Enlightened Mischief
By JAY COCKS
O LUCKY MAN!
This nearly overwhelming film is part epic allegory, part lighthearted Brechtian morality play and part three-ring circus. It is the saga of a young English coffee salesman (Malcolm McDowell), a description as precise and inadequate as saying that Gulliver's Travels concerns the misadventures of a ship's surgeon. In O Lucky Man! Lindsay Anderson calls on all the resources of the cinema, challenges them and extends them. The movie is brash, eclectic, innovative, deeply personal and elusive--all at once. It is a transcendent movie; perhaps even a great one.
The story is a sort of streamlined Pilgrim's Progress shot through with vigorous satire. McDowell, a peerless young actor of apparently unlimited range, appears as Mick Travis, who when last seen was shooting up his prep school common in Anderson's //. Here again, Travis is afloat in a society that is both recognizable and out-of-joint, where business meetings can turn into blase conferences on genocide. Mick's struggle to make a success in such an unbalanced world forms the classic curriculum for his picaresque education.
His journey is accompanied by some jauntily savage songs provided by the remarkable Alan Price, who, besides appearing as an actor, often comes onscreen to provide musical comment and counterpoint. "So smile while you're making it./ Laugh while you're taking it./ Even though you're faking it,/ Nobody's gonna know," Price sings at one point, as Mick, with his radiant smile and infinite belief in his own good fortune, tries to charm and brazen his way to the top. He is outwitted and undone at every turn, tortured in an atomic plant, made the scapegoat in an elaborately criminal international cartel.
Even when Mick devotes his life to charity, he is confounded.
Bedraggled, without hope and apparently out of luck, he decides to answer a casting call. The director, who is Lindsay Anderson, photographs him (a clapper board reads: "O Lucky Man!
Scene 755, Take 1"), coaches him holding schoolbooks and a machine gun (echoes of I), then tells him to smile.
Mick will not. "What's there to smile about?" he demands. Anderson smacks him on the head with a script, an ironic rendering of one of those moments of illumination in Zen. The corners of Mick's mouth twitch upward into the beginnings of a grin: he understands what there is to smile about.
Everything in the film could be considered a kind of flashback from this one moment. Mick reassesses his recent life with the new knowledge that the only way to deal with absurdity is to recognize it. Winning that insight, he may be again the lucky man.
Such a summary cannot do justice to the complexities--and occasional confusions--of the film, does not convey Anderson's stylistic virtuosity, his sustained energy, his eagerness to explore, to take chances. Besides the direct presence of Price and his musicians, an idea that appears to derive directly from the stage and Anderson's considerable work in the theater over the past decade, the very rhythm of O Lucky Man! is unique, with scenes bridged by blank black frames and sometimes interrupted or punctuated by them. Without being fussy, the film has a reserved beauty, a nearly voluptuous grace, like the work of John Ford, a director Anderson especially admires (and whose picture hangs on the wall of the warden's office during a prison sequence).
Anderson's taste in satire is sometimes a shade too obvious, and he shares with Ford a sentimentality that can play him false, but the very impact and size of the movie (about three hours long) seem to dwarf even its mistakes. What will be remembered is not the occasional false steps but the prevailing tone of high spirits and ferocious humor in such scenes as a sex show behind a respectable hotel, or a trade meeting with an emerging African nation that manages to be both hilarious and horrifying.
Besides McDowell, the superb cast includes Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe, Helen Mirren, Dandy Nichols, Mona Washbourne and Graham Crowden, each of whom appears in at least two different roles. This is done to underscore the prevailing sense of strangeness, to give everything an eerie continuity and, quite characteristically and properly, just for the merry hell of it.
sbJay Cocks
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