O Lucky Man!

Across the abyss of a lifetime, O Lucky Man! (1973) looks less like Godard to me now and more like Michael Powell’s The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp. When I saw this picture in the theater – probably around 1974 – Malcolm McDowell enjoyed critical esteem as the “next big thing,” the charismatic star of Clockwork Orange, a young actor from whom great things were expected and O Lucky Man!, with its Brechtian songs and meta-narrative conclusion, was considered rather daring and avant-garde. Some things from this film have stayed with me for 32 years – the guy with his head grafted to a sheep’s body, the scene in the sex club in the beginning, and, of course, the final episode where director Lindsay Anderson tells McDowell to smile, and when he can’t manage it, whacks him with a book. Intended as Swiftian satire, the movie, which was written by McDowell, is puerile and obvious; you can see its simple points coming long before the film makes them and, for the most part, it’s a rather ugly picture – the camera-work is mostly just serviceable, the editing rough (and unnecessarily complicated with Godard-style lacunae – black frames that seem interpolated at random in the mise-en-scene). Parts of the film are shot in silent film style which merely exemplifies the crudity of Anderson’s direction and McDowell’s scenario. It’s intentionally episodic and doesn’t hold together as a narrative. And, as I recalled from 1974, the movie labors mightily and unsuccessfully to distinguish itself from its model – Kubrick’s infinitely more mordant and accomplished Clockwork Orange; the picture seems highly derivative of the earlier satire. McDowell plays an ambitious cipher, a coffee salesman with apparently no family and no background, deracinated to the point of enigma. Dispatched to the north of England, he has some sexual adventures – he beds every woman he encounters – gets captured by the military and tortured for no apparent reason, escapes the explosion of a nuclear reactor, and agrees to become a subject for some kind of horrible medical experiment (hence the Dr. Moreau-like sheep-man hybrid). He flees to London with a depraved member of the nobility, a young woman played by the luminous, unbelievably young and pretty Helen Mirren. She’s a groupie with a rock band lead by Alan Price – and we see Price’s songs from time to time sardonically commenting on the action. (Price’s songs may be the best thing in the movie and they are shot in a smoky attractive proto-Scorsese – The Last Waltz – music video style). In London, McDowell becomes the aide to a vicious tycoon and gets involved in transporting napalm (called “Honey” in the film) to suppress an insurgency in a colony. He’s imprisoned for his crimes for five years and comes out of the jail, like Alex in Clockwork Orange, completely reformed, kindly, and helpless. After being savagely attacked by the very poor folks he is trying to help, McDowell wanders into a casting call for Lindsay Anderson’s movie – although the screen tests seem to be for If… (the previous movie Anderson made with McDowell). And, then, there’s the final Zen-like scene and a rock and roll party with all the characters in costume mingling and dancing with one another. In its broad satiric outlines and epic sweep, the film resembles Powell’s far better The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp and, in fact, Anderson uses an important effect that Powell developed in his film – the same actors and actresses play many roles; except for McDowell each of the character actors encountered along the way play, at least, three parts – it’s a bit like the use of Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness in British comedies of the late fifties and sixties. The movie is rather ineptly edited – it’s timing is all off: some scenes go on too long and others are too short to make their points effectively. I suppose the deficits in the picture, which is almost three hours long, are primarily due to McDowell’s amateurish script. Nonetheless, the movie is fairly amusing and, in its simple-minded way, quite effective – and the scenes of economic hardship in Britian coupled with the military officials torturing people in hoods gives the movie a patina of timeliness.