Review of O'Lucky Man (2003) by Parker M — 30 Oct 2010

3.5 Stars out of 4.

"I went to Lindsay and said 'We've GOT IT! The title!" and he said with a snub, 'Well what is it?' David and I looked at each other with excitement and cheered, 'LUCKY MAN!' Lindsay raised his eyebrows and teared through his thoughts, until he whispered in our ears: 'O Lucky Man!' Then we all screamed 'Ah Yes!'".

-- Malcolm McDowell.

Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! is a special film. It's title screams with desperate joy in a sense that it is making a statement that it hardly can be assure of. To review O Lucky Man! properly, I won't elucidate it on its own. The film simultaneously tallies with Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. In various degrees, it contrasts but it is through those variations that the film imputes it (it came 2 years after A Clockwork Orange). In this review I will break both films down in categories, mincing their comparable features into something rather unique - this relic, yet still relevant O Lucky Man!

1) The plot: We all know what Kubrick's adaptation of the Burgess novel is about, but O Lucky Man! is about an amoral tale of Michael Travis (Malcolm McDowell) who ventures across Europe having to detach his positivist idealism in order to avoid the evils of the world. It's about (as Alan Price's song goes) "Smile while you're makin' it, Laugh while you're takin' it, Even though you're fakin' it, Nobody's gonna know." In particular, O Lucky Man! is considered the cinematic edition of Voltaire's Candide - a sly critique on idealism in society and the pressures of curbing one's scruples to achieve independency.

2) First and obviously foremost, both contain the charming yet assertive McDowell playing characters much like this. In O Lucky Man! Travis's innocence is detached through a mock-silent film to kickstart the film. The character is proclaimed "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" while through the whole film he wanders like a puppy dog and smiles self-consciously. His iconic Alex was much of this nature, but intuitively guilty and profane, making him an allegory of the Britain dystopia around him. As that drunken beggar pouts: "It's a stinking world because there's no law and order anymore! ... Oh, it's no world for an old man any longer.".

3) Both Lindsay Anderson and Stanley Kubrick were fascinated by the euphoric visage of McDowell. Through one mere closeup, they defined his characters. In O Lucky Man! all it takes is a quick shot of McDowell's Travis staring up at his Imperial Coffee superiors and giving a courteous simper. Alex is defined through the first shot of A Clockwork Orange: staring at us, the victim, as he drinks his drencrom to sharpen himself up for the old "ultra violence." Both films, through these expressions, create McDowell's character as an extrovert programmed to make these gestures according to what surrounds them: Alex's cynical Britain and Travis's saccharinely optimistic Europe.

4) Music plays like narrative commentary in O Lucky Man! (as it did in Clockwork). Musician Alan Price's score is fast-paced, upbeat, and positive. In the film, Price sits at his piano, chants the music, while Lindsay Anderson surrounds them holding papers. Using self-reference through music makes O Lucky Man!'s gleeful score prominent but also frivolous. It's hard to embrace the music as a part of the movie because it seems to be in another dimension of time and space (until Travis actually walks through the soundstage in which he almost jumps through the looking glass).

Music beheld an extraordinary yet equally foreboding purpose in A Clockwork Orange. The good ol' Ludwig Van would palpitate as Alex and his 'droogs' marched down the Britain streets and prowled in their unusually fast vehicle. Kubrick's use of classical music creates a frightening beauty to Alex's movements, while also self-referencing not on the basis of its ideas but with its main character: with Ludwig Van playing it was as if Alex's terror was ubiquitous.

5) Could we dare argue the singeing romance in the two? Travis runs into Patricia (Helen Mirren) and they lust for each other. But it's not a typical romance. Travis always seems to be below Patricia; her father (played by Ralph Richardson) is an industrialist tycoon who literally causes death amongst his coworkers (that scene reminded me of the business head's window death in the Coen Brothers' much later Hudsucker Proxy). As for Travis, he can never fully earn Patricia's heart as she is "in love" with a man of royalty, though her attraction to him seems more obligatory. By the end of the film, Travis cannot even recognize Patricia as she is dressed in conservative attire, obscuring her liberal appearance. O Lucky Man! uses love as a tool for loss, inevitability, and obscurity - if Price quoted love in his songs, I think he'd say "Love if you are willing to hate!".

In A Clockwork Orange, the romance is all in Alex. We romanticize the regressive state of his character, while also hating him to the bone. As Alex rapes, murders, and teases his victims we become obsessed by his sexual exterior (like him holding the big dildo at the cat lady). McDowell is often naked in A Clockwork Orange which is some poetic justice, considering his character always strips his victims of everything they cherish. Romance in both films act as punishment - both characters really are martyrs in society, vulnerable in a sense by their own sexual nature.

6) Finally, both films are a unique journey, centred on discovery and shifting idealism, all enforced by society. Travis is a 'good boy' and Alex is a 'bad boy' yet what has driven them for most of their life is put on a pedestal and torn apart. Either way, it is the characters ambition that ultimately make them realize that a life of theirs is only quixotic. Travis, in the end, is harassed by a group of vagrants, in which Anderson cuts nicely to the film's climax, which puts all the characters in a blender (reminded me much of Fellini's beautiful finale in 81/2).

7) Oh and one more: O Lucky Man obsesses over eyes. I began to think McDowell's eyes, as he was with Alex, represent thoughts and ideas being programmed and tortured into his mind in replace for his natural ones. Yet both seem to be objects of their society and then suddenly manipulated in an opposite form of it. These are lucky man, who by the end, rarely seem fortunate.

O Lucky Man! does come across one-noted (at least on a first view). The whole film feels whimsy, with never an inclination to become something darker, or very real. O Lucky Man! inspires cheekiness and a more facetious narrative that parodies one ideology and ingratiates the other. Anderson's use of silent film homage reflects a traditional era, which plays as a comic addition to the film, nothing serious or informative.

Simultaneously that is what makes O Lucky Man! fascinating. Its world is ridden with glee, aspirations, and hope - yet also sarcastic and uncomfortable with itself. When Anderson forces us to watch a pornography movie at a local gentleman's club, he emphasizes the pain of waiting and pointless debauchery, not the mere salaciousness of it.

O Lucky Man! is long but earns its minutes by never slowing down to suggest its purpose because it reeks of one - how quick will it take to remove that luckiness and buoyant smile off Travis's face?