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O Lucky Man is fucking ace. Although, it must be said, it is a very, very strange motion picture and not always in a good way.
I remember I got my copy from Amazon for not a great deal of money.
Here's an article-type thingy I wrote a while ago with the general intention of educating the world about this film but never got round to finishing. The bits in italics are quotes from the film;
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Director Lindsay Anderson, Screen writer David Sherwin and star Malcolm McDowell’s follow-up to the incomparable If.. (which I’m assuming you’ve all seen – if not, get the video today, it’s among the greatest films ever made), O Lucky Man! Has to be one of the most extraordinary and ambitious British films ever made, yet it’s rarely recognised as such. A wholly unusual and uncommercial film, it was a spectacular failure upon release. It was, and largely still is, considered to be too strange, too arty, excessively long (3 hours!) and too subversive. Now, being hip, you’re no doubt aware that people who criticise films for things like that are, without exception, closed minded and full of shit. There is so much of interest in O Lucky Man, so many beautiful touches, sobering touches and striking images. Though it seems too difficult and uncatorgorisable to even fit the “cult movie” niche into which If.. has fit so readily upon it’s re-release, O Lucky Man surely needs to be screened, written about and recognised a lot more than it currently is.
“How much is a building like that worth?”
“The ground rent is £800,000 a year, it cost ten times that to build, and every three months it’s value increases by 20%”
“How do you know?”
“My father owns it.”
“Really? It’s beautiful. I’d like to meet your father.”
“You’ve got lovely eyes..”
“Tell me more about your father.”
“He owns half the copper mines in the world. He’s ruthless. For every five million pounds he invests, he makes fifteen million pounds profit. In Bolivia, he drove half a million peasants off their land. They starved to death.”
“Fifteen million pounds profit…”
Trying to describe in any detail the plotline of O Lucky Man would be a pretty thankless task, but in short, it follows the exploits of Mick Travis, revolutionary schoolboy hero of If.., who, having evidently had a pretty dramatic change of heart, is training as an agent for a coffee firm and dedicating his energies to ruthlessly pursuing the capitalist dream of success. That Mick’s character is so completely inconsistent with his role in If.. (not to mention his assumed violent death at the end of that film) is one of the many, many incidences of disconcerting strangeness that makes O Lucky Man so fascinating .. have the filmmakers simply transformed Mick for the sake of it, to mess with audience expectations? Is he supposed to have undergone some kind of revelation? Or is he simply acting the ambitious young businessman, his real aims quite different (an interpretation suggested by Malcolm McDowell’s characteristically excellent performance – every line of dialogue bordering on the edge of sarcasm, every facial expression seeming to hide a smirk)? Most of the rest of the cast of If.. reappear as well (some of them several times), often playing the same characters, but always in drastically different situations.
The film takes Mick through innumerable strange situations, following a rambling, fable-like “series of events” narrative which is reminiscent of anything from The Odessey to Candide, yet seems strange and often clumsy when applied to a feature film.
Much of the film is concerned with highly effective (and surprisingly relevant) satire attacking corporate exploitation and the capitalist mentality, as well as the devastating critiques of the British establishment and class system familiar to viewers of If.. . From the Crime & Punishment plantation worker silent movie pastiche that opens the film, to the quiet exchanges of gold and napalm between an eminent industrialist and a small African nation, the politics of O Lucky Man are sharp and unflinching, easily the match of modern satires such as Wag the Dog, and perfectly (and bizarrely) in tune with the concerns of the anti-globalisation movement.
REVOLUTION IS THE OPIUM OF THE INTELLECTUALS.
Aside from this though, the film is perhaps most notable for it’s honest to god strangeness, it’s non-linear narrative allowing for a constant stream of completely inexplicable, unexplainable events and confrontations, seemingly based on a bizarre kind of dream-logic and a constant desire to confuse and disorientate the audience. All of which is highly reminiscent of David Lynch, nearly two decades before Blue Velvet. Strange characters collide and exchange cryptic dialogue in scenes of calculated awkwardness, and for a great deal of the running time the viewer remains gloriously unaware of precisely what’s going on..
This feeling of strangeness is compounded by completely gratuitous musical interludes from a flat cap and donkey jacketed 70s band (think the Strokes if they came from Lancashire and were into Elton John) and utterly ridiculous “Confessions of a Window cleaner” style shenanigans wherein Mick has cheap sex with just about every woman he meets during the course of the film .. truly, O Lucky Man! must rank as one of the most deeply odd motion pictures ever produced.
Almost inevitably, there are strong hints – subtly inserted and never elaborated upon – that the events of the film involve some sinister conspiracy or secret society, of which Mick may or may not be a member. This theme can be seen in the mysterious disappearance of Mick’s predecessor in the coffee company, the significance of the gold-lined suit given to him by the strange man who hangs around in his Lancashire lodgings and the cryptic advise which is whispered to him by almost complete strangers throughout the film (“Be sure not to die, like the dog.” “Glad to see you’ve done well for yourself, stick with the old man, you’re on a good wicket” etc.). Most of all though, this element of the film comes to light in the sequence in which Mick is – without explanation – captured by soldiers and taken to a secret military base for interrogation. He’s strapped to a chair and asked a series of increasingly puzzling questions along the line of “When did you join the Party?”, “Was your headmaster right to expel you from school?”, “Do you believe in the brotherhood of man?”.
(It’s worth mentioning as this point that Grant Morrison owes a significant debt to O Lucky Man!. King Mob’s interrogation and torture in volume one of The Invisibles repeats dialogue from the film almost word for word, and several other scenes and images in the series strongly echo those in the film. The two stories also share a similarly unusual narrative structure and focus on anti-authoritarianism, particularly with regard to the British class system – O Lucky Man!’s Sir James has more than a little in common with The Invisibles Sir Miles.)
Stylistically, the film is also quite similar to Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius books, both in terms of the non-linear narrative and the critique of 20th century Britain, but even more so in the use of weird refractions of “swinging London” clichés, and especially in the film’s frequent use of radio news broadcasts, deliberately mixing “state of the nation” reports of social problems with scenes of complete fantasy – exactly the same technique used to great effect in the Cornelius quartet.
As I used up more than my fair share of hyperbole at the start of this piece, I’ll finish it simply. You owe it to yourself to see this film. It’s a unique, amazing piece of work, and I’ll no doubt have many more observations to make about it after a few repeat screenings.
(O Lucky Man! is fairly easy to get hold of on VHS in the UK, if not through the shops then certainly through Amazon. I’m unsure about it’s availability in other countries or whather it’s out on DVD.)
THERE ARE 3,750 MILLION HUMAN BEINGS ALIVE ON OUR WORLD TODAY.
17 MILLION OF THEM ARE IN PRISON.
LEARNING TO LIVE A GOOD AND USEFUL LIFE.
BEHIND BARS…
STONE WALLS…
BECOMING BETTER. |
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