Scum in the halls of a boarding school mark If… as a reprehensible and remarkably accurate depiction of life in the all-boys dormitories. Part of the charm found in this Malcolm McDowell-starring piece is the understanding of how ridiculous it all is. Weedy, annoying Etonian boys wandering around with thin collars and thinner hairlines, a hierarchy made up of each class and year group, partly through the schooling system and partly through their desire to be ruled. Pupils and prefects are aligned and separated in equal measure until the bubble bursts, as it inevitably and so frequently does. If… is Scum but a little higher-classed and harder to root for.
“One night we’re going to massacre you, Stephans” is the not-so-idle opening threat from the band of three hoping to run rampant over ruling parties. It is hard to root for McDowell and his followers, even if they are wanting to cause disruption to an archaic system. Uncaring teachers are at the core of that problematic system. Director Lindsay Anderson asks what would happen should the students tire of poor standings. Scum did something similar decades later, but there was unity at the heart of the wrong-doers and a clearer evil to combat. What If… hopes to showcase is a fight against a representation, not an action. Mick Travis (McDowell) and his band of supporters want to rebel against geriatric ideals that dominate their boarding school experience.
That much is shown with sincere brilliance in both the sporting portrayals of unremarkable teachers and ruthless prefects. Most chilling of all is the reflection found in the lower and upper years. That dichotomy is founded on levels before and after the schooling days. Anderson directs with that ideal in mind. Key to that is the representation of Travis as not a person but an entity for the everyman, which he misses out on here because he is a portion of an upper-living boarding school. A need to rebel is founded, but he is rebelling against himself to a certain degree. He is part of the structure, like it or not, part of the system he actively insists is not worth his while. It is not worth his while and If…, if anything, proves that and uses Travis as the constant reminder of just how warped the ideals he is smothered by are.
Whether Travis, with his necklace of teeth and almost psychotic attitude, is a “degenerate” as one prefect calls him is beside the point. Travis is the embodiment of the revolution of the working man for If…, it is just a representation that feels scuppered by a desire to be weird. Anderson’s work is still as interesting as can be expected for a cultural analysis of the late-1960s boarding houses of the time, with the religious undertones felt ever-so briefly. McDowell is as good as expected, a monumentally fearsome performance that shows flickers of what he would achieve with A Clockwork Orange. Patriotism eeks into the discourse that comes from If… in a surprising and well-rounded turn of form that sees Travis, the everyman in upper-classdom, reject the systems that keep him pressured and perplexed.
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