Director: Lindsay Anderson
Screenplay: David Sherwin, based on the script The Crusaders by David Sherwin and John Howlett
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, Robert Swann, Peter Jeffrey
Running Time: 107 minutes
Genre: Drama, satire
The film is set in an all-male British boarding school where the pupils lives are ruled by meaningless tradition, and bullying, predatory prefects (known as "Whips") who force the younger boys (who are referred to as "scum") to act as their personal servants. The headmaster (Jeffrey) is completely ineffectual and out of touch, and the rest of the adults are either bullies, weird or ineffective or a combination of the three. Mick Travis (McDowell), Knightly (Wood) and Wallace (Warwick), three senior boys, start to rebel and soon become a problem to the staff and Whips. After a particularly brutal beating, the three boys plot violent revenge for the school's Founder's Day celebration.
Lindsay Anderson, who himself attended boarding school, had a reputation for tough, social realist films such as This Sporting Life (1963), and this film mixes gritty realism with surreal flights of fantasy. The early scenes introduce the daily life of the school, depicting the traditions, and casual cruelties that Mick and friends are rebelling against. The picture switches, seemingly randomly, between colour and black-and-white. Apparently because it was easier to film the scenes in the chapel in black-and-white rather than colour, and Anderson liked the effect and decided to use it throughout the film. There are memorably bizarre sequences, such as where McDowell flirts with a waitress (Noonan) in a cafe and they end up wrestling naked on the cafe floor impersonating tigers, and a scene where a character, who has seemingly been killed earlier, pops up in a drawer to shake hands with his supposed killers. This is very much a film about the late 1960s. It's a counterculture film, about the struggle between old and new ideas that were going on in Britain at the time. Despite it being very much a product of it's time it is still weirdly relevant today, in it's depiction of old versus young, albeit in possibly the most privileged place imaginable. The violent climax, which involves a gun battle at the school, is possibly even more disturbing now than it was at the time. This is a deeply disturbing film, that still packs a punch, but it is also very funny, and features a star-making performance from Malcolm McDowell, in his film debut.
McDowell and Anderson reunited with writer David Sherwin for two subsequent films, O Lucky Man! (1971) and Britannia Hospital (1983), in which McDowell reprised the role of Mick Travis, albeit as a very different character each time. Both of them are very well worth checking out, if you can find them.
No comments:
Post a Comment