Director Lindsay Anderson’s film trilogy starring Malcolm McDowell and a host of supporting character actors is not one continuing story (or is it?), as we have come to think of trilogies being. In each film, McDowell plays a character named Michael Arnold Travis, called Mick. It is only the character’s name and portrayer that remain consistent. Just as he has three first names, Mick is presented as three separate people over the course of the trilogy. What binds the films, then, is the company of actors and crew; the name of McDowell’s character; an anti-establishment ethos; and a loose interweaving of the realistic, the fantastic, and the metaphorical.
If…. remains the most famous of the three films and was McDowell’s film debut. The title is a transformation of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—”, which had once captured the spirit of colonial British manhood and education. By 1968, however, the poem had become a symbol of the stuffy, idealistic past against which it had become de riguer to rebel. (Side note: what we know as “the sixties” really didn’t begin until 1967 or 8, when youth culture erupted in defiance of traditional mores and multiple peaceful and violent student revolutions took place throughout the Western world.)
The new title, then, is not meant to convey Kipling’s “then you’ll be a man” sentiment but more of a “If you continue to treat us this way, we will take it no longer.” The film takes place at a British boarding school, refusing to romanticize the military-style education, institutionalized homosexual power structure, and violent but petty pitting of students against each other. (For the romanticized version, read Harry Potter; for the truth, see C. S. Lewis’s clear-eyed and continuous critiques of the British school system.)
In If…., Mick and two fellow seniors unsuccessfully rebel against the abuses of their situation until they end up massacring the staff, parents, and societal leaders from the roof of the school. This was long before actual school shooters took to towers to do the same, and the famous scene, while relatively realistic, is clearly coded as one of the film’s fantasy/metaphor segments. Shockingly, before the film was released, several strikingly similar events took place in places like Paris and Prague. Lindsay Anderson and screenwriting partner David Sherwin had put their finger directly on the pulse of the times without fully knowing it. This is the basis of If….’s success, though it is considered a near-perfect film by today’s critics, who are less reactionary to the content through the lens of time. While the trilogy’s films each appeared in a separate decade, their concerns are very much of that late-sixties-to-seventies hippie culture which we have watched mellow and metastasize into yuppie and “boomer” culture.
While If…. was not intended to birth a trilogy, it did, and consequently the following two films are more tonally consistent and increasingly parodic. O Lucky Man! is easily my favorite. Here, Mick Travis is eagerly starting out in business when a series of absurd events takes him around the UK geographically as well as socioeconomically. An epic social parable in the tradition of Candide and so many others, there is something undeniably charming about Travis's increasingly bizarre financial pilgrimage around the UK. I think it comes down to the brio and audacity of the situations, the playfulness of the cinematic form, and the infectious musical interludes by Alan Price.
O Lucky Man! is so titled because of Mick’s seemingly stellar luck, which gets him promoted at epic speeds. Through the process, he quickly learns, however, that he is a replaceable cog in a corrupt machine that seeks to exploit not only him but the entire public—including his love interest, played by a hilariously young Helen Mirren. Mirren’s character is the anti-establishment element here, although she is as inside the establishment as one can get as a wealthy heiress—someone whose money and leisure create the luxury of rebellion.
The best part of this second film is that it is punctuated with scenes of Alan Price and his band in the recording studio. Their songs comment wryly on the action, putting them in the position of a Greek chorus of mop-haired pop stars. Not only does the music help break up the film into chapters, it’s really good stuff! I found myself longing to see what Price and company would have to say/sing after each episode.
The trilogy uses techniques like musical interludes, chapter titles, and random changes from color to black-and-white in the tradition of theatre legend Bertolt Brecht, whose verfremdungseffekt sought to alienate the audience from comfortably suspending disbelief with extraneous elements and undisguised technical equipment. Brecht wanted audiences to keep a firm grasp on their rational minds during his social parables, not allowing them to view the time as merely entertainment while also highlighting the fact that everything onstage was a deliberate choice meant to provoke thought and response in the audience. Of course, the social system against which Brecht was rebelling was Nazi Germany, but his ideas changed the arts forever.
The Mick Travis Trilogy winds up with the farcical Britannia Hospital (the title of which stops me from calling it The Punctuation Trilogy). We have now dealt with British society through the microcosms of education and business, and now Lindsay Anderson officially admits the ailing system to a place where it can be cured. Of course, this hospital is yet another reproduction of the world outside, as it takes on science, media, and the monarchy.
The conclusion of this trilogy about class, humanity, and morality in the revolutionary culture of 1970s England, Britannia Hospital pulls out all the stops. A brutal social satire, it raises the farcical and absurdist stakes of the prior two films, boiling over into a grotesque spectacle before simmering into the trilogy's thesis in the form of an impassioned and prescient monologue by the films' resident mad scientist, fulfilling at last the role of the Wise Fool who can see past the societal chaos of the present into the inevitable downhill race that would be the future (still in progress). By embracing its role as the summation and pinnacle of a brilliant and outrageous series, the film is destined to go so far over the top that it lands on the other side of the fence. That unleashed buffoonery makes for a weaker single film, but it is a wonderful, anarchic conclusion to the so-called Mick Travis Trilogy. I can only assume that my (now considerable) pleasure would only be enhanced by a more thorough familiarity with UK society during the era.
Just as If…. found itself more prophetic than it realized, the final film ends with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence as the only solution for the mess humans have wrought. Dr. Millar (a Frankenstein figure) lays everything on the table in the final scene, citing such hot topics as climate change, terrorism, and runaway technology. It is a perfect way to end the film—in which investigative reporter Mick Travis ends up as a disembodied head. An epic artistic achievement that continues to speak to our world today, the Mick Travis Trilogy is never conventional but always confrontational and a whole lot of fun.