LINDSAY ANDERSON'S
O LUCKY MAN!
by Norman Taylor
A film fit for a festival.
And that's where it is right now-Britain's entry at the Cannes Film Festival, competing for the Grand Prix, the most coveted Festival Award in the world.
Four years ago, director Lindsay Anderson entered his film If... at Cannes and won the Grand Prix. His chances this year are rated pretty high, for his new picture is more original, imaginative, thought-provoking than its predecessor, a bigger film altogether, a comedy on an epic scale.
O Lucky Man is the story of a young man in search of success. He starts off as a coffee salesman and finishes up as an actor. In between he samples life at various levels. At one time he becomes personal assistant to an industrial tycoon; another time he's down and out among the meth drinkers and dregs of society. He is arrested and interrogated at a secret atomic establishment, and experimented upon in a sinister medical research clinic. He falls in with a pop group, undergoes a spell in prison, attends a Salvation Amy meeting. His sex education is provided by a strip club performer, a love-starved landlady, a warm-hearted vicar's wife and a millionaire's promiscuous daughter.
And through most of his journey he preserves a wide eyed innocence. You can see it in his face...on the face of Malcolm McDowell who plays the hero, the Lucky Man.
Malcolm, seen by millions this year as the gang leader in Clockwork Orange, made his acting debut as the leader of the rebel students in If.... He is not the only actor from that film to reappear in Lindsay Anderson's latest. A score of people have been called up again by this director who believes in picking a team that has served him so congenially and capably in the past, on stage as well as in films.
Michael Medwin, the producer of O Lucky Man (and seen in three roles in the film also produced If....
David Sherwin whose first screenplay was If...has written O Lucky Man The original idea was by Malcolm McDowell, based on his own experiences as a coffee salesman before becoming an actor.
Cameraman is Miroslav Ondricek, a Czech who worked on If....
Music and lyrics are composed by Alan Price, who composed the music for Lindsay Anderson's stage production of Home.
Starring in that play was Sir Ralph Richardson, who now plays two roles in O Lucky Man--a humble tailor and a ruthless tycoon.
Others from If...include Arthur Lowe, Mona Washburne, Graham Crowden, Mary McLeod, Peter Jeffrey, Anthony McNichols and Christine Noonan. And nearly everybody in O Lucky Man plays more than one role, some of them four. For a very good reason fromLindsay Anderson's point of view: there are more than eighty speaking parts in the picutre, many small, fleeting, but each important to the story. So we see the same actors and actresses popping up again and again as we follow the hero's progress from job to job and place to place.
Arthur Lowe, for example, is both black and white; Rachel Roberts is both rich and poor; and Michael Medwin, having produced the film, gets in on the acting by playing an army captain, an atomic technician and a playboty Duke.
A newcomer to the Lindsay Anderson team is Helen Mirren as the tycoon's tearaway daughter.
Originally appeared in Film Review, June 1973, pp. 12-13. Published by EMI Cinemas & Leisure Ltd. Copyright remains with the publication cited. No infringement of rights is meant or implied.
Transcribed by T. del Rosario for www.malcolmmcdowell.org.
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