Corrupt bobbies. Local government timeservers who treat young women as playthings. A country bogged down in never-ending crises, overseen by a rancid managerial class.
These aren’t the theoretical findings of some future report into rape gangs. As it happens, they’re the basis of O Lucky Man!, a film from the Edward Heath era that suggests self-interest and incompetence are an inescapable part of the national character.
When the Royal Court Theatre’s Lindsay Anderson directed it in 1973, the left was as keen as today’s online right to howl in anguish at a UK that had gone to the dogs.
Anderson had form in this regard. His Palme d’Or-winning addition to the Angry Young Man genre, 1968’s If…, culminates in a massacre of teachers and assorted shire Tories by the bolshy public schoolboy Mick Travis, played by a sardonic Malcolm McDowell.
The follow-up, loosely based on the actor’s young adulthood in the north of England, is more ambitious. Its picaresque plot – in which a staid coffee company entrusts its most precocious factory worker, also called Mick Travis, with a regional travelling salesman’s job – devotes nearly three hours to exploring the worst aspects of the (mostly bourgeois) English character.
Mick’s superiors at work speak in vapid management babble worthy of LinkedIn. Later, when he witnesses a gruesome motoring accident on his patch, two passing policemen warn him that if he wants to avoid a manslaughter charge, he should clear off and let them concoct a statement.
The tone is one of unremitting cynicism. But nothing prepares the casual viewer for the infamous orgy scene that follows.
Plying his wares at a plush hotel in Yorkshire, Travis encounters its seedy manager, the town’s mayor. With a suggestive nod and a wink, the civic dignitary – played by Dad’s Army’s Arthur Lowe – leads him to a ‘party’ in a packed function room, where newspaper editor James Bolam and police superintendent Bill Owen are groping prostitutes and watching porn on a projector.
As the crowd chants: ‘Chocolate sandwich’, two white women and a black man move to the front and performatively strip off on a fold-out bed. A fat, sweaty bloke in the audience follows suit, at which point we cut to another scene.
‘Lindsay told me that he’d looked through a window’, says scriptwriter David Sherwin on the long-since-deleted DVD, ‘and seen the chief of police and the mayor and all their wives watching blue films’. Without any wider context, it’s hard to know what to make of this anecdote, but it encapsulates the ‘rotten borough’ stereotype perfectly.
The pop star Alan Price acts as the film’s Greek chorus with a string of memorable, socially conscious songs. On the commentary, however, he’s curiously ambivalent about the politics of Anderson’s ‘exaggerated documentary’.
‘Free enterprise produces corruption, but so does communism. And when the film was made in the 1970s, it was the back end of socialism’, says the Jarrow-born singer. ‘It was still a very controlled society and it was breaking down because of it.
‘This is pre-Margaret Thatcher and the sort of social revolution from the right-wing side of government in our country. That’s what we were picturing: the nervous breakdown of the United Kingdom.’
Yes, it’s skewed to the left, but it’s assuredly pre-Tony Blair
It’s certainly true that the film’s working-class characters are more sinned against than sinning. Their social betters, by contrast, include chinless wonders in the army, a judge who likes to be whipped on the bottom in his chambers and a crazed surgeon conducting Dr Moreau-like experiments on clinical volunteers.
Helen Mirren, as the daughter of wicked tycoon Ralph Richardson, is at least more sympathetic than the spoilt posh girls whose daddy issues make the headlines nowadays. She doesn’t halt ambulances on motorways, like certain environmentalists we could mention, or destroy artistic masterworks. For the most part, her rebellion consists of hanging out with the Alan Price Set.
The film also shows its age by refusing to accept the notion of a ‘global majority’ that is somehow less evil than white people. Bizarrely, a blackfaced Arthur Lowe portrays a murderous, money-grubbing despot in it, scheming with Richardson, his uber-capitalist friend, to exploit the downtrodden masses of his African country.
As entertainment, O Lucky Man! eventually runs out of steam by virtue of its length. As a political statement, it is agitprop with a twinkle, propelled along by a handful of fantastic songs. Yes, it’s skewed to the left, but it’s assuredly pre-Tony Blair, hailing from a time that disdained rather than rewarded smarm, doubletalk and meaningless platitudes.
By painting adult life – or authority figures at least – as a soulless parade of venal, morally compromised buffoons, the film wears its adolescent mindset on its sleeve. But given the revelations of recent weeks, who’s to say it’s wrong? In a Britain that might be heading for the rocks, it’s certainly worth another look.
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