A hand-grenade of a film : Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson s If..
Credit: Alamy
British director Lindsay Anderson wanted to shoot If…. at his own alma mater, Cheltenham College. “I liked my school,” he later wrote, despite what the 1968 film might suggest. “It was a pleasant, friendly place.” To secure permission from Cheltenham, Anderson submitted to the headmaster what his lifelong friend Gavin Lambert described as “a laundered script”.
“They sleight of handed him [with] a script that obviously didn t have a revolution at the end of it with the boys shooting the parents,” said actor Malcolm McDowell, being interviewed at the National Film Theatre in 2004.