"Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968) is the first installment in a loosely woven trilogy of films which progresses through the picaresque O Lucky Man! (1973) and ends with Britannia Hospital (1982). A black comedy, If... is also a finely wrought study of youthful romanticism, couching the revolutionary ideals of 1960s counterculture in the setting of an English boarding school. In If... we are introduced to Mick Travis and his two friends Johnny and Wallace, free-thinking young men trapped for yet another term at an all-male boarding school. Life at the school is like life in a dictatorship: an irrational and hypocritical faculty at the top, an elite guard of older student ""whips"" (who maintain discipline) below, and the oppressed masses of younger students at the very bottom. Travis and his friends have refrained from becoming school disciplinarians. Their position as older students who refuse to tow the line draws a great deal of hostility from the whips, who see Travis and his friends as a corrupting influence on school morality. Travis, Johnny, and Wallace try a number of times to either break free of or exact revenge on the system. Nothing works, and eventually they are beaten into partial submission by the whips and banished to the school's theater to clean out the archive of forgotten stage props. They dream up a plan to end the tyranny once and for all, and during a school ceremony, stage a fire which evacuates everyone. Waiting on the roof with submachine guns and grenades, Travis and his friends engage in a revolutionary battle with their oppressors, who return fire. Like the other films in Anderson's trilogy, If... is a black comedy which at times crosses over into the surreal. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell fact from fancy. At times the two blend so stealthily that the border between them obliterates. Do the events of the story actually happen, or are they just escapist fantasies? Certainly Travis and his friends do not really get on the roof and mow down the faculty with machine guns, like real revolutionaries. Or do they? Adding to the film's sense of dislocation is that it is partially in color, partially in black & white. Though the significance of switching between the two formats caused some debate after the film's release, it was later admitted by Anderson that the film had merely gone so far over budget that switching to black & white became an economical (though aesthetically interesting) decision. If... remains an enigmatic and masterful film, and those interested in the further misadventures of Mick Travis (played in each film by Malcolm McDowell) should pursue the other films in Anderson's trilogy."