I really wanted to like this movie, but in the end couldn't even bear to watch it to the end. The one redeeming feature was Leonard Rossiter and I found myself wondering whether even he would have doubted his sanity in signing up to this when he saw the final rushes. Malcolm McDowell, whom I considered to be a good actor, was reduced to little more than a 'Carry-On' performance. The juxtaposition of farce and horror to me seemed miscalculated. Just dreadful and one I'm trying to forget... Tip: don't watch this whilst consuming food.

Anderson attempts a rather heavy handed allegorical tale, his vision of a dysfunctional Albion. The working class flexing its muscle through organised labour, a pragmatic middle class, kow-towing to labour and the aristocracy, a ruling class oblivious to the chaos surrounding it, and a prying, amoral media. Anderson seems to have gone beyond his critique of capitalist imperialism and found himself buffeted from all sides by the chaos that was Britain in the early 1980s. His major coup is seeing the future of humankind as merely a pawn in the oncoming information industry. The film was made towards the end of the first Thatcher government's electoral victory, when Britain was still in the grip of industrial conflict, and the there was still a debate about the possibilities of socialism. Nowadays this seems very dated and almost obscene, and its hard to imagine that the ongoing conflict betweenmanagement and labour was very real back then. However, because of Andersons obsession with class conflict, the story gets completely lost, and I found it hard to maintain interest in a story that had very little to empathise with. UK Films such as Gregory's Girl, Chariots of Fire and Ghandi were the big hitters, British directors like Ridley Scott were making Blade Runner. Anderson, like many others, was on the wrong side of the fence culturally and politically by the 1980s. People wanted something more than sledgehammer politics. However, this is a loveletter to some of the great TV actors of the 1970s and 1980s. Leonard Rossitor is great, Robin Asquith more than holds his own. There's Joan Plowwright, Dandy Nichols, and Richard Griffiths. Alan Bates makes an appearance as does Arthur Lowe. Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. The list is endless. So, a poor movie, but worth a watch just to catch the best of British acting from the era.

This is a brief review of "If", "This Sporting Life", "Britannia Hospital" and "O, Lucky Man!", four films by director Lindsay Anderson.One of the defining films of the British New Wave, "Sporting Life" revolves around Frank Machin (Richard Harris), a short tempered guy who becomes a star on the rugby circuit. Eschewing the style of Anderson's later films, which tended to be stylised satires, it offers a gritty portrait of a Northern England rife with failed relationships, class anxiety and human despair. As Anderson cut his teeth as a run-and-gun documentary filmmaker, the film crackles with the energy of post-war neorealism."This Sporting Life" would prove a big influence on Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull". Replace Scorsese's boxing scenes with Anderson's urgent rugby brawls and swap the tough-but-dim Jake LaMotta for the equally tough-but-dim Frank Machin, and you have virtually the same tale. Both also make extensive use of flashbacks, are shot in black and white, are preoccupied with masculinity and personal anguish, feature violent romances, mix poeticism with realism, follow the same narrative progression and are about men who express their inner turmoil through external violence.Where "Bull" differs from "Life" is in the former's refusal to put Jake within a larger social context. This is a direct result of a broader shift; from modernism to post-modernism, from art as social engine to art as social withdrawal. In Scorsese's film, Jake LaMotta essentially has no external motivation. When at the end of the film LaMotta strikes a wall and yells "Why? Why?", Scorsese is equally clueless. "I didn't want to give LaMotta any motivations," Scorsese would say in interviews (not quite true; LaMotta is reduced to a Catholic body bag, a suffering Christ who exists to absorb penance for his earthly sins), before going on to state that "all motivations are cliché". "Reasons? We never discussed reasons!" he would tell the New York Times in 1980. Scorsese's dismissal, the unconscious stance of post-modernity, is chilling.But "understanding" is not necessarily "cliche", rather it is the essential component of character. La Motta's boiling anger in Scorsese's film does not make him a human being, especially once you've read how articulate and self-analysing LaMotta is in his autobiography. That makes the film, for all its power, somewhat shallow. Compare this to "Life", which has more direct and urgent ties to the neorealist movement. It portrays sporting clubs as the playthings of the wealthy, shows how club owners become Mephistophelian menaces, is resoundingly class conscious, portrays the sports community as being intertwined with the mining community, shows how celebrity and sports are seen to be a form of financial and psychological escape etc etc. And so Anderson's films are, at their best, rebellions against the inherent conservatism of British culture, akin to the plays of Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, and the contemporary working-class novels of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and David Storey, the screen adaptations of which, in the late 1950s and early 60s, ushered in a new era of British film and formed the core of what was to be known as the British New Wave.Scorsese's film, however, functions more as a pastiche of New Wave aesthetics. He, like many Hollywood directors of the 1970s, essentially takes the sexy blood/violence of the European realists and new wavers, and then drops all political context.Scorsese has never spoken of "This Sporting Life", but in the late 1970s he did mention to David Sherwin that the name of his central character in "Taxi Driver", Travis Bickle, had been chosen as a homage to Mick Travis, Malcolm McDowell's character in Lindsay Anderson's "If". It should be no surprise, then, that "Taxi Driver" is essentially a remake of "If", now set in New York."If" is about life in a highly authoritarian British boarding school. We watch for an hour as teachers, prefects, priests and various other authority figures essentially make the lives of the students miserable. One young man called Mick Travis, however, refuses to put up with this any longer; he finds a stash of guns and, during a climactic, pseudo-fantastical sequence, guns down the school's staff from a clock tower.It's a great film, though it does, like many similar films of the era, degenerate into a simple revenge fantasy, revolutions - unashamedly cathartic - brought about by bullets and violence. Compare this to fare like "The Magdalene Sisters", Jean Vigo's "Zero De Conduit" or perhaps "Clockwork Orange" and "Zabriskie Point", where the "fantasy cliché" at the end is reversed and the "anarchist" is absorbed/enfolded/manipulated into the very fabric he lashes out at."If" found Anderson developing a new aesthetic. He employs Brechtian distance, cartoonish antics and an acerbic, satirical tone. He'd develop this style further in "Hotel Britannia" and "O, Lucky Man!", both of which feature the Mick Travis character. A precursor to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", both are also dystopian fantasies preoccupied with revolution, anarchists and abuses of state/corporate power. Attempting to portray life in a capitalist society dominated by powerful mega corporations, "O, Lucky Man!" (1973) was the more popular of the two films. "Hospital" (1982), though, was the more ambitious. Using a hospital to encapsulate pre-Thatcher, mid-1970s Britain, the film tackled everything from class bigotry to imperialism to problems of equity to Britain's love affair with monstrous dictators. The film's release coincided with the "Falklands War", and so was sunk by a rise in nationalistic fervour."This Sporting Life" – 8.5/10, "If" – 8.5/10, "O, Lucky Man!" – 7.5/10, "Britannia Hospital" – 7/10

This is the last entry in The Mick Travis Trilogy (also comprising IF.... [1968] and O LUCKY MAN! [1973], all directed by Anderson, written by David Sherwin and starring Malcolm McDowell as Travis) and the only one I hadn't watched before; ironically, the film made it to DVD before the others which are still M.I.A. (being owned by the majors, Paramount and Warners respectively) though both have been rumored as being "in preparation" for what seems like forever!! As with HELL IS A CITY (1960) and THE CRIMINAL (1960), I had my eyes on the Anchor Bay DVD of this title for the longest time but only now have I finally taken the plunge to acquire it - though, in its case, this had more to do with the fact that the film was largely considered a failure, certainly in comparison with its more highly-regarded predecessors! Actually, it comes off as quite underrated and its satire on British society at large - with the titular hospital serving more or less as a microcosm of all that was not well with the country during the early 80s - is just as harsh, if admittedly somewhat hit-and-miss (the "Frankenstein" scenes, for instance, and the fact that royal representatives are played by a midget and a man in drag are more tasteless than anything else!). The thing is, however, that the film became part of the trilogy by accident and, in fact, McDowell isn't really the lead character - so that it's not quite as focused as IF.... and O LUCKY MAN!, and even borrows elements from both of them (the revolutionary aspect from the former and the bizarre experiments, mentioned above, from the latter) which aren't as successful this time around! Still, it's very funny - for those who can take its unbridled savagery - along the way and the cast is brimming with talented character actors (Leonard Rossiter, Graham Crowden, Joan Plowright, Jill Bennett, Peter Jeffrey, Brian Pettifer, Dandy Nichols, Richard Griffiths, Brian Glover, Robbie Coltrane, uncredited bits by Alan Bates and Arthur Lowe, and even unlikely appearances - in fairly important roles - by Robin Askwith and Mark Hamill!), many of whom had already appeared in the two earlier Mick Travis films. Unfortunately, the score by Alan Price (ex-member of The Animals) - whose O LUCKY MAN! soundtrack, including a number of songs, had been one of its major assets - is underwhelming and, typical of old British films, the dialogue is hard to grasp sometimes due to the limited sound recording and the actors' heavy accents!