if.... (1968) on Netflix
Mick Travis and his friends Wallace and Johnny return to an English boys' boarding school ruled by senior prefects and distant masters. The three lower-sixth boys are non-conformists.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.4/1026,638 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
At a traditional English boys' boarding school in the late 1960s, Mick Travis returns for the Michaelmas term and shaves off the mustache he had been hiding. He, Wallace and Johnny are lower-sixth boys who refuse to conform. The Whips, upper-sixth prefects, hold authority over the other pupils and use junior boys as personal servants. The headmaster keeps his distance from the boys and the housemasters, while their housemaster, Mr. Kemp, lets the Whips enforce discipline as they please. Some masters behave bizarrely. Mick and Johnny slip off campus, steal a motorbike from a showroom and ride to a cafe, where an unnamed girl works. Wallace grows close to a younger boy, Bobby Philips. In their study, the three friends drink vodka and talk about how one man with a bullet in the right place could change the world.
Cast
- Rupert Websteras Bobby Philips - Crusader
- Michael Cadmanas Fortinbras - Whip
- Peter Sprouleas Barnes - Whip
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about if.... (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Stanley Kubrick cast Malcolm McDowell in his 1971 A Clockwork Orange after seeing his performance in If..... Unsure how to play Alex, McDowell asked Lindsay Anderson for advice, saying he drew on his If.... performance for the part.
- The British Board of Film Censors' John Trevelyan allowed the sequence of Mary MacLeod's Mrs Kemp walking naked through the school only on the condition that shots of male genitalia in the shower scene were removed.
- Because the production had only limited time in the school chapel, Lindsay Anderson shot those scenes in black and white instead of spending longer lighting them for color; he liked the effect so much that he used monochrome for other sequences too.
- Lindsay Anderson first asked Charterhouse School and then Cranleigh School for permission to film there; negotiations were going well until the schools found out what the film was about and pulled out.
- Early location shooting was done at Cheltenham College, Anderson's own old school, but the school's role was kept secret at the time under the agreement that secured permission to film there.
