Peter Jeffrey – Movie Musings

Malcolm McDowell as contemptuous bitter student Mick Travis in counter-culture classic If…

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Mick Travis), Richard Warwick (Wallace), David Wood (Johnny), Christine Noonan (The Girl), Robert Swann (Rowntree), Peter Jeffrey (Headmaster), Arthur Lowe (Mr Kemp), Mona Washbourne (Matron), Ben Aris (John Thomas), Robin Askwith (Keating), Robin Davis (Machin), Rupert Webster (Bobby Phillips), Geoffrey Chater (Chaplain), Anthony Nicholls (General Denson), Graham Crowden (History Master)

Lindsay Anderson’s If…emerged in the late 1960s, at a time of furious counter-culture reaction to the establishment. Only a few months before its release, Paris had been torn by student riots against everything from the government to class discrimination, which had sparked over a month of protests and strikes that consumed every part of society. If… was released in the midst of the aftermath to this event – and managed to capture the mood of Europe with an astonishing prescience.

In an unnamed English public school, “College House” is run by the senior prefects (“Whips”) who impose a harsh discipline upon the rest of the students. The head of house (Arthur Lowe) is an easily manipulated weakling, the school headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) is a well-meaning but distant figure, most of the staff are either bizarre, creepy, disinterested or all three. Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and his friends Wallace (Richard Warwick) and Johnny (David Wood) are three persecuted lower sixth formers, who (particularly Mick) have a burning resentment for the structures and traditions for the school: a resentment that slowly builds towards outright rebellion.

Lindsay Anderson’s background was Cheltenham College followed by Oxford. Only someone so thoroughly grounded in the background of private education as that could surely have produced a public school film as furious as this one. The entire film is like a kick in the teeth. Anderson understands the cruel traditions and oppressive rules of public schools completely, and the entire film is awash with moments like this that govern school life. There is not a single, solitary moment where there appear to be any positives at all in the life at the school, or any educational benefits (the school is proudly focused on turning out “gentlemen”).

Anderson shoots all this with a careful eye for the surreal and flights of fancy. Much has been made about the black and white sequences that pepper the film. The natural light in the chapel caused the colour stock to be over-exposed, forcing Anderson to shoot the scenes there in black and white. However, Anderson loved the effect, and filled the film with scenes shot in monochrome to unsettle the audience and make them question the nature of what they are seeing. And that’s something you need to do with If…, as the film walks a fine tightrope between what is real and what is imagination.

While the film starts off grounded in a reality of cruelty and traditions, as it progresses it develops into something unusual and perverse. An extended sequence where Travis and Johnny skip school and head into town, steal a motorbike, drive to a country café and Travis seduces a Girl (Christine Noonan) becomes ever-more hyper real. Is the Girl even real? The speed of her seduction certainly seems to owe more to the boys’ adolescent fantasies of attractive women than any reality. In fact, the use of Noonan’s character (as sex object) is both a dated moment and an expression of the boys’ immaturity and fantastical longings.

The film is building of course towards the final act of rebellion: a firearms-laden shoot-out after the rebel boys discover a secret cache of automatic weapons on campus (this is in itself unlikely) and then proceed to machine gun visiting dignitaries and their oppressors from the roof of the school, who in turn return fire with their own machine guns. How much of this is real and how much is a flight of fancy from the students and from the film makers? It’s unclear – there is no consistency in the filming of this sequence. When does reality in the film start to cross over to fantasy? There are plenty of moments where this could be happening.

It comes down to the title of the film. If – is this Kiplingesque title suggesting the possibility of such things happening, or such things coming to pass in certain situations, rather than an actual reality? Anderson’s fury at the ghastliness of the class system in this country, and the institutions that promote it (the army, politicians and the church get the same short shrift) suggest a fantasy of bringing the whole system down in a violent outburst. It’s a fantasy, initially grounded in reality, that suggests a poetic realism with lashings of the surreal (most famously the reveal of the schools bullying and vile chaplain as living in a large drawer of a desk in the Headmaster’s office).

The film’s fury and counter-culture joy has the perfect lead actor in Malcolm McDowell, whose simmering, edgy anger as an actor, and chippy rage with a sneering sense of defiance, are perfect for Travis. I’m not sure if McDowell ever topped this first performance, one where he burns through every frame and brilliantly seems to embody every single cog in the system that wanted to thumb its nose at the boss (to mix some metaphors). Anderson and McDowell are clearly working in perfect sync in this film (they collaborated three more times on spiritual sequels). It’s a beautiful performance of simmering resentment and fury at the hypocrisy around him.

The film’s exploration of the injustice of the school doesn’t feel outdated at all. The brutality of fagging and caning plays is like a darkly twisted version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Robert Swann is particularly good as leading Whip Rowntree, a hypocritical patrician, and memorable sequences capture the eccentric inadequacy of the teaching, the drilling of school rules into new students (brainwashing them into continuing the pattern in the future) and the arbitrary cruelty of the Whips. Peter Jeffrey’s liberal but distant and ineffective Headmaster is a perfect Thomas Arnold parody, a man with grand ideas but no knowledge of the actual school he is running, who claims to understand the boys but knows nothing about them.

However, interestingly, it’s the rebellion itself that seems rather dated today. In the 1960s, it was easier to whole-heartedly invest our sympathies in the counter-culture rebellion of Mick and his friends – but it’s harder today, with our climate of school shootings in America (there was one the day before I watched this film), to root for our heroes carrying out an indiscriminate shooting, for all the vileness of the institutions Travis is taking on. Of course this sequence is shot with a surreal eye (and I’m not sure any of it is meant to be an expression of something that is literally true, just spiritually true), but it’s a little uncomfortable today.

But at the time, this gut punch of a picture by Anderson wouldn’t have been troubled by these doubts. It’s a brilliantly directed film, that burns with a genuine fury against the institutions it is addressing. There is virtually nothing sentimental or kind about the film – it’s entirely about kicking against the tracks. Nothing in the school is redeemable or decent, everything is corrupt and twisted. It’s a sneering, burning, angry shout of a movie that manages to avoid preaching to the audience and instead presents its hellish vision of class in this country with a witty grace. If… is a film that perfectly captures the mood of the time and understands the “small world” culture of public schools like few others: it’s an essential classic.

Jon Voight narrowly misses a train in The Odessa File

Director: Ronald Neame

Cast: Jon Voight (Peter Miller), Maximilian Schell (Eduard Roschmann), Maria Schell (Frau Miller), Mary Tamm (Sigi), Noel Willman (Franz Bayer), Derek Jacobi (Klaus Wenzer), Shmuel Rodensky (Simon Wiesenthal), Peter Jeffrey (David Porath), Klaus Löwitsch (Gustav Mackensen), Kurt Meisel (Alfred Oster), Günter Meisner (General Greifer)

One of the best thriller writers in the game is Frederick Forsyth. He never gets quite the credit he deserves, probably because he’s a very safe writer and he has certain character formulas which he reuses over again. But what his plots lack in depth, they more than make up for in the gripping intensity and extreme readability. A Forsyth plot barrels along and doesn’t let you rest for a minute.

The Odessa File is an adaptation of Forsyth’s journalistic style thriller, exploring the shady world of former Nazi war criminals, now hiding in new identities in positions of influence throughout the German republic. Set in 1963, Peter Miller (Jon Voight) is an idealistic young investigative journalist, who finds the diary of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor. Horrified by the stories of the Holocaust, Miller decides to hunt down the “Butcher of Riga” Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell playing a real war criminal), a renegade Nazi recently spotted alive by the writer shortly before his death.

The Odessa File is an episodic film that carefully follows Miller’s investigation, at first alone, later as an undercover operative for Israeli intelligence. Each scene takes us step-by-step closer towards the final target (Roschmann), which means each scene introduces new characters and locations. The one consistent note we have is Voight, who is pretty good as the driven, idealistic (and arrogant) Miller, and he holds the film together rather well. Each of the tense set-ups works well as a self-contained little story, although it does mean that the overall arc of the film is less engaging than it should be. However, you are invested in wanting the investigation to succeed.

This is partly because the black and white flashbacks to the Holocaust are surprisingly effective from a film from the 1970s. Atrocities are implied and sensitively shown, in an unsensational way, but remain very affecting. Schell’s bombastic acting style also really works as a fanatical and sadistic Nazi (it also works very well in the film’s final confrontation). Combine this with the well-written, unembellished readings from the diary (good work from Cyril Shaps as the voiceover artist) and the film very sensitively establishes its anti-Nazi credentials early on.

Where it doesn’t really work is its whole Odessa plot. The shadowy group of Nazis proves laughably easy to penetrate. The network is then blown wide open seemingly within hours. There is a sub plot about the Nazis supplying missiles to Nasser to fire at Israel which is totally unclear (it has something to do with the factory Roschmann is now running). In fact, the whole organisation’s structure is unclear and the film lacks a real face for its antagonists. The film barrels along fast enough that you don’t notice it too much when viewing it, but reflecting on it afterwards everything makes slightly less sense, and the contrivances become far more glaring.

Other than Miller (whose motives the film is deliberately obscure about) not many of the other characters get a look in. In particular the female characters are little more than ciphers or “stop reading about the Holocaust and come to bed” girlfriends. The Nazis are all pretty interchangeable, although Noel Willman brings a nice sense of menace to a Nazi fixer. The strange intermixing of real and imaginary characters (including Simon Wiesenthal) is also a little odd.

But the story is exciting enough, and Voight’s earnest performance makes you care about Miller enough, that you’ll enjoy watching it. It’s not a classic like The Day of the Jackal (a perfect cinematic expression of Forsyth’s forward motion as a writer) but it’s going to keep you entertained for a couple of hours.

SPOILERS AHEAD FROM HERE!
I also think the final revelation of Miller’s motives is bungled and undermines the anti-Nazi message. It turns out Miller is primarily motivated by concluding Rorschmann murdered his father during the war. This immediately trivialises the horrors of the Holocaust – yeah, it was bad, but you can’t expect someone to go to all this trouble to hunt a bad man for that alone can you? It’s a problem in the book as well, but at least there, more weight is given to Miller’s anger at the war. Here he drops a few lines about the evils of Nazism, but it never quite snaps together.

This is a good, decent, sharp thriller – but it has its chances to be more than that, and it misses them.