Over the course of its truly epic length of 177 min­utes, Lind­say Ander­son’s O Lucky Man! (1973) picks up the con­tin­u­ing saga of Mick Travis (Mal­colm McDow­ell) from If… (1968; read The Dork Report Review). While If.… used a British pub­lic school as a metaphor­i­cal micro­cosm with which to sat­i­rize British class cul­ture, O Lucky Man! widens its lens to take in all of Eng­land for its bleak por­trait of cap­i­tal­ism tri­umphant. Travis appears to have matured out of his school­boy fan­tasy of per­pe­trat­ing a school mas­sacre and has since joined the cor­po­rate world. Because of McDowell’s inher­ently imp­ish per­sona, one might not expect his char­ac­ter here to be sin­cere, but Travis is now ruth­less and gen­uinely will­ing to endure any­thing to climb the lad­der of profit and social advance­ment. Early on, he is urged by a senior col­league to “try not to die like a dog,” but it’s a warn­ing he is never equipped to quite comprehend.

When do we live?

His jour­ney is so long and involved that it would hardly count as a spoiler to recount it here: Travis is pro­moted from the low­est rung on the cor­po­rate lad­der all the way up to a high-level mis­sion set up to fail. As he is ordered around the Eng­lish coun­try­side by his office­bound supe­ri­ors, he becomes lost on the way to Scot­land, is arrested and tor­tured by the army, sur­vives a mil­i­tary strike by an unseen enemy, stum­bles into an idyll, is nursed back to health (er, lit­er­ally), donates his body to med­ical research, falls in with Alan Price’s tour­ing band (includ­ing groupie Patri­cia (Helen Mir­ren)), talks his way into the employ of the most venal busi­ness­man in Eng­land after his pre­vi­ous assistant’s timely sui­cide (a prime exam­ple of Travis’ alleged “luck”), becomes party to ille­gal chem­i­cal weapons sales in a corporate-funded civil war in a third-world nation, takes the fall for his boss, is impris­oned to five years of hard labor, is evi­dently reformed, tries and fails to talk a poor woman out of sui­cide with a hilar­i­ous litany of trite plat­i­tudes, is robbed and becomes home­less, tries to pros­e­ly­tize like Jesus and is, finally and fit­tingly, stoned by his peers. But in the the end, he is dis­cov­ered as a future movie star.

So long and thanks for the milk

An early form of David Sherwin’s script was writ­ten by McDow­ell him­self, based on his own expe­ri­ences as a cof­fee sales­man. I think it’s fair to pre­sume that the begin­ning and end­ing are drawn directly from McDowell’s life story. At oppo­site ends of the film, the for­tu­nate Travis is cho­sen from the masses for higher call­ings. The young man at the begin­ning is all too eager to com­mence his jour­ney, but the beaten-down and dis­il­lu­sioned man at the end is no longer able to take any plea­sure out of his unlucky luck.

Must read: every­thing you could pos­si­bly want to know about O Lucky Man, from MalcolmMcDowell.net

Offi­cial movie site: www.lindsayanderson.com/o_lucky_man.html

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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