If (1968) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)

As film-makers we believe that
No film can be too personal.
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments
Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.
Manifesto of Free Cinema. 1956

I have always gone on to new places and undertakings, each different from those already familiar to me (“oh where is that sense of unifying style?” the critics would say) Each time I’ve pushed off it has not been from necessity or a wish to get away but because the newer world holds the promise of a positive and glowing thing which I wanted to experience or create.
Tony Richardson

Only connect! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
E M Forster “Howards End”

Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, both signatories to the Free Cinema Manifesto, started their film careers making documentaries in England, about England. The Forster quotation was a favourite of Lindsay Anderson’s and he took it as the title of an article he wrote in 1953 for 'Sight and Sound' on the English documentarian, Humphrey Jennings. A documentary, as define by Grierson, is a “creative interpretation of reality”, and it was this principle that Jennings applied in his wartime documentaries. Anderson wrote of Jennings work: “His subjects were…the common ones, yet his manner of expression was always individual… It was a style that bore the closest possible relationship to his theme…It was, that is to say, a poetic style.”

Both Anderson and Richardson later became associated with The Royal Court Theatre in London where they were pigeon-holed as 'Angry Young Men' (and therefore “left wing”) who produced Kitchen Sink plays. So when they took on the subjects of these two films it was lazily assumed that it would be from those standpoints that they would mount their attacks on, respectively, the public school and the military. In fact, the attacks were both broader and more specific – that is to say, both epic and poetic.

It might also be assumed that because of the close working relationship of the two men dating back since before the Free Cinema manifesto that they might develop their work in unison. That was not so. The Free Cinema manifesto was essentially a publicity “branding”, as we would say today, like the ‘Angry Young Men’ label that was written by the Royal Court’s press officer to drum up trade for Look Back in Anger. So rather than four filmmakers trying to launch themselves individually they united under the Free Cinema banner and hoped that the press and public would use the manifesto as a point of departure to interrogate their individual works.

The protagonists of the two films, Lieutenant Nolan (David Hemmings) and Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), are men who want to believe in England, but not the England they see around them. They are neither of them heroes because they are too flawed. And they are too ignorant of their flaws, to be anti-heroes. They are not philosophers. They are men of action. Yet they are still complex characters, and were seen as such by at least some in the audience: Martin Scorsese borrowing Mick’s surname for his Travis Bickle, in Taxi Driver.

Lieutenant Nolan in Charge of the Light Brigade is recently arrived from India and has brought with him an Indian servant to look after his horses. This is not some liberal do-gooder’s act. It is simply that Nolan judges him the best with his horses and so that is the man he will have. His belief in a meritocracy is further demonstrated in the scene after he has attended the flogging of a soldier when we hear his voice over as he walks the length of the regimental stables straight towards camera. “One day there will be an army where troopers need not be forced to fight by floggings. An army - a Christian army - that fights because it is paid well to fight. And fights well because its women and children are cared for. An army that is efficient and of a professional feather. I must fight for such an army.” But then he stops as he comes level with his white horse, which takes a step towards him. He greets it, “Dear friend”, and touches its nose. Then as he looks into the horse’s eyes his voice over continues, “That army will bring the first of the modern wars, and the last of the gallop. “ Eighty years later, Churchill wrote in reflecting on the passing of the cavalry that it had been replaced by, “chemists in spectacles and chauffeurs pulling at the levers of aeroplanes…War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, is now cruel and squalid.”

Later, just before the actual Charge takes place, it is Lord Raglan, wonderfully portrayed by Sir John Gielgud, who observes of Lieutenant Nolan, “That young man Nolan, I don’t really like him. He rides too well, knows a lot, but he has no heart. It will be a sad day when England has her armies officered by men who know too well what they are doing - smacks of murder.”

Both of the cinematographers of the films had experienced working in straightened circumstances. David Watkin (Charge of the Light Brigade) had started his career in documentaries, including Under Night Streets (British Transport Films). Miroslav Ondricek, Anderson’s Czech cinematographer had, the previous year shot The Fireman’s Ball for Milos Foreman. While they both demonstrated a “documentary” feel and flexibility it was the documentary of Grierson’s “creative interpretation of reality”.

Anderson’s use of black and white on If; which began as a practical decision, and his use of inter-titles, serve to remind the audience that this not “reality”, nor is it a “fantasy”, at least not in the way cinema uses the term today; but an essay or an imagining that concludes with, “What would happen if…”

The Charge of the Light Brigade developed Richard Williams’ stunning animated titles as a means to explain the “bigger picture” as it develops through the film. Drawn in the style of 'Punch' magazine satirical cartoons they remind the audience that the film’s style is satirical, in its strictest definition. It is not a send-up or a burlesque, though those techniques are employed, but it is ironical and it challenges the audience to recognise the irony.

Though both films were released in 1968, events moved with extraordinary speed in that extraordinary year and the reception that each film received requires consideration of their precise release dates. Audiences should have found echoes of the military chaos in Vietnam when Richardson’s film opened in the UK on April 11th. But that was just seven days after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. Then, on April 20th Enoch Powell gave his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. In May, students and workers in Paris faced teargas and riot squads. On June 5th Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles and in August the Prague Spring of Czechoslovak freedom was crushed by Soviet tanks. By the time of its American opening in October there was little room for a poetic re-examination of history when people were making history on the streets.

If…meanwhile was filming through most of those events. “When we wrote it, our conclusion seemed like an extremist fantasy. When we shot it, in April and May 1968, it seemed like prophecy.” (Lindsay Anderson, The Observer, 1968) But when the film was delivered to Paramount the Americans were horrified and tried to sell it off to an art house chain which also rejected it. It seemed that If… would be buried forever. Then Paramount’s Barbarella starring Jane Fonda flopped in the West End and they replaced it with If…, in the week before Christmas, simply to satisfy their Eady quota. But the film’s revolutionary feel caught the mood of the moment and queues stretched round the block, at least in London. In the provinces it was somewhat different. I was a film fan and I had been to a boarding school, though definitely not a public school, and so when it arrived in Leicester where I was a student I was at one of the first showings. The cinema was virtually empty except for a boy and a girl immediately in front of us who were passionately snogging. At one point the girl cast an eye at the screen and remarked “Tha’s ridiculous”. My companion (an old Amplefordian) leant forward, tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, but my friend and I went to that school.” They watched the remainder with rapt attention. A creative interpretation of reality, indeed.

Peter Delaunay