Public schoolboys express their contempt for the institution in small acts of rebellion, but their non-conformity is greeted with harsh punishment, prompting them to adopt more extreme methods. Lindsay Anderson's surreal satirical drama, the first of three films starring Malcolm McDowell as iconoclastic anti-hero Mick Travis. With David Wood, Richard Warwick, Arthur Lowe and Graham Crowden
In the powder-keg political environment of the late sixties, Lindsay Anderson launched a pop-culture Molotov cocktail into British cinemas with his stunningly subversive If…., an anarchic vision of rebellion at a British boarding school starring Malcolm McDowell as the everyman turned guerrilla revolutionary Mick Travis. In two subsequent films—the freewheeling anti-establishment epic O Lucky Man! and the divisive gonzo comedy Britannia Hospital—Anderson and McDowell continued to trace the story of the Travis character and his outlandish adventures in a through-the-looking-glass England.
