if... (1969)

[ER]

An early entry in the school shooting genre, this dark satire (how much of it is a fantasy?) featured an early-career Malcolm McDowell setting the tone that stuck with him for most of his career, and gave the world the charming psycho Mick Travis, a character McDowell also played with arguably less vitality several years later in the equally strange but less embraceable O Lucky Man. Do you want homoerotic beatings of British public schoolboys (no), nude walks through campus by a headmaster's wife (shrug), teens living out murderous impulses without thought to the consequences (uhhh)? Ever wanted to see a school burning? This is a bold, creepy, thrilling but sometimes glacial movie that almost manages to be good and nearly seems great in retrospect.

It is even more horrifying today than it was in the '60s, when a campus massacre could be depicted with the shooters as antiheroes, and no one thought any more about it. A simpler era indeed.

Watch it while you can.

I'd give it a J on a rating scale of H to L.

[Rev. Powell]

Just bought the Criterion edition but I haven't opened it yet.

When I first saw them, I like IF... better than O LUCKY MAN! After I watched them both again twice, I preferred O LUCKY MAN! Both are superior to the third Mick Travis movie, BRITANNIA HOSPITAL.

I love the scene where the boys are waiting in the anteroom to the gym, putting on brave faces while listening to the sound of their companion getting walloped. So simple, but so effective.