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The Worst Film Ever

Simply A Masterpiece

Powerful

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I've heard that If... and O Lucky Man were two must-see classic movies, but I regret to say I couldn't connect with either. I saw If... years ago and don't remember anything about it beyond my disappointment, but I still gave O Lucky Man a chance.A dark satire of England (as best I can tell), the movie follows the adventures of a likable and enthusiastic coffee salesman who meets a series of corrupt caricatures. While the movie aims for sharp satire, there is something half-hearted about it all. The pace is sluggish and the movie seems to wander here and there with little purpose.Some of it works. Malcolm MacDowell is quite good, and the movie perks up when Ralph Richardson is on screen. But I just couldn't keep interested.About a third of the way through my Internet went out. Had that not happened, I would have kept watching in hopes that things picked up. But I am not at all inspired to continue.I like satire, I like surrealism, I like the cast, and I love the songs by Alan Price (I have the album). But I don't like this movie.

My somewhat slow, long-term project of revisiting films of my youth that impacted me took me back to that staple of campus films societies at Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1970's, O Lucky Man!, where I first saw it. Unfortunately, it has not dated well, at least in my opinion. (I know, I used to have a romanticized memory of the movie in my head as well.) Seeing it again after many, many more years of film-viewing I see this movie as being too long by at least a third. I think it could have really benefited with stricter editing choices and a firmer hand on the story -- which is ironic since Lindsay Anderson himself allegedly kept telling Malcolm McDowell (and presumably the crew) that they needed to do that very same thing. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious -- and normally I'm a sucker for an ambitious "failure," ESPECIALLY by Hollywood standards -- but they lost the story for some of the anti-establishment points they were trying to make way too inconsistently to hold focus or interest. There are too many other reasons for falling short to mention here, but not the least of them is that it features the high-water mark of the career of Malcolm McDowell who was at the peak of his international fame between the two Lindsay Anderson films and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (although also very good later in Time After Time). Once his stock fell after the collapse of the British film industry and he was displaced to the United States (along with a very nasty cocaine habit), his career never fully recovered and seems to have tainted some of Anderson's legacy with him. History, as they say, is written by the winners and McDowell (though, admirably, he cleaned up and turned his life around) hasn't been on the winning end. And just to be clear, I like McDowell. The cast is terrific (including a very young Helen Mirren who looks amazingly similar to Jennifer Lawrence of today) which is why I give it a 5, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than for film history purposes (British New Wave film, the 1970's, Lindsay Anderson, etc.).

A social satire that works more in the form of an absurdist deluge, "O Lucky Man" suffers like its protagonist from an excess of ambition and an absence of common sense.When we last saw Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), he was shooting up an English boarding school in "if..." Now, a few years later, he's trying to make it in the rat race as a salesman for the Imperial Coffee Company, with the whole of north England as his beat. But strange things have a way of happening to Mick. He finds himself alternately interrogated by the military, threatened by a mad scientist, and a pawn in capitalism's greedy game."There are thousands of ways of making it," Mick naively tells his ladyfriend Patricia (Helen Mirren). "It's only a question of picking the right one."As a big Malcolm McDowell fan, I really wanted to like this one. He never did get another star vehicle like this again, and it's a shame. But "O Lucky Man" is a hard film for me to love.It is a brilliantly shot film, with a solid rock score by Alan Price that sounds a bit like Badfinger did. What grates is its dyspeptic, nihilistic tone, not to mention a catch-as-catch-can randomness and assorted left-field oddities. It's bizarre hearing McDowell in the DVD commentary talking about how director Lindsay Anderson kept railing about tightening up the story's construction; the final result on screen is as slapdash as one can imagine, with Travis sent in every possible direction without apparent motive.One quibble: Why is he playing Mick Travis again? The character here is nothing like the antisocial character we saw in "if...". McDowell barely seems to be playing the same character from scene to scene. He's alternately an eager go-getter, a cynical corner-cutter, and a wide-eyed innocent. The basic idea was taken from McDowell's own experiences as a coffee salesman, but the coffee-seller angle is abruptly dropped so the movie can have some fun with Mick being captured by the military, falling unconscious in a church, and then hitching a ride back to London, his job forgotten for the rest of the movie.Anderson and screenwriter David Sherwin want to pack everything in they can think of, and then twist the reality around to confuse and challenge the viewer. I don't think you can challenge a viewer before bringing them along somewhat, like getting them into the story or else liking the protagonist. The story never stays in one place long enough to develop momentum. Worse, McDowell never finds the character that would impel us to take his side, the way he did with "if..." and "A Clockwork Orange." He's slow and dull here.The film's restless spirit does keep things hopping, and so does the brilliantly eccentric Graham Crowden in three roles, each madder than the last. The acting is pretty solid around McDowell, and there's a good moment here and there, like an interrogation scene where Philip Stone, one of McDowell's castmates from "Orange", asks Mick if he believes in the "brotherhood of man". Mick says yes."Think carefully about your answer," the interrogator warns.If "O Lucky Man" offers any answer, it's to keep your mouth shut, believe in nothing, and enjoy yourself as best you can while you can. It's an answer some can take to heart, but "O Lucky Man" lacks the craft or apparent interest to sell it to the rest of us.

For the first hour or so of this movie, everything seems pretty straightforward. Michael (played by Malcolm McDowell) is a young coffee salesman who's just starting to climb the ladder of success. His slow rise is sometimes humorous, and - with its sexual content - was somewhat reminiscent of the later American movie "The Secret Of My Success." At about the hour mark, though, this turns increasingly bizarre, beginning with Michael's arrest at a military installation. At that point his identity as a coffee salesman seems, for some reason, to simply disappear, and for the next two hours (yes, this is slightly over three hours long!) the movie takes on a darkly satirical note, critiquing pretty much everything: capitalism, religion, socialism, intellectuals - "the system" in general. No doubt the critique has some validity. I appreciated its balance in skewering pretty much everything, and truly appreciated that it took on the left as well as the right - so that Marx's famous dictum about religion becomes rephrased as "Revolution is the Opium of the Intellectuals" and Michael ends up being not only rejected but attacked by the homeless he tries to help; I took from all this the suggestion that socialists are often quite disconnected from those they claim to represent. The critique is valid, then, and the movie does make you think. It's also quite rambling at times, though, and often seems to lose its focus - or perhaps its better to say that it never really found its focus. In the end, it leaves little hope for redemption of any kind. If everything is as bad as this movie portrays, then frankly Mrs. Richards was right - and I'll say no more about that; you can watch the movie to find out about Mrs. Richards. In the end, I found this to be a rather dark and even depressing movie. 4/10