Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This is a brief review of "If", "This Sporting Life", "Britannia Hospital" and "O, Lucky Man!", four films by director Lindsay Anderson.One of the defining films of the British New Wave, "Sporting Life" revolves around Frank Machin (Richard Harris), a short tempered guy who becomes a star on the rugby circuit. Eschewing the style of Anderson's later films, which tended to be stylised satires, it offers a gritty portrait of a Northern England rife with failed relationships, class anxiety and human despair. As Anderson cut his teeth as a run-and-gun documentary filmmaker, the film crackles with the energy of post-war Neorealism."This Sporting Life" would prove a big influence on Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull". Replace Scorsese's boxing scenes with Anderson's frenetic rugby brawls and swap the tough-but-dim Jake LaMotta for the equally tough-but-dim Frank Machin, and you have virtually the same tale. Both also make extensive use of flashbacks, are shot in black and white, are preoccupied with masculinity and personal anguish, feature violent romances, mix poeticism with realism, follow the same narrative progression and are about men who express their inner turmoil through external violence.Where "Bull" differs from "Life" is in the former's refusal to put Jake within a larger social context. This is a direct result of a broader shift; from modernism to post-modernism, from art as social engine to art as social withdrawal. And so in Scorsese's film, Jake LaMotta essentially has no external motivation. "I didn't want to give LaMotta any motivations," Scorsese would say in interviews (not quite true; LaMotta is reduced to a Catholic body bag, a suffering Christ who exists to absorb penance for his earthly sins), before going on to state that "all motivations are cliché". "Reasons? We never discussed reasons!" he would tell the New York Times in 1980. Scorsese's dismissal, the unconscious stance of post-modernity, is chilling.But "understanding" is not necessarily "cliche", rather it is the essential component of character. La Motta's boiling anger in Scorsese's film does not make him a human being, especially once you've read how articulate and self-analysing LaMotta is in his autobiography. That makes the film, for all its power, somewhat shallow. In comparison, "Life" has more direct ties to the Neorealist movement. It portrays sporting clubs as the playthings of the wealthy, shows how club owners become Mephistophelian menaces, is resoundingly class conscious, portrays the sports community as being intertwined with the mining community, shows how celebrity and sports are seen to be a form of financial and psychological escape etc etc. And so Anderson's films are, at their best, rebellions against the inherent conservatism of British culture, akin to the plays of Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, and the contemporary working-class novels of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and David Storey, the screen adaptations of which, in the late 1950s and early 60s, ushered in a new era of British film and formed the core of what was to be known as the British New Wave.Scorsese has never spoken of "This Sporting Life", but in the late 1970s he did mention to David Sherwin that the name of his central character in "Taxi Driver", Travis Bickle, had been chosen as a homage to Mick Travis, Malcolm McDowell's character in Lindsay Anderson's "If". It should be no surprise, then, that "Taxi Driver" is essentially a remake of "If", now set in New York."If" is about life in a highly authoritarian British boarding school. We watch for an hour as teachers, prefects, priests and various other authority figures essentially make the lives of the students miserable. One young outcast called Mick Travis, however, refuses to put up with this any longer; he finds a stash of guns and, during a climactic, pseudo-fantastical sequence, guns down the school's staff from a clock tower.It's a great film, though it does, like many similar films of the era, degenerate into a simple revenge fantasy, revolutions - unashamedly cathartic - brought about by bullets and violence. Compare this to fare like "The Magdalene Sisters", Jean Vigo's "Zero De Conduit" or perhaps "Clockwork Orange" and "Zabriskie Point", where the "fantasy cliché" at the end is reversed and the "anarchist" is absorbed/enfolded/manipulated into the very fabric he lashes out at."If" found Anderson developing a new aesthetic. He employs Brechtian distance and an acerbic, satirical tone. He'd develop this style further in "Hotel Britannia" and "O, Lucky Man!", both of which feature the Mick Travis character. A precursor to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", both are also dystopian fantasies preoccupied with revolution, anarchists and abuses of state/corporate power. Attempting to portray life in a capitalist society dominated by powerful mega corporations, "O, Lucky Man!" (1973) was the more popular of the two films. "Hospital" (1982), though, was the more ambitious. Using a hospital to encapsulate the social mores and ideological underpinnings of pre-Thatcher, mid-1970s Britain, the film tackled everything from class bigotry to imperialism to problems of equity to Britain's love affair with monstrous dictators. Ironically, the film's release coincided with the "Falklands War", and so was sunk by a rise in nationalistic fervour."This Sporting Life" – 8.5/10, "If" – 8.5/10, "O, Lucky Man!" – 7.5/10, "Britannia Hospital" – 7/10

I've heard that If... and O Lucky Man were two must-see classic movies, but I regret to say I couldn't connect with either. I saw If... years ago and don't remember anything about it beyond my disappointment, but I still gave O Lucky Man a chance.A dark satire of England (as best I can tell), the movie follows the adventures of a likable and enthusiastic coffee salesman who meets a series of corrupt caricatures. While the movie aims for sharp satire, there is something half-hearted about it all. The pace is sluggish and the movie seems to wander here and there with little purpose.Some of it works. Malcolm MacDowell is quite good, and the movie perks up when Ralph Richardson is on screen. But I just couldn't keep interested.About a third of the way through my Internet went out. Had that not happened, I would have kept watching in hopes that things picked up. But I am not at all inspired to continue.I like satire, I like surrealism, I like the cast, and I love the songs by Alan Price (I have the album). But I don't like this movie.

The central idea of Lindsay Anderson's bizarre and sometimes frustrating political satire seems to be that ideals inevitably come to grief when they fall into contact with humans and human society, which are invariably corrupt, petty, stupid, selfish and cruel. This is a pretty dark message for a comedy, even one as black as this, but it helps that the main character manages to cling to his ideals for as long as he does. The story comes from McDowell's own experiences selling coffee in the 'territories' (ie. the parts of England that aren't London), but the plot runs fairly close to that of Waugh's Decline and Fall, as we follow the fortunes of a naif through the blood thirsty world of capitalism and eventually into prison and beyond. Along the way we encounter every class and type of Britisher, every UK institution and we watch as idealism crumbles in the face of pragmatism and the failings of human character. Ex-Animals keyboardist Alan Price provides often clever, sometimes intrusive or annoying sung commentary on the action and on England herself, which makes for a somewhat uneasy mix, but then the whole film is like that. Anderson pulled out all of the stops and dares the audience to put up with the results. Hollywood won't do this now, but directors in the early 70s and especially those working outside the big studios could get away with it. At almost three hours length, and with a picaresque story that is never about just one thing for more than twenty minutes, this movie is a bit of challenge to sit through.Make the effort. Movies like this don't get made anymore and we're oh such lucky men to have this one.

The opening of O Lucky Man!, a three-hour epic black-comedy on one man's journey through self-discovery in 1970's Britain, is a little odd off the bat. We see some old documentary footage on the making of coffee beans (maybe it's real, maybe not), and it leads up to some coffee farmer in a bad mustache played by Malcolm McDowell getting his hands cut off for thievery. I suppose this is to introduce McDowell's character as a coffee salesman early in the film, but see how it cuts away from this to the rock band led by Alan Price plays, in a studio, the opening title song for the film. This is not just something that will happen once, but as something of a theme, like a rocking Greek chorus (or, perhaps, like Godard's Sympathy for the Devil). But then again, this is the simplest thing about O Lucky Man! This is a complex nut to crack: on the one hand it's whimsical in its telling of Mick Travis (the same, or a variation, of the Mick Travis from If....), who starts off as a coffee salesman, then has a little bit of a road movie for the first half, then tries to become successful with a big-shot London businessman, and then after a stint in jail... becomes an actor, one supposes, much like McDowell in real life (albeit the only similarities one could see is that he sold coffee and became an actor). But on the other hand with the whimsy and dark comedy, sometimes bizarre (the "Pig-Man" at the laboratory Mick walks in on, the breastfeeding bit, the in-jokes on Clockwork Orange), sometimes political (the torture scene with the fascists), it's also an existential drama of sorts.Of sorts I mean that you come to this conclusion when the film ends. As O Lucky Man rolls along and we see a story unfold that could only happen in the conflicted 1970s. Lindsay Anderson, by way of his writer and McDowell too, is presenting us with a clear-eyed double edged sword: how does one have a free will and have fun and games with women and rock n roll and be successful in business at the same time? Mick changes by the time he's released from jail, but in those final scenes he's still unsure where his life will go. Anderson's character can do whatever he wants- float along, get rich, fade away, become a star- and all the matters, perhaps, is that he does it with a smile.McDowell is game from the get-go, and this is perhaps his most charming and (at times) subdued performance. There's little of the menace and devilish-side of his Clockwork Orange, nor that repressed revolutionary in If... Instead here it's a mix of gentlemen and Lady's Man, suave spy and lost soul, and McDowell does any and all the script asks of him with such joy and interest. That's the other curious thing: McDowell makes us really care about this guy Mick Travis, even when he seems to be heading towards real greed "at the top", which makes it easier (or just more fun) to take in awkward and surreal scenes, like when the man jumps from the window and the boss calls for a 15-second moment of silence. As it's a trip through British society as a whole, rich and poor, science and military, music and women, we need someone to bring us along, and McDowell is perfect to do it.O Lucky Man is a long trek though at three hours, which sometimes passes by like nothing at all and only a couple of times drags (the long scene of the slide-show for the African businessmen is one of these), and it is very much of its time and place (one or two of the songs are dated, though on the whole Price's songs are excellent and even moving). What makes it work for any time period or place past 1970's England is the essential conflicts and contradictions this protagonist faces, and the inventiveness of the film-making. Where else will we see facts about the number of people in the world in prison in text-scrawl during a 5-year transition? It's bold and audacious, and just clever enough to keep us grinning along the way.