If...

(Lindsay Anderson, UK 1968, 111 min., DCP)

This disturbing drama of repression and revolution at an English boarding school is director Lindsay Anderson's timely social satire on the student rebellion movements that were rocking the world (the film opened just months after the May 1968 French student uprisings). Malcolm McDowell's galvanizing screen debut as the insolent antihero leader Mick Travis now seems like a dry run for his role three years later in A Clockwork Orange. A black comedy with a truly savage edge, the film at once captures the zeitgeist and smartly comments on it.