If...

The first part of Lindsay Anderson’s film was so vivid, it was as if I had seen it just last month. The group portrait of English public school boys was indelible -- not just re-seeing Malcolm McDowell in his debut (after recently seeing him as Ari’s ex-boss on Entourage.) Equally impressive was the delineation of the school’s class structure, as an epitome of British society as a whole. And the film certainly took me back to the days when the “Missa Luba” was one of my most-played records, even though the music plays a surprisingly small role in the picture itself. But in total the movie is a sum of disparate parts that adds up to less than a whole. The line between reality and fantasy -- and between satire and violence -- is too wobbly. I guess you could blame the concluding but inconclusive hail of gunfire on the year of the film’s release, when insurrection and revolution seemed like live and not altogether unwelcome options. Here youthful anarchy has a different tone than in Vigo’s Zero de Conduite. Definitely worth seeing for the good parts, this is not a film I would recommend as a classic, despite the deluxe two-disk Criterion Collection treatment. (1968, dvd, r.) *7-*