • 8} Like If...., both owed their existence to American financing, from Paramount and Warner Bros respectively.⁶

References

1. If.... (1968), British Film Institute
2. Introduction, David Buckingham, "If…. and the spirit of '68"
3. The ambiguity of the revolutionary "moment": Lindsay Anderson's If…. (1968) and the legacy of the global crisis of 1968–1975, Matthew Raymond Mason, CECC, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
4. If... , Paramount Pictures
5. If, British Board of Film Classification
6. Anarchy in the UK, Gavin Lambert, The Guardian (2002)
7. In search of the locations for Lindsay Anderson's If…., Adam Scovell, BFI
8. if.... (1968), dir. Lindsay Anderson, Sightlines
9. encyclopedia.com

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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