If Only....

LINDSAY ANDERSON is best known in America for If..., the study of English schoolboy life he made in 1969. When I last saw If..., the night before the world premiere of O Lucky Man!, I felt that the more sensational aspects of the film's ending -- in quasi-surrealism with a chic nihilistic attitude toward revolution -- were beginning to overshadow the basic insight and vitality found in the earlier parts of the film. Anderson's talents as a director of actors still seemed considerable, and the photographic images he produced in collaboration with the Czech cinematographer, Miroslav Ondricek, seemed as striking as when they first appeared, but the fuzzy radicalism Anderson tried to force on his film reduced If...'s impact considerably.

The same problem is a crusher for O Lucky Man! though Anderson's politics have changed. This three-hour picaresque story (again photographed by Ondricek) grew out of a semi-autobiographical comedy Malcolm McDowell, the star of the film, wrote about his early years as a traveling coffee salesman. Anderson and David Sherwin went to work on enlarging McDowell's comedy into a major work. They extended McDowell's ideas into a string of improbable events which eventually present Malcolm McDowell's success -- his rise from coffee salesman to actor -- as a paradigm for humanity. Yet, despite the writers' attempts at universalizing McDowell, the main character remains an actor, and the status of successfully-luckyman which he achieves after his long quest is his salvation only.

ORIGINALLY an idealistic go-getter who fits neatly into the commercial world, the young man becomes transformed (by a prison term), into an idealistic do-gooder. It takes nearly two hours for this first transformation to occur, but the second is much more rapid. McDowell dishes soup to derelicts, who then attack him. He becomes disillusioned. He wanders through London until he sees a man walking around Picadilly Circus wearing a sandwich board which announces open casting for a new film. He goes to the casting room, is picked out of the crowd of would-be stars by director Lindsay Anderson (playing himself), who orders him to smile. The poor boy has been so disheartened that he cannot; Anderson hits him with a copy of the script. Suddenly the scene changes to a party. McDowell has been named the star, balloons float down as if at a political convention, the film ends.

Throughout his multiple quests, McDowell encounters simplistic over-dramatizations of the evil which besets our society. The viewer encounters many of the standard film cliches which normally beset directors far below Anderson's level. The picaresque style which Anderson adopts has already been so exhausted in both film and literature as to leave little room for originality. And the major fresh idea -- generalizing the actor's experience -- smells so strong that it might as well be stale.

The film's optimism lies in the success of the young actor. This optimism extends hope to humanity, but the hope seems so facile as to be ludicrous. Lindsay Anderson said last month that he had no clear conception of exactly how the ending event grows out of the film's plot. But he said that, in his mind, the ending was tied in with Buddhist notions of satori enlightenment being achieved by being hit over the head.

A plausible idea for a film, perhaps, but not this film. Satori as the balloons float down? Malcolm McDowell said he had no idea that this was what Anderson had in mind. The film may have been doomed from the start: Anderson could not make a comedy, yet McDowell's original idea was clearly unsuited to the mammoth parable Anderson conceived.

THIS EPIC cost a lot of money. It may even be Lindsay Anderson's last film. Many directors with far more promising, if smaller, projects cannot get financing. Anderson is far more full of ideas than is this film, and McDowell can do much better work than playing a role where most of his time is spent watching things happen to him. Films which seem initially to be failures by artists we respect deserve to be looked at closely, and on their own terms. Sometimes, as we begin to understand the artist's purpose, the work seems to grow in our memory. But as I found out more and more about what Anderson's intentions were, O Lucky Man! seemed farther and farther even from what he had envisioned.

It is ironic that the underlying life-view is the weakest point in O Lucky Man! and If... because one of Anderson's major achievements was the championing of "Free Cinema," the movement that helped lead British film into social consciousness in the fifties. Anderson's movement stood for political commitment, yet at the screenings of his films that accompanied the O Lucky Man! premiere, two stood out above the rest: The White Bus, a 1966 short film about a woman who takes a bus tour of her home town (a film containing only vague social comment), and the lyric 1967 short, The Singing Lesson, in which Polish songs accompany a masterfully planned, plotless set of views of Warsaw. The two shorts are hardly ever shown to the public yet they, not the "epic" O Lucky Man!, represent Lindsay Anderson at his best.