Overview
If.... (stylised in lowercase) is a 1968 British satirical drama film produced and directed by Lindsay Anderson, and starring Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, and also starring Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, and Robert Swann. A satire of English public school life, the film follows a group of pupils who stage a savage insurrection at a boys' boarding school. The film was the subject of controversy at the time of its release, receiving an X certificate for its depictions of violence.
If.... won the Palme d'Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.
In 1999, the British Film Institute named it the 12th greatest British film of the 20th century; in 2004, the magazine Total Film named it the 16th greatest British film of all time. In 2017 a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine ranked it the 9th best British film ever.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 90% approval rating based on 49 reviews, with an average score of 7.9/10. According to the site's critical consensus, "Incendiary, subversive, and darkly humorous, If.... is a landmark of British countercultural cinema."
Plot
The pupils return after the summer for a new Michaelmas term at a traditional British public school for boys in the late 1960s. Mick Travis arrives hiding his moustache, which he quickly shaves off. He, Wallace, and Knightly are three non-conformist boys in the lower sixth form, their penultimate year. They are watched and persecuted by the "Whips", upper sixth-formers given authority as prefects over the other boys. The junior boys are made to act as personal servants for the Whips, who discuss them as sex objects.
The headmaster is remote from the boys and the housemasters. The protagonists' housemaster, Mr. Kemp, is easily manipulated by the Whips into giving them free rein in enforcing discipline. Some schoolmasters are shown behaving bizarrely.
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