(It's hard to "spoil" a movie whose denouement is the main thing everyone knows about the movie, but marking this as "spoiling" allows me to mention whatever I please.)
I missed this film when it first came out, so I am now seeing it on DVD after nearly 50 years. Possibly it seemed totally daring to the critics of the time, a harbinger of youth revolution. Today, to me, it seems dated, narrow, and sad.
Time hasn't served it well, and I don't refer only to the fact that we have now seen a lot of actual mass school shootings and are less likely to get excited about them. Nor to the fact that repression of the children of the elites and wannabes in UK "public schools" is not so much a contemporary issue.
Possibly the world of 1968 was not so quick as we are now to notice that, hey, every named character in this film is an obnoxious misogynistic white male twit! I can testify personally that there was a period of a few years when misogynistic white male twits could get a lot of attention leading protests on US campuses. Actually one could take this film as a warning that people like Travis and his followers are to be shunned by persons serious about change, but if that was its message it gets lost.
Particularly in the second half a lot of apparently surrealistic elements start to appear. When a clergyman who also leads military training was produced from a large drawer, this set me wondering about other events and images. Did an instructor's wife actually wander naked through the halls? Did Travis actually steal a motorcycle at all, or throw a crocodile on a bonfire? Or are these Travis's fantasies? And if so, is the whole concluding scene of violence maybe really just another fantasy, something that might happen "If...." ? (This would explain how the nameless "The Girl" ends up on the scene. I'm not confident that she even exists.) No doubt all these questions are answered in commentary or interviews somewhere, and if I were a professional I would look them up, but I'm only an amateur reporting on my impressions.
But it doesn't terribly matter whether these are Travis's fantasies or the filmmakers' fantasies. The question is how revelatory or instructive or inspiring or artistically attractive they are. And frankly after it all I'm not terribly impressed.
I would be more impressed if the 13-year-old enslaved "scum" had picked up arms to defend themselves against their manifest oppression, torture, and degradation, but that isn't the story. Instead, you have Travis. We learn nothing of his family or backstory. He is contemptuous of the whips and faculty, who deserve contempt, but what has he to offer himself other than some tired snippets of laziness passing for anarchism, about how "war and violence are the only creative acts" and "one man with a gun can change history", and a blood pact with his mates which is about what you would expect of Tom Sawyer playing Red Indians. Why does he stay in the damned school at all? If he left and tried to deal with the issues of his actual life that would also be more impressive. But he strikes me as someone with a sense of ruling- class entitlement just as monumental as that of any of the oppressors, who feels that he should be allowed to just wallow in inaction and play on someone else's dime, and, when he gets whacked on the bum a few times (not exactly the worst thing to happen to anyone in the year of the My Lai massacre), wants to just kill everyone in sight for it.
So, to be fair, maybe the makers are entirely aware that Travis's "Crusaders" are as horrible examples as the powers and principalities of the school. Maybe they know that the dilettantish so-called resistance grounded in pique of these children of the ruling class is as much a target for "satire" as the institutions of privilege. Maybe. But they don't make it clear to me that they do. The Monty Python troupe satirized this whole ground a lot better, and apart from satire, what's left here?
I missed this film when it first came out, so I am now seeing it on DVD after nearly 50 years. Possibly it seemed totally daring to the critics of the time, a harbinger of youth revolution. Today, to me, it seems dated, narrow, and sad.
Time hasn't served it well, and I don't refer only to the fact that we have now seen a lot of actual mass school shootings and are less likely to get excited about them. Nor to the fact that repression of the children of the elites and wannabes in UK "public schools" is not so much a contemporary issue.
Possibly the world of 1968 was not so quick as we are now to notice that, hey, every named character in this film is an obnoxious misogynistic white male twit! I can testify personally that there was a period of a few years when misogynistic white male twits could get a lot of attention leading protests on US campuses. Actually one could take this film as a warning that people like Travis and his followers are to be shunned by persons serious about change, but if that was its message it gets lost.
Particularly in the second half a lot of apparently surrealistic elements start to appear. When a clergyman who also leads military training was produced from a large drawer, this set me wondering about other events and images. Did an instructor's wife actually wander naked through the halls? Did Travis actually steal a motorcycle at all, or throw a crocodile on a bonfire? Or are these Travis's fantasies? And if so, is the whole concluding scene of violence maybe really just another fantasy, something that might happen "If...." ? (This would explain how the nameless "The Girl" ends up on the scene. I'm not confident that she even exists.) No doubt all these questions are answered in commentary or interviews somewhere, and if I were a professional I would look them up, but I'm only an amateur reporting on my impressions.
But it doesn't terribly matter whether these are Travis's fantasies or the filmmakers' fantasies. The question is how revelatory or instructive or inspiring or artistically attractive they are. And frankly after it all I'm not terribly impressed.
I would be more impressed if the 13-year-old enslaved "scum" had picked up arms to defend themselves against their manifest oppression, torture, and degradation, but that isn't the story. Instead, you have Travis. We learn nothing of his family or backstory. He is contemptuous of the whips and faculty, who deserve contempt, but what has he to offer himself other than some tired snippets of laziness passing for anarchism, about how "war and violence are the only creative acts" and "one man with a gun can change history", and a blood pact with his mates which is about what you would expect of Tom Sawyer playing Red Indians. Why does he stay in the damned school at all? If he left and tried to deal with the issues of his actual life that would also be more impressive. But he strikes me as someone with a sense of ruling- class entitlement just as monumental as that of any of the oppressors, who feels that he should be allowed to just wallow in inaction and play on someone else's dime, and, when he gets whacked on the bum a few times (not exactly the worst thing to happen to anyone in the year of the My Lai massacre), wants to just kill everyone in sight for it.
So, to be fair, maybe the makers are entirely aware that Travis's "Crusaders" are as horrible examples as the powers and principalities of the school. Maybe they know that the dilettantish so-called resistance grounded in pique of these children of the ruling class is as much a target for "satire" as the institutions of privilege. Maybe. But they don't make it clear to me that they do. The Monty Python troupe satirized this whole ground a lot better, and apart from satire, what's left here?