This sprawling, surrealist comedy serves as an allegory for the pitfalls of capitalism, as it follows the adventures of a young coffee salesman in modern Britain.
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.
