A nearly forgotten English classic, If…. is one of those genuinely provocative films that only the 60s and 70s could produce, satirizing school and religion, glorifying sex and drinking, and offering youth the dangerous idea of freedom. Marc Wilkinson’s hypnotic soundtrack helps ensure that the film’s dangerous ideas corrupt the impressionable youth of the audience.
Given that the film’s main characters are boys attending an all-male English boarding school, they often think about sex. Whether it be distant infatuation, imagination sparked by lingerie on a storefront mannequin, or the real thing, these moments overwhelm the senses. Wilkinson’s score kicks in, with drawn out violins intercut only by rhythmic drumming. Together the two countervailing sounds ebb and flow like a hypnotic pendulum and all other sounds disappear, entrancing the boy. However, these freedoms are rare.
Each day starts with choral and organ excerpts that these boys must perform, establishing religion’s constant and unbending presence. But, as children often do, they bend the rules. Mick, the film’s protagonist, repeatedly plays a haunting, dirge-like track of a Congolese children’s choir performing a Latin Catholic mass. Mick plays the song when looking at photographs of left-wing revolutionaries surrounding the pope or adding recruits into his fold. The connection is fitting since the Congo underwent its own revolution during the film’s production. The song’s usurpation of Catholicism and the Congo’s overthrowing of its own traditional overlords, then, feeds into Mick and his gang’s own feelings of resentment, oppression, and revolution.
