It provokes Thackeray’s eureka moment, one that would be familiar to the writers of Season Four of The Wire. These kids are in their last term of being in school before being spat out into a life of soldiering or shopwork or far, far worse. There’s no curriculum – at least, not one that anyone in authority gives a shit about. So . . . treat these children like adults . . . up to a point. Spend class time allowing them to talk about their lives, and pay them the courtesy of listening. If you can’t send them out into the world with reading skills and times-tables intact, at least try and encourage them to have social skills, and to treat others – and each other – with respect. Soon, Mark is very smartly diverting a Denham wind-up question about black women in Africa always being naked into a discourse about teen style and The Beatles, which smoothly becomes a plug for a simply must-see new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Genius, really. And, with the exception of a few bravura scenes of conflict and tearjerking feelgoodery, that’s your movie.
Admittedly, this is still the 1960s, so the sexual politics lags a little behind the race and class consciousness. Hence the Mark Thackeray/James Clavell Charter For The Education Of Young Women: ‘Soon boyfriends and marriage will concern you. No man likes a slut for long . . . and the competition for men on the outside is rough.’ It’s a war out there, ladies. And one doesn’t win the right to drop sprogs and wash his streak-marked undies by wearing miniskirts and waving your sanitary towels around. It’s like a red rag to a bull.
Nevertheless, we have a proto-feminist in the movie. Judy Geeson’s Pamela Dare – daring by name and by nature – is the one character other than Thackeray who is prepared to take stands about race and other principles, and, after her mother has begged Thackeray to speak to Pamela about her daughter staying out all hours, the maker of a sexual liberation speech inspired by The Pill: ‘We’re the luckiest bunch of kids, the luckiest generation. . . . We’re the first to be really free to enjoy . . .’ – a neat pause – ‘life, if we want. Without fear.’ Oh, the naivety.
The best scenes are often as much down to Clavell’s willingness to innovate and a love of pop as they are good writing. The museum visit is rendered as a montage of photos – fresh-faced kids looking happily awestruck as a new, old world is unveiled to them through the exhibits – while the wonderful theme song plays. This is where I declare another unusual fetish: for me, Lulu’s ‘To Sir, With Love’ is the best teen movie theme song ever, ever, ever. Music by Marc London, lyrics by Don Black and arrangement by one of the great unsung geniuses of British pop, Mike Leander, ‘To Sir, With Love’ is a blue-eyed soul ballad about being (platonically) in love with one’s teacher which includes the graceful, gorgeous question: ‘How do you thank someone/Who’s taken you from crayons to perfume?’
An American No. 1 in 1967, the song busts right through the potential for inappropriate child–adult romance, which was never going to be easy. The film, incidentally, pulls the same trick, making the crush that Judy Geeson’s Pamela eventually has on Thackeray into something pure and heartfelt about the gratitude you really do feel, as a kid, when an adult shows you kindness and understanding above and beyond the call of duty. We all need mentors beyond our parents, and ‘To Sir, With Love’, the song, is a fitting tribute to memories of adults who helped you when you needed it.
The opening scene on a bus is a stand-out too, despite its absence of teens. It brings me thudding back to my own childhood, and memories of shrinking with embarrassment as loud middle-aged geezerettes you’d never met made ribald jokes about sex that you didn’t entirely understand but knew, instinctively, were about the fact that you were just the new version of the never-ending sexual disappointment that was men. The loud and proudly hideous woman here is Rita Webb, another ’70s TV comedy stalwart who always played the same happy but ball-shrinking cockney harpy, made for a life of working in launderettes or on fruit and veg stalls, and long immune to insults about her looks or weight . . . a force of nature and living testament to working-class Blitz spirit and mustn’t grumble attitude.
The tale’s flashpoint comes in a nicely unexpected way. You know all this sweetness and light can’t last, and you’re expecting Pamela to lure Mark into something compromising, or grumpy old Weston to find some way to stop the new boy making him look bad. But actually, the cause of ill-feeling comes down to two letters than can still cause many grown-men to regress into foetal positions and relive all their worst adolescent nightmares . . . PE.
Admittedly, we haven’t met either a kid called Fats or the bullying PE teacher before now. But the scene of a fat kid being forced to jump a gym horse the teacher knows full well he can’t negotiate is horribly familiar. Problem is, all this Thackeray talk about his class being adults is making these boys feel responsible for each other. When Fats breaks the horse and hurts himself, instead of having a good laugh at his expense, they rise up against the pointless humiliation. Cheeky chappie and Denham sidekick Potts goes for Teach with a bit of wood. Thackeray stops him before blood is spilled, but our hero now has to make them understand why standing up to a bully is very, very wrong . . . Hey! Wait a minute! It isn’t, is it?
But such are the inequities of the education system – you can’t beat up teachers, even when they’ve really been asking for it. And the perceived reverting to type of Thackeray forces a confrontation between him and Denham for control of the group. Right back in Blackboard Jungle territory again, then.
Meanwhile, Seales’s mother dies and Thackeray finds out that the kids can’t take a wreath round because their reputations will suffer if they enter a ‘coloured’ person’s home. There’s a great close-up of Poitier, trying to process the news that, despite being so much better and brighter than these kids and their parents, he is still seen as a blight, an inferior to be tolerated at arm’s length. It’s a look Poitier had to pull a great deal in his career, but he really was the master of the form.
Thackeray’s attempts to form a society of consensus among the savages are being undermined by outside forces. In the end, he can only reassert his leadership of the herd with a right uppercut. Typical American. Once order is restored, it’s feelgood all round, courtesy of a funeral, another disco, a wonderfully camp Poitier/Geeson dance-off . . . and Mark’s pondering of whether to run off to make engines in the Midlands or continue with his missionary work in darkest Plaistow.
It’s only at movie’s end you realise that Ms Kendall is a complete red herring . . . there is no love interest. There is no shakes-her-head-and-removes-glasses, duckling-to-swan moment. No nasty Lolita threat from Pam. But, sadly, this isn’t down to subversive screenwriting. It’s because the price that Sidney Poitier paid for being the first mainstream African-American leading man was that he was never allowed to display his sexuality. An America which was still shaking itself loose of segregation could deal with one black star if he didn’t pose a sexual threat, and especially not with white women. And to be honest, Britain wasn’t any more comfortable with black sexuality in 1967. It was Poitier’s typecasting as the noble, desexualised black ‘role model’ that eventually turned the star away from acting and into directing and producing.
But, to be fair to To Sir, With Love, it didn’t offer any pat solutions to the fact that most of the kids are leaving school for unemployment and being unpaid skivvies for their parents. No judgement, either way, as to whether this liberal schooling is a good or bad idea. And Thackeray is never given a single preachifying speech. In short, all the clichés that you expect at the beginning of the film never emerge. Just a heartbreaking theme song, a London with the strange beauty it had in the 1960s, and a genuinely uplifting film about the importance of being respected and making the best of a bad lot. Very British, then, and all the better for it.
IF . . .
1968
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick, Hugh Thomas, Peter Jeffery, Arthur Lowe, Robert Swann, Christine Noonan
Dir.: Lindsay Anderson
Plot: Portrait of the E
nglish schoolboy as a young guerrilla.
Key line: ‘Don’t push us, Stephans. The day is coming.’
Released in a year of counter-cultural insurrections largely led by youth, If . . . remains the teen film that most perfectly captures the fantasy of teenage revolution. It does so by presenting a satirical and surreal view of a very specific reality: life in an English post-war Home Counties public school. The school remains nameless, but its blackly comic blend of arcane rituals, militaristic hierarchies, religious hypocrisies, physical humiliations and teenage homosexual affairs was based upon the experiences of screenwriter David Sherwin at Tonbridge School in Kent in the 1950s. The film was, intriguingly and bizarrely, first offered to American director Nicholas Ray of Rebel Without A Cause (see here) fame, a hero to new wave film-makers of the time, who had to let it go because he was having some kind of breakdown. Ray was also approached to make a Rolling Stones movie at roughly the same time.
Instead, the job went to Lindsay Anderson, who was already one of the British new wave’s most acclaimed directors through his work on his 1963 debut adaptation of Angry Young Man novel This Sporting Life. Anderson was the perfect choice: a product of an upper-class British army family stationed in India whose own rebel anger stemmed from his experiences at Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, where he somehow managed to shoot most of If . . . (two other colleges had turned down the opportunity as soon as they got wind of the movie’s themes).
Like the French new wave directors, Anderson had begun his movie life as a radical critic and worshipped at the altar of Jean Vigo, a French film-maker whose surreal schoolboy comedy short Zéro de conduite was the major influence upon Francois Truffaut’s teen new wave classic The 400 Blows (see here). For If . . ., Anderson took the revolutionary implications of Vigo and Truffaut and made them explicit: society is sick and corrupt, and, as schools are both literal and metaphorical breeding-grounds for this corruption, the best thing for all concerned would be a children’s uprising, in the form of an armed revolution. Being a French-inspired film that hit screens to great critical acclaim and commercial success as France reeled from a dramatic insurrection led by Paris students, If . . . became the film that symbolised the imperial wobbles of 1968.
The (gunpowder) plot is minimal. Three students, led by Michael ‘Mick’ Travis (McDowell), rebel against the strictures of a brutal public school in various mocking, mischievous ways. Mick swishes into school in a black hat with a scarf covering his face, and gets compared to Guy Fawkes, that most infamous of failed English revolutionaries, and the boys clip photos of big angry black men toting machine-guns out of magazines, experiment with asphyxiation by plastic bag and occasionally spout epigrams like, ‘War is the last possible creative act.’
The school is a petri-dish for the development of brutality, as the most sycophantic older students are given carte blanche to repress their peers, language is mangled into abusive labels like ‘scum’, ‘shag’ and ‘bumf’, and teachers smack or grope pupils without fear of censure. It’s all working a treat on the kids who, when left unsupervised for the odd moment, have nothing else left in their interaction locker but callous bullying and chaotic violence.
Boys must be locked up in the school by 5 p.m. and are not allowed to mix with the peasants of the town, reinforcing both the prison feel of the institution and its symbolic value as a micro-society. And, as they re-register for this winter term, the boys must line up and have their genitals inspected by the Matron. This involves dropping their trousers while she peers at their bits with a torch. If . . . was, apparently, entirely accurate about the details of public school in the 1950s and ’60s.
After Mick and Johnny (Wood) escape the school grounds for an afternoon of sex and motorbiking, and Wallace (Warwick) gets caught in an after-hours smoking session with pretty first-year Bobby Phillips (Webster), our heroes must be punished. This involves Head Boy Rowntree (Swann) taking a long run-up and caning the boys’ arses until they bleed. The most important part of this debasement ritual is that the victim must politely and respectfully thank his spanker, as boys throughout the school must always thank whoever is torturing them currently, and as we, in turn, must always thank those above us for allowing us to be exploited and humiliated by them.
After a surreal sequence of events involving war games and apologising to a dead priest who is sleeping in a drawer (watch it – it will all make sense, honest), the boys and Mick’s girl (Noonan) stumble upon a cellarful of heavy artillery. They clamber aboard the school roof and proceed to take out the faculty and assembled dignitaries with extreme prejudice. A visiting military general organises a fight-back and the public school becomes a theatre of war. The head appeals for calm and Mick’s girl shoots him in the head. The film ends with an outnumbered and outgunned Mick manically firing his weapon, and the screen fades to the unresolved, titular question.
But none of this makes If . . . a classic movie. After all, left-wing movies are notoriously dull and worthy. The bad guys and good guys here are ciphers, rather than fully imagined characters. And If . . . is rooted in ’60s notions of radical chic; almost the only music on the soundtrack is the ‘Sanctus’ theme from ‘Missa Luba’, a once-popular version of the Latin Mass based on Congolese folk songs and sung by African children, which beats you over the head with its dated and racist views of all blacks as nobly savage revolutionaries. ‘Sanctus’ even gets to soundtrack the movie’s memorably surreal and savage sexual dream sequence in a deserted monochrome café. Oh yeah . . . there are also the bits where colour suddenly turns to black and white, that most pseudish of art cinema short-cuts to symbolism.
Yet, If . . . really doesn’t date. It has something timeless, you see. It has Malcolm McDowell.
Just as he gave focus and heart to the scattershot violence of A Clockwork Orange (see here), the Yorkshire-born actor, already 25 by the time Anderson cast him in his screen debut, makes Mick Travis into the idealised Every Youth. His every gesture and expression mocks power, yet his pain and humiliation is poignantly rendered in the caning scene. He is funny, sexy, hard, vulnerable and his eyes seem to pierce through to the truth at the core of every lie. He is as iconic in the formal dress of the public schoolboy as he is as leather-jacketed revolutionary assassin. He is shot through with life and ironic loathing, and the dual innocence and cynicism needed to survive any indignity. As symbolic revolutionaries go . . . he’s pretty fucking good. And although Anderson’s directorial style is full of gorgeous compositions, energy and stark comedy, and Sherwin’s dazzling script refuses to sacrifice entertainment for propaganda, it’s McDowell who does the hard work of both making privileged children sympathetic, and making their insurrection feel like the fulfilment of the dreams of anyone who has suffered at the hands of the arbitrary wielding of power and allowed themselves to dream of murderous revenge as an act of human liberation. Which, I suspect, is absolutely everyone in a world that can’t yet shake its addiction to hierarchy and a fundamental belief that human beings are too sick and selfish to allow themselves to be truly free.
There is also a treatment of adolescent homosexuality which was entirely ahead of its time for a film made only a year after homosexuality had been decriminalised in England. The gay theme forms a kind of parallel story to Mick’s rebellion, centred around Bobby Phillips.
Phillips is passed around by the whips (the head prefects) as both their ‘scum’ (slave) and desired object of unseen sexual abuse. His blank acceptance of this miserable situation is brought to an end when he watches Mick’s friend Wallace (Warwick) giving an impromptu display of parallel bar gymnastics, and falls dreamily in love. The scene switches between Wallace’s slow-motion swoops through the air of the gym to the young boy’s captivated stare, also shot in slow motion, in what is a pretty blatant celebration of homoeroticism. Wallace and Phillips bond in a room full of phallic rifles. Anderson attempted to keep his homosexuality a secret until his death in 1994, and, if Phillips’s extremes of experience have any bearing on Anderso
n’s coming of age, this may give some insight into his complex relationship with his own sexuality.
No work of art questions the morals of using the words ‘thank you’ so relentlessly as If . . . . But I’ve given a lot of heartfelt thanks down the years to Messrs Anderson, Sherwin and McDowell for giving me the only fictional images of English revolution that I can believe in. There’s nothing else in cinema like this film, and no teen movie has ever come close to emulating its fervour. But then, no one since has had a social context to work in like 1968, or found a young actor as extraordinary as Malcolm McDowell.
KES
1969
Starring: David Bradley, Colin Welland, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Brian Glover
Dir.: Kenneth Loach
Plot: We wish we could fly. Like a bird in the sky. But we can’t.
Key line: ‘Go back to sleep, yer pig. Hog. Sow. Yer drunken bastard. Bastard, bastard, drunken pig!’
Shot on location in the Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley, this adaptation of Barry Hines’s coming-of-age novel A Kestrel For A Knave is one of British cinema’s most admired and influential films. It is shot in documentary-style with actors who don’t act like actors, and concerns the hard-knock life of Billy Casper, a working-class teen from a ’60s sink council estate whose only pleasure in his grim and hopeless existence is the training of a wild bird. Its star, David Bradley, gave a performance so rich and believable that the film still makes perfect sense to children, even though the world it depicts seems distant enough to be almost Dickensian. It’s a performance summed up by the film’s iconic promo poster: a grainy, over-exposed shot of a scruffy urchin giving a defiant two-finger salute to the whole fucking world.
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