If …
Studio: Criterion Collection
WorkNameSort: If …
In light of Columbine and Virginia Tech, it’s impossible that a movie like Lindsay Anderson’s If â?¦ would be made today. Which is too bad, because this savage satire has never been more relevant. It’s not just that the 1968 film culminates in a school massacre that earned it an X rating in its native Britain. No, unlike today’s cinematic depictions of youth violence, here the killers are heroes. This is a school shooting as a metaphor for revolution, a just uprising of the have-nots against the oppresive haves. Furthermore, the boarding school that acts as the movie’s micrososmic setting for British society is held to blame for the students’ behavior, both implicitly and explicitly, literally giving the students the tools for a mass killing and showing them how to use them. The primo featurette on this two-disc edition is a 2003 roundtable discussion for the BBC, with cast and crew reflecting on the movie’s importance and production. This is marred by the photogenic but obviously cinematically unsophisticated moderator, who can’t seem to stop flipping her hair. But Thursday’s Children (from 1954) is a touching documentary short by Anderson about a gentler school, an academy that teaches deaf children how to speak and comprehend language.
This article appears in Jul 4-10, 2007.