Bad Lieutenant (USA, 1992)
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Starring Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Frankie Thorn, Paul Hipp

Since attracting the wrath of the BBFC with his debut feature Driller Killer, Abel Ferrara has carved out a niche as one of the most difficult and uncompromising filmmakers of our time. His forthright personality off-screen is matched only by the hard-talking, macho nature of his films, which range from the gruesome rape revenge thriller Ms. 45 to the poignant but swaggering China Girl. In Bad Lieutenant, arguably his most audacious work, he gives us a film about guilt, redemption and unbearable human suffering, constructed around one of the greatest performances of the 1990s.Bad Lieutenant is a slow-burning, often thoughtful character study scripted by Zoe Lund, a model-turned-actress who starred in Ms. 45. It follows the tortured lifestyle of an unnamed New York police lieutenant who is deeply in debt to the mob through bets made on a baseball series. On top of his gambling addiction he is also a cocaine and heroin addict, who steals drugs from crime scenes to sell on the street so he can fund his other habit, namely women. In the midst of all this, somehow being able to keep his job, he is assigned to track down two men who have brutally raped a young nun, played by Frankie Thorn.For this kind of character to be believable, you need an actor with weight, experience and a threatening screen presence - and no-one meets those criteria better than Harvey Keitel. After a relatively quiet 1980s, Keitel was experiencing a revival with critical plaudits for his work on Thelma and Louise and Bugsy, the latter of which brought him his first (and so far only) Oscar nomination. Around the same time he played Mr. White in Reservoir Dogs, a role popularly perceived as his comeback. But out of the two this is the more remarkable performance, which makes any talk of a 'comeback' seem like damning with faint praise.Keitel's performance in Bad Lieutenant is one of the best of his career, up there with his early work on Mean Streets or The Duellists. He truly and painfully inhabits the nameless Lieutenant, giving a performance of such raw, unmitigated honesty that we empathise with him even in his most unspeakable moments. We genuinely feel the torture of the lieutenant as he descends further and further into hell on the streets of New York, faced with both his growing personal problems and a case which is impossible to solve. It's a performance of blood, sweat, tears and God knows what else, and the result is both frightening and heartbreaking.In terms of Keitel's back catalogue, the film to which Bad Lieutenant is closest is Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese has almost admitted this comparison, including Bad Lieutenant on his list of Greatest Films of the 1990s. Both Travis Bickle and the Bad Lieutenant are driven, obsessive loners, who inhabit a world which is drowning in corruption and sin, and whose motivation comes from a desire to fight against the all-engulfing tide. But where Travis is positioned as God's lonely man, the Lieutenant has one foot firmly in hell and only gains complete moral conviction in the final stages of the film.Bad Lieutenant is at heart a story of Catholic redemption. Keitel is haunted by the mistakes he has made in the past, and his regrets are tempered by an admittance that it is all his fault. His bets with the mob's bookie become increasingly absurd, so that during the scene in the club the broker advises Keitel that it would be cheaper and easier just to have him killed. The Lieutenant's many years on the streets have made him incapable of forgiving people or understand the grace or mercy of God. When his nieces receive their first communion, he watches from a distance, unable to connect with either the service or the beliefs it upholds.There are a number of deeply striking sequences in Bad Lieutenant which convey the seemingly impossible prospect of redemption in the midst of all the horror unfolding on screen. The best and most extraordinary of these comes in the church, where Keitel questions the nun over her refusal to identify the men who raped her. She refuses to identify her attackers on the grounds that her rape raises the prospect of God's grace being bestowed on the two men. After she leaves, Keitel breaks down and see a vision of Christ standing in the church. He crawls along the floor, weeping and wailing, wanting to grasp the mysteries of God and forgiveness but being unable to reconcile that with his own shallow nature. It's an extraordinary scene in which the temporal and spiritual collide in a moment of pure passion and emotion, leaving the character devastated and the audience astonished.After coming out of his vision, Keitel manages to track down the two men who raped the nun, but rather than turning them in, he gives them all the money he has and puts them on the first bus out of town. He does so against his better judgement, but even while he berates himself as the bus drives away, he knows in his heart that it was the right thing to do. In these scenes the Lieutenant realises in practice the true grace and compassion of Christ, with his decision mirroring that of the nun; like Thomas in the Gospels, he believes because he has seen. The film ends with the Lieutenant being murdered in his car: what seems like a cruel accident could equally be a blessed release, with the Lieutenant finally reaching heaven having performed God's works here on Earth.Because Abel Ferrara started out as a grindhouse director, the spiritual aspects of Bad Lieutenant are not handled in a sugar-coated, airy-fairy way. Instead they come as ecstatic interludes to really brutal scenes involving nudity, violence and copious amounts of swearing, which earned the film an 18 certificate in the UK and a rare NC-17 in the States.The film contains several very realistic depictions of drug-taking. Ferrara shoots long, uninterrupted takes in which Keitel meets with his stick-thin dealer, and warms heroin on a spoon with a lighter before injecting it into his arm. In one of the very first scenes, Keitel uses a coke spoon immediately after dropping his young nephews off to school. These scenes are shot in such clinical detail as to make drug-taking about as unglamorous as you can get: as in Requiem for a Dream, the high of taking the drug is cancelled out or overridden by the immediately painful consequences.This discipline on Ferrara's part is equally present in the rape scene. Having previously made Ms. 45, Ferrara was well aware of the way such scenes would be structured in a duplicitous way: we almost tolerate the horrible violence because we are on the moral side of the victim and are goading her on to take revenge. But Bad Lieutenant doesn't fall into the kind of hideous duplicity present in I Spit On Your Grave. The rape scene focusses on the emotion of the nun and is intentionally repulsive. To reinforce the Christian element of the story, it is intercut with Christ on the cross, screaming as the nun screams. It's a shocking and original way of conveying the idea of Christ feeling every single pain and sin of mankind as He hung there on Good Friday.Most controversial of all is a scene halfway through Bad Lieutenant, in which Keitel pulls over two girls, to find that they are stoned and driving without a license. Rather than turn them in, he asks one of them to strip and the other to mimic oral sex while he masturbates outside the car. James Ferman, then-Head Censor of the BBFC, was asked on several occasions why he didn't cut that scene; he responded that it was so repulsive that no sane person could possibly find it arousing. The scene is repulsive and goes on a little too long, but it does at least reinforce the distance and desperation of the Lieutenant, and arguably a graphic sex scene with girls half his age would be the greater of two evils.There are flaws with Bad Lieutenant which prevent it from being a masterpiece. Even as we invest so deeply in Keitel's performance, we can't help wondering why he has been able to stay on the force all this time. He makes next to no effort to cover up his behaviour, and it seems a little far-fetched that even his seasoned colleagues would turn such a blind eye. As the character study deepens, the crime plot becomes almost totally peripheral, and in its weaker moments it can feel like Ferrara is testing our mettle for its own sake, seeing how much nastiness we can take before bringing back the plot to give us relief.In the end, however, Bad Lieutenant rises above these flaws as a triumphant example of how exploitation cinema can explore serious ideas, in ways which are often more insightful and frequently more provocative than its mainstream equivalents. Keitel is outstanding in the title role, and Ferrara's direction is both merciless and mesmerising. It's a very tough watch for those not familiar with Ferrara or the traditions he has espoused throughout this career. But for those who can go the distance, it is a deeply moving piece of work.

Rating:
Verdict: Slow-burning, tough and profound

Spetters (Netherlands, 1980)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Starring Hans von Tongeren, Toon Agterberg, Maarten Spanjer, Renee Soutendijk

Long before he unleashed his particular brand of filmmaking on an unsuspecting Hollywood, Paul Verhoeven was kicking up a fuss in his native Netherlands with a series of playfully provocative films. Having won acclaim for period dramas Katie Tippel and Soldier of Orange, Spetters was the film which set the tone for his later career: lambasted in the press but loved by audiences, and with Verhoeven always having the last laugh.Spetters is a coming of age film set in and around Rotterdam, which follows the stories of three young men aiming to become motocross racing champions. In the manner of all Verhoeven films, it marries full-on sex, violence and strong language with subtle and often intelligent insights into the human condition. The title epitomises this, being both slang for pretty young men and a word meaning 'splatters' - the sound the chip pan fat makes when the female lead tips it down the naked chest of a leather-clad thug.Spetters is what you would get if you put The Wild One, Rebel Without A Cause and Saturday Night Fever in a blender, and then inhaled the contents in the middle of a drunken rave. The latter is most evident in the cocky attitude of the male characters, along with a scene early on of the mechanic Eef showing off in the disco, only to be outclassed by an unnamed rival. The costumes take on elements from all these films, with Eef's penchant for leather nodding towards Marlon Brando and Rutger Hauer's perfect silver hair rivalling anything that John Travolta could produce.As you would expect from a coming of age film, much of Spetters is concerned with our male protagonists trying to score with women and coming away with a little more than bruised egos. And coming in the middle of the gross-out wave of Animal House, Porky's and Lemon Popsicle, it's only natural to anticipate that such scenes would leave a sour, guilty taste in the mouth. But such scenes are also a showcase for Verhoeven at his best: setting up a given situation, allowing things to turn a little seedy, and then defying our expectations with a cracking punch-line.Two examples in Spetters illustrate this ability. The first comes in the disco when one of the men starts chatting up a black woman. He buys her a beer and starts to stroke her leg, flirting with her in a typically unsubtle way. Despite her protestations, he puts his hand under her dress - and brings it out with a strange yellow gunk on his fingers. We grimace in disgust, only to burst into raucous laughter when the woman lifts up her dress to reveal a jar of mustard between her legs. Talk about taking precautions.The second such instance comes soon after, when two of the bikers and their respective girlfriends have snuck onto a building site to have sex. Having chosen their spots, one of the girls reveals that she is on her period - which the boyfriend grossly demonstrates by bringing up two bloody fingers. Hearing his friend moaning and panting next door, he asks the girl to fake having sex with him, and together they try to out-moan their friend. Having assumed that the other couple are having great sex, Verhoeven then cuts to a wide shot which shows said couple doing exactly the same!

But the wild antics of these men are not confined to the bedroom. The racing sequences in Spetters are shot with real energy and panache: Verhoeven gets his camera in close and uses long takes, so that when the spectacular crashes happen, we think that people are genuinely getting hurt. The sense of youthful vigour present in these scenes prevents them from becoming gratuitous: Verhoeven clearly identifies with the drives and urges of these young men, and has sought to communicate this in the most natural way he knows.Having taken its time in setting up the three main characters, Spetters really gets into gear when the main love interest arrives in the shape of Fientje, played with feisty abandon by Renée Soutendijk. She arrives inauspiciously with her brother in tow to run a fast food van in the centre of town, but over the course of the film she seduces all three men, ruining the life of Rien and Eef and changing Hans' destiny forever.The film sets up Fientje as a dangerous outsider whom the community does not accept. The only reason the police allow her and her brother to stay is because she gives the officer a 'cup of coffee' (in other words, a sexual favour). Eef's father, who is a devout Calvinist, goes so far as to brand her a "whore of Babylon". But as with Verhoeven's subsequent works, particularly The Fourth Man and Basic Instinct, the role of 'evil women' is not quite as clear cut as would first seem.Spetters, like all Verhoeven's best work, calls characters' identities into question and leaves us confused as to whom we are really rooting for. The device of seduction is employed to show just how much there is to becoming a man - in other words, there is more to finding out who you are than losing your virginity, or scoring with the best woman in town. Fientje's own motivations are up for debate: she starts as a serial maneater, a femme fatale who wants Rien's riches for a new fur coat. But in the end she is confused as the others, unsure of herself and of her fate.There is some kind of moral point in the fate of the three men. Rien is seduced by the money Fientje gets him through sponsorship, but he ends up losing the only woman he really loved. When he finally gets the chance to express it, he is unable to do so: the accident has claimed not only his ability to perform sexually, but all his accompanying confidence and self-esteem.Eef desperately wants to seduce Fientje, but the more time he spends with her, the more he becomes convinced that he is deceiving himself - a conviction which culminates in him coming out as gay and hooking up with her brother. It's an odd way to find yourself, but the end point, the realisation of identity, is the same. Meanwhile Hans, the best-endowed of the group, should be first in line to claim Fientje as his own. But being too shy and inept to pull her, he ends up making something of himself and wins her heart by seeing her as something more than a possible conquest.Naturally, all this seduction results in a lot of nudity. Sometimes the flesh-bearing is funny, such as an early sequence of Rien, Eef and Hans in the garage measuring their manhoods with a spanner. But others are deeply uncomfortable, like the very tough sequence of Eef being gang-raped in the subway after stealing from a gigolo. Even for long-term Verhoeven fans, who are used to this kind of thing, you will start to lose patience as the film tips further into lazy soft-core territory.Alongside its rampant nudity, Spetters pulls no punches when it has to get violent. Outside of the dangerous racing early in the film, there is one particularly wince-inducing moment where Rien suffers an accident that will leave him crippled. Having been hit in the face by a bag of orange peel, Rien goes flying from his bike, rolls down the verge and (in tight close up) catches his leg on a stone pillar. Having made us squirm and then laugh before, Verhoeven turns that approach on its head to effectively show the demise of this character. The end comes with Rien trundling his electric wheelchair back to the motorway to kill himself - a scene made all the more harrowing by the fact that actor Hans von Tongeren took his own life two years later.Spetters is a visceral and often hilarious comedy-drama which offers plenty in the way of thrills and spills. Like a lot of coming of age stories, its plot is far too thin, and it resorts to a few too many gross-out moments to keep us interested. But in the sections when it works, it finds Verhoeven firing on all cylinders, delivering substance in the midst of violent sleaze. It's not up there with The Fourth Man or his early work in Hollywood, but it remains good, guilty-pleasure fun.

Rating:
Verdict: Raucous and relentless

Shock Treatment (USA, 1981)
Directed by Jim Sharman
Starring Cliff De Young, Jessica Harper, Richard O'Brien, Patricia Quinn

The only thing more foolish than remaking a cult film is making a sequel to one. This idea becomes worse still when that cult film happens to be The Rocky Horror Picture Show: no matter how many of the original cast return, it wouldn't be humanly possible for lightning to strike twice. For all its initial promise and moments of hilarity, Shock Treatment is a failure both as a sequel and in its own right.Shock Treatment could be called the middle instalment of an unfinished Rocky Horror trilogy. The unproduced third instalment, Revenge of the Old Queen, would have been set on the planet of Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, with Frank N. Furter's mother (the Old Queen of the title) seeking revenge on Richard O'Brien's Riff Raff. While Brad Majors has become a Las Vegas go-go dancer and died from falling off a trapeze, Janet has become a mother through her night of passion with Frank in the first film, and brings their new-born child to this strange and twisted planet.Neither Shock Treatment nor Revenge of the Old Queen are direct sequels, retaining much of the same cast but playing different roles. Richard O'Brien and Patricia Quinn are still playing brother and sister, with Riff Raff and Magenta becoming Doctors Cosmo and Nation McKinley. Nell Campbell trades in Columbia for Nurse Ansalong, and Charles Gray's Criminologist becomes Judge Oliver Wright. They are joined by Barry Humphries, playing a Dr. Strangelove knock-off called Bert Schnick, and a pre-Young Ones Rik Mayall as 'Rest Home' Ricky. And in classic B-movie fashion, the main characters from the first film are played by different actors, with Cliff De Young taking over as Brad and Janet being played by Suspiria star Jessica Harper.Shock Treatment does attempt to tackle a number of interesting ideas surrounding the nature of television, using musical conventions to raise serious questions in a light-hearted way. To some extent it is about how advertising has come to dominate television and influence its content at the expense of serious programming. This is shown in Charles Gray's first scene, in which almost every word of his 'interview' is talked over by promo people and his disinterested host, played by Ruby Wax.The look of Shock Treatment is deliberately tacky and plastic. Everything within the TV station looks like an advert, with fake pinball smiles, garish 1950s colours and women who all resemble either air hostesses or fashion models. One song is set in a gallery of all the clichés of the American dream - the white picket fence, the perfectly sheared hedge and the man with his lawnmower. And there is the association of fast food consumption with being sane, which resembles a non-ironic mix of Monty Python's Appeal for Sanity with the New Seekers adverts for Coke.There is also an undercurrent in Shock Treatment about reality television. The population of Denton have given up their lives to become the permanent studio audience of this 24-hour TV station. Their entire existence is based around watching the lives of others, observing and obsessing over every last detail of relationships. The nature of the TV programmes such as Dentonvale reflect this voyeuristic desire; characters are committed to the asylum so that people can watch them go to pieces, all for the sake of entertainment.Sadly, all these interesting ideas end up getting lost as the film moves on. For all the subversive intelligence of O'Brien's ideas, his script and songs cannot convey them in a way which is meaningful, coherent or narratively sound. The result is a total mess which resembles channel surfing through a mixture of MTV and late-night game shows.The first and biggest problem with Shock Treatment is its story. In the case of Rocky Horror, the plot was assembled from different bits of B-movies and pushed forward by the songs: the familiarity of the references always gave you some idea of where it was going, or at least that it was going somewhere. Shock Treatment doesn't have those traditions to fall back on, and its existing plot is far too thin to stand on its own.Because the central story is so simple (Brad and Janet fall out, split and get back together), the film has to keep chucking different things into the mix to appear more sophisticated, until staying on top of it becomes as difficult as herding cats. There are too many characters on whom to focus, with both Rik Mayall and Nell Campbell being largely superfluous, and the rest are barely developed beyond suggestions of odd sexual preferences. In any case, the idea of real people being caught up in a lethal TV game show was handled better in The Running Man six years later.A related problem is that there is no strong central performance. In Rocky Horror, Tim Curry stole every scene that he was in, so that even if what was going on made no sense at all, there was a magnetism in the finished product which kept you interested. There is no such tent-pole in Shock Treatment: Cliff De Young is no Tim Curry, and he doesn't get enough screen time in either of his roles to build himself up. There is also no narrator who can come in to steer the ship: Charles Gray is shoved into the background and becomes a subplot with little bearing on events until the trite final revelation surrounding Brad and Farley.When The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 came out, Kim Newman wrote that it seemed to have been directed by someone who not only didn't make the first film, but who never actually saw it. And for all the good work that Jim Sharman did on Rocky Horror, there is a similar feeling with this film. Despite its deliberately tacky edges and madcap colour schemes, there is precious little of Rocky Horror's distinctive style remaining here. In fact, with all its 1980s fashion and emphasis on glamour, it begins to feel like a series of videos for The Human League or Michael Jackson.Then there are the musical numbers to worry about. The cast sing well enough, especially Jessica Harper in her musical debut. And there are one or two tracks which pass muster: the title track is catchy and 'Bitchin' In The Kitchen' is quite witty in combining marital frustration with household appliances. But the rest are just plain forgettable, with none of the syllable-stretching wit of O'Brien's earlier work. 'Little Black Dress' feels like an off-cut from Grease (and not in a good way), while 'Thank God I'm A Man' finds O'Brien ripping off Frank N. Furter's song from the first film.Worst of all, Shock Treatment is really quite dull. The cast clearly had a ball making it, but next to none of that fun rubs off on the people watching it. The story is too incoherent, the characters too uninvolvingly madcap, and after a while the deliberately plastic conversations between the presenters and audience becomes repetitive and tiresome. Even the prospect of Charles Gray singing and dancing - one of the highlights of the first film - isn't enough to rouse us: the sight of it just makes us wish that such an entertaining actor hadn't been so obviously wasted.Shock Treatment is a deeply disappointing misfire from Sharman and O'Brien. It was never going to match Rocky Horror on any level, and the creators deserve some credit for wanting to make something that could stand on its own and have something to say. But in the end all their efforts are in vain, with all that was magical and distinctive about Rocky Horror being mostly absent this time around. You won't need treatment after watching it, but to quote Rocky himself, it's a pretty big downer.

Rating:
Verdict: A disappointing misfire

If.... (UK, 1968)
Directed by Lindsay Anderson
Starring Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, Arthur Lowe

In selecting the greatest high school movie of all time, there are a number of different 'schools' from which to choose. We have the light-hearted nostalgia of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off; the awkward indie spirit of Napoleon Dynamite and Grosse Point Blank; the adolescent gross-out of Porky's and American Pie; and the twisted one-upmanship of Carrie and Heathers.But while all of these entries are valid and have their own merits (even Porky's), they cannot hold a candle to the overall winner: a film which combines earthy black comedy with artistic flights of fantasy, and savage satire of the establishment with personal quandaries about sex, servitude, romance and rebellion. And, as a bonus, it is the film which launched the career of Malcolm McDowell. The film is If...., the director is Lindsay Anderson, and the result is one of the greatest films of the 1960s.If.... might seem an odd choice for the greatest ever high school film when we consider the kind of schooling on which it focuses. Set in the fictional College School deep in the conservative heartlands of 1960s England, it explores the kind of education and school system which the vast majority of us will never have to endure. It's the kind of school that would serve as an ideal backdrop for a story like Goodbye Mr. Chips or The Browning Version: while capable of producing fine drama, it doesn't smack of rebellion, let alone revolution.Fortunately, If.... has both qualities in spades, and it captures all the essential elements of adolescence that have been replicated in often putrid detail by its American progeny. It manages to be aware of the intelligence and sophistication of public school while overtly and sarcastically mocking everything it stands for. The very title is an act of thinly-veiled defiance: If... is a famous poem by the staunchly patriotic Rudyard Kipling, with the extra '.' in the ellipsis being an impudent revision of the way of life it encapsulates. The final scenes in particular give new meaning to the poem's penultimate line: "Yours is the earth, and everything that's in it."Like many films of the counter-cultural period, If.... depicts the relationship between the older and younger generations as being one of bitter opposition. The older generation, embodied by the masters, parents and prefects, are entrenched in the pre-war, imperial mindset with an emphasis on serving one's country and knowing one's place. The younger boys, including Mick Travis, feel no attachment to these values, regarding them as irrelevant, out-dated, stuffy and dull.But while there is this broad divide in outlooks between the generations, there are instances of crossover on both sides. Some of the teachers harbour relatively subversive thoughts and attempt to convey them, such as Graham Crowden's history teacher who cycles right into the classroom and then proceeds to outline his own peculiar take on key historical events. The headmaster is less successful in this, calling Travis into his office and repeating the phrase "I understand" to a point of desperation.Just as not all of the teachers are straightforwardly stuffy and backward, so not all the students in If.... are didactic flag-wavers. The students who rebel are not politically motivated like their counterparts in Zabriskie Point; in the words of the headmaster, "You're not rebels. That would be too easy." Travis may have posters of Lenin and Che Guevara on his wall, but his monologues are more concerned with the beauty of freedom, and the need to live a truly meaningful and joyous life even in the shadow of a possible nuclear holocaust. He rejects and flouts all forms of authority, despising the very essence of anything which inhibits him from free expression and the passionate act of being himself.One aspect of free expression on which If.... focuses is sexual liberation. In one of the film's more surreal segments, Travis and one of his friends steal a motorbike and drive some distance to a roadside café. Once there, they order coffee, Travis plays some classical music on the jukebox and, without any notice or questions asked, begins an affair with the waitress. In other section, a young boy spots Wallace training on the parallel bars, and they develop a homoerotic relationship. Anderson may not be encouraging free love in the now-clichéd manner of hippie movies, but he uses these scenes to reinforce his point about needing a society shaped by the people, rather than the other way around.If.... is Anderson's stand against the traditional values of England - everything from duty and propriety to the barmy traditions of private clubs. The film is part of his continued attempt to destroy the post-war malaise of British cinema, just as his political heroes had tried to destroy it through guns and social democracy. Throughout the film we see bastions of the community attempting to drill their students with values of 'honour', 'duty' and 'fighting the good fight', only for these ideas to crumble into absurdity and insignificance when applied.Two examples perfectly illustrate this point. The first comes at the three-quarter mark, where the chaplain gives a sermon on fighting for Christ, and how desertion or failure to fulfil duty is the greatest and most unforgivable of sins. But less than ten minutes later, he is cornered by Malcolm McDowell during the war games and becomes a quivering coward, terrified by the prospect of there being real bullets in Travis' gun. At the end of the film a visiting General gives a speech about how "the cynics" have nothing to replace the old values which they criticise. But what starts as convincing soon descends into the absurd: he speaks about discipline, only for his public to stumble into the aisles in blind panic while the stage beneath him goes up in flames.The film is built around the central performance of Malcolm McDowell, who is little short of magnificent. It's a very close rival for his work in A Clockwork Orange, which could be described as the more cynical cousin of this film. Stanley Kubrick and Lindsay Anderson may direct in totally different ways, but they both use McDowell superbly, utilising those huge, puppy-dog eyes, perfect hair, curled lips and upstart demeanour. And then there is the voice, which is note-perfect when delivering his poetic musings and savage put-downs to the uptight prefects.There is a further comparison with Kubrick in the idea of discipline and degradation being used by the establishment in a manner which ultimately destroys it. The brutal scene of Travis being caned repeatedly in the gym is like an artier, moodier version of the boot camp scenes in Full Metal Jacket. Travis may not take on the psychotic quality of Private Pile, but his experience of brutality makes him more determined than ever to fight against the system and reclaim his identity.The visuals of If.... are distinctive in their combination of colour and monochrome cinematography. When the film was first released, people read into the black-and-white sections as having some deeper artistic meaning, with a variety of theories being posited. In fact, these sections exist for the simple reason that Anderson ran out of money - or, as in the chapels scenes, it was quicker and easier to light for monochrome on a tight production schedule. Whichever is the more true, the film benefits from its unique look - it's a happy accident which reinforces the artistic and personal tone even if it doesn't bring much in the way of meaning.If.... remains as incendiary and as perfectly formed as it was over 40 years ago. Anderson's masterful yet understated direction gifts us with a series of properly believable performances, and his balanced of the natural and the surreal is effortless, particularly in the final shootout. While the revolutionary zeal and optimism surrounding it have long since faded, the film remains both a truthful product of its time and a work of timeless genius. It is an extraordinary piece of British cinema and is essential viewing.

Rating:
Verdict: Magn-IF....-icent