O Lucky Man!

Lindsay Anderson + Malcolm McDowell + Alan Price = O, Lucky Me!

What films do we include in our top lists? The ones that affected us in some very personal way or changed something – not, maybe our lives but the way we watch movies.

"O Lucky Man!" (1973), directed by Lindsay Anderson (with Ralph Richardson, Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren) is a constant source of joy when I watch it again and again. Off I go with Mick Travis (McDowell) in his crazy surreal journey up and down, back and forth, "around the world in circles" along with the Alan Price's band that provide the music commentaries in the traditions of a Greek Chorus or Brecht's Theater (whichever you prefer). And in the end we find themselves in…. Well, can't tell you. You have to find out for yourself.

I saw it again yesterday, and it still stands as one of my favorite films. This time, though, I noticed that it was much darker than I remember. The good things and the bad things happen to our hero, Mick Travis, and I think that he really changed - he started to think more and smile less. The look on his face in the end of the move after asked to smile was not that charming, winning smile that he had in the beginning. It was pain, confusion, and anger.

Wonderful film - I am never tired of it. Even though, I know all the turns on the Mick's way to the top and back, it is still so interesting to watch him. I believe it was best McDowell's performance. I know that his most famous one was in Kubrick's Clockwork Orange but my favorite is the everyman Mick Travis who just wanted to succeed.

Young Helen Mirren was lovely as Patricia who traveled in her own crazy circles; the rest of the cast did great job, each of them playing more than one character.

Alan Price - I love his songs to the film very much. Possibly the best use of a rock soundtrack in a film. I am a proud CD owner and I listen to it constantly in my car. It is short, unfortunately.(sigh)

"O Lucky Man!" is one of the best unfairly forgotten films ever.

I remember when I saw it for the first time in the theater, I did not know anything about it – I just liked the title. The girl who was next in line to the box office said to me, "You will like it – it is a very cool movie, I saw it already." Where ever she is today – I want to thank her.

It's always nice to find a worthy film after being a movie watcher for three decades. I remember when this movie was in the theaters. I was a teenager then and didn't go see it. I decided to watch the video and was immediately drawn into this surreal Bunuelish kind of British made movie. Malcolm McDowell is superb as the forever optimistic young coffee salesman. No matter what happens to him, he keeps his good attitude. Don't miss it! But, don't expect absolute narrative

This is simply one of my favorite films, and shows that just because the studio system was long dead by the 1970's, that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of worthwhile classics from that decade and beyond. This movie is unique, and yet to watch it is to see something that was very typical of films in the early 1970's - film trying to reflect in some way upon the world as it exists or is heading. Then came CGI and the cartoonish escapist fantasies that comprise the vast number of films we have today. This film really requires multiple viewings to get it. It basically follows the moral journey of an initially smiling coffee salesman (Malcolm McDowell) as he has his ideals smashed one by one. McDowell was himself a coffee salesman as a young man, and the whole film is from an original idea and script of his very own. I think it does a perfect job of describing the 1970's, which was basically a bridge decade between the idealistic 1960's and the "If it doesn't contribute to the bottom line then it's expendable" mode of thinking that began in the 1980's and just gets more entrenched as time passes. This film isn't for everyone, and although the two movies have completely different story lines, I'd say if you liked "Harold and Maude" you'll like this one too.

It became my favorite film the day I saw it for the first time, 22 years ago! It still is. I saw it again on video a week ago and here it is, traveling through my brain as a familiar song with constant new messages. Malcolm McDowell and Lindsay Anderson had blown us away with "If..." a couple of years before. But if "If..." was the courting, marriage and honeymoon of two great artists, "O Lucky Man" is a confirmation of a great love story. I know there are a few other members of this menage, David Sherwin for instance or the amazing group of superb British character actors from Mona Washbourne to Helen Mirren but the incomparable presence of McDowell inhabiting Anderson's universe makes this "O Lucky Man" one of the happiest movie adventures of my movie going life. As you may have noticed, I haven't told you anything about the film, I just wanted to share my thoughts hoping to wet your appetite. If you haven't seen it, don't miss it.

This remarkable, often overlooked film deserves a higher critical reputation than it has largely received. It represents a blossoming of the themes introduced in "if..." (the previous film in Anderson's trilogy) and a playful, even strangely upbeat reworking of those ideas.

"if..." was an explosion of the subconscious, repression fermenting into fantasized revolution; in "O Lucky Man!" the repression has matured into deep, abiding social, political, and economic corruption-- but the fantasies have matured as well. Mick Travis's journey through early '70s England features calamity after calamity, atrocity piled onto atrocity, but it feels lighter than air. It rises like a joke-filled balloon. That vantage point gives the viewer the two advantages unavailable to Travis: wisdom and perspective, and the film's humor comes from the distance between us and the characters scurrying below. (But the film is not, I think, cynical; the road to enlightenment may be hard one but the film makes it clear that it's not unreachable.)

Surrounding Malcolm McDowell's indefatigable Candide of a hero, the supporting cast flows in and out of their multiple roles like a comic repertory company, in which the same actors show up in scene after scene shuffled into a new assortment of scoundrels, con-artists, victims and sages, climaxing (don't worry, I'm not going to spoil it) in a beautiful, subtle joke which has to be seen to be understood.

From the silent-movie pastiches through Price's terrific songs (the music is used admirably) through wild, spontaneous moments of parody, uninhibited symbolic flourishes, and a few small scenes of genuine poignancy, "O Lucky Man!" deserves to be recognized as one of the great films of the 1970s, and perhaps of all time. It's certainly one of my personal favorites. Movies, I think, though bigger than ever, have become smaller and smaller at heart; more films should have the ambitions this film does and deliver on so many of them.