When people complain a lot about our current school system, just tell them to watch this. Talk about being restricted from being yourself. A lot of this makes me just as annoyed and angry as Malcom McDowell. I do really like how good a job they do at showing what it was like being a teenager. You're ready to be an adult, but not fully allowed to be one yet. But at least in my high school, if you did something sort of bad you didn't get spanked by a wooden rod.

There is a big aspect of the film that I want to love, but I find issues with it as well. The switch between black and white, along with the switch between reality and fantasy don't like up. I love the concept of seeing what the main trio want and think about and then seeing what they actually get. And I love the concept of switching tone with color or lack thereof. I just don't understand why these things don't line up at all.

Perhaps I just need to watch it more times back to back and analyze better. But if it doesn't clearly matchup on a viewing, or only have one switch that has meaning, then I do think that is a drawback. However, this is still a great watch that I recommend. Kubrick himself liked it enough to cast Malcom McDowell for A Clockwork Orange, so I think you'll enjoy his performance as well.

Released in 1968, directed by Lindsay Anderson with a screenplay by David Sherwin, If.... is a story of three non-conformist schoolboys played by Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick and David Wood, who plot revenge. Organized as a series of tableaux separated by title cards, IF... spends its first half depicting the harsh rules that these boys live under at their elite public school, and the arbitrary punishments given out by senior boys, headed by the sinister Rowntree (Robert Swann) and the distant school officials. This is all in an environment of bizarre old rituals, Latin refrains, and hardly more intelligible English public school slang (and of course, it wouldn't be a classic story of British public school life without some innuendo about buggery.) In the second half of If...., as the storytelling takes on an increasingly surreal tone where we question what is real and what is fantasy, the boys and a girl from town get their hands on weapons and ultimately commit a massacre.

The 1960s was a time of war in Vietnam (and other violent conflicts brought to viewers globally by the media) and youth uprisings in the United States and France. Plus, these elite British school also featured compulsory military drill. In If...., the walls of these boys' dormitory is covered with magazine cutouts of war photographs, as if to say that in a violent world, it is no surprise if the young too made recourse to violence. In this respect it feels very much like a precursor to Aki Kaurismäki's The Match Factory Girl. If.... also reflects the new sexual freedom of 1960s Britain, and the frustration kindled in these young men who see such open sexual expression in magazines and town streets but cannot have any of it. There are a number of films from this era that document the rise of a counterculture and more open attitudes, but few are as sympathetic to these young people as this film of Anderson and Sherwin.

The only serious flaw of If.... is that the main actors are too old to convincingly play teenagers, being in their mid 20s at the time of shooting. Imagine how much more shocking the film would be if it were real sixth-formers acting, though I suppose the (few) sex scenes made this impossible. Still, If.... is deservedly a classic.