If....

Scholastic Britannia, its hierarchies and tremors. "Stand up, stand up for college..." Back to class is a memory of Hitchcock's The Lodger, the sardonic senior (Malcolm McDowell) cloaks his mustache behind a scarf, it vanishes on a mirror by a Chairman Mao picture. "Crusaders," the best friend who might be Lindsay Anderson (David Wood) and the athlete (Richard Warwick), a bit slow on the uptake but beautifully tender with the delicate freshman (Rupert Webster). Against them the Whips, fey sadists enforcing "the stability of the house." The teacher (Graham Crowden) contemplates the nature of fascism, the chaplain (Geoffrey Chater) sermonizes and fondles, the headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) fancies himself a progressive. "Education in Britain is a nubile Cinderella—sparsely clad and much interfered with." Vigo's jeunes diables adjusted to the summer of '69, a forceful little hallucination. Guerrilla collages on the walls and Missa Luba on the Victrola, the fencing exercise that draws blood, a classic English style unsettled most lyrically. (The camera turned on its side so that the bullied pupil suspended over the toilet fills the horizontal frame points to the project's Nicholas Ray roots.) The goal is to cash the check Godard wrote in La Chinoise, Anderson brings real bullets to combat games. "Meat to be punished" in the gymnasium, monochromatic flashes, marching uniforms outdoors versus the nudity of the prefect's wife (Mary MacLeod) in the dormitory. The old empire is an embalmed crocodile tossed into the bonfire, the specter of revolt is a raven-haired panther (Christine Noonan) waiting at the roadside diner. After an anticipation of Kubrick's war face (Full Metal Jacket), a full-scale fusillade on Popes and Colonel Blimps and fellow inmates. "There's nothing unhealthy about that. It's a quite blameless form of existentialism." Peckinpah unmistakably absorbs the last salvo in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Cinematography by Miroslav Ondrícek. With Robert Swann, Hugh Thomas, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Anthony Nicholls, and Sean Bury.