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Wendy Notsid’s Retro Movie Reviews

The Mick Travis Trilogy Part II:

O Lucky Man! (1973)

Director:

Lindsey Anderson

Writer:

David Sherwin

Starring:

Malcolm McDowell

Helen Mirren

Ralph Richardson

If you’ve seen If… there are two things you should know when you watch O Lucky Man!

1. The movie is three hours long
2. This is not a sequel to If…

3.The Mick Travis of If…. is not the same as the Mick Travis in O Lucky Man! They just have the same name and are both played by Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange, Time After Time)

In this movie, Mick Travis is not a philosopher or a revolutionary as he was in the first film. He is an opportunist and ambitious capitalist, his mind set on making money. Enter him training as a coffee salesman. He gets a huge break by means of you guessed it, sleeping with his boss Gloria Rowe played by Rachel Roberts (The Reckoning, Wild Rovers). He travels north as a sales representative to take over a post by former top salesman Jim Osbourne, who has mysteriously disappeared.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. And this is the start of an epic quest to find out aboutwhat happened to him and save the day, right?

No. No it isn’t.

Instead, Travis is successful, charming, and making useful contacts (several at a sex club) until he gets a car from Gloria telling him he is need that morning 200 miles from his location by 10 am. He does her bidding, only to discover he has been lured to a government building where it is revealed he has been framed by his employers to be a Soviet Spy. He is tortured into confessing, only to have the building blow up just in time.

Keep in mind, this is not an action movie at all. In fact, it would be impossible to pinpoint exactly what type of movie this is supposed to be.

Anyways, Travis wanders for miles from the building, only to collapse in a church where the woman running it nurses him (literally) back to health and has her children lead him to the highway in order for him to hitch a ride to London. He gets sidetracked however, by a sequence of events that bear the most references to A Clockwork Orange(keep in mind, this film was made just after ACO). After narrowly escaping a gruesome fate (again) he hitches a ride on a van filled with a bunch of musicians (including the film’s composer Alan Price) and one curious woman called Patricia (Helen Mirren, The Queen, Hamlet).

Patricia reveals to Mick she is the daughter of Sir James Burgees (Ralph Richardson, The Heiress, Dragonslayer) who; “Owns half the copper mines in the world… the most evil man you could ever hope to meet.” Despite the Christian by the family at the church, he seems not the least bit perturbed by this and immediately sets out to woo Sir James into employing him. After a visit to Sir James’ office where he makes a bungled attempt at “alerting” the business man that Patricia is in “bad trouble… bad company, protests, drugs..”

Despite this, Sir James makes him his assistant. After a good time helping Travis prosper, he frames him for fraud.

Travis then spends five years in prison, during which he “reads books” and “thinks” and truly comes out a new man: An person of Christ-like love for all with a penchant for optimism and pissing off religious authorities. Almost immediately out of jail, he makes it his mission to save one woman from killing herself by scaling the wall of her building and shouting snatches of optimistic philosophy at her. Unfortunately, he falls and fails. Not to be defeated, he makes more attempts at humanity only to be denied. The film does not end there, but it almost does.

Several noteworthy patterns and allusions come into play into this film. It becomes clear before long, what with Travis’ experiences as a coffee salesman at the beginning of the film, that this is a satire of the high and low points of capitalism. Often times you see Travis taking part in, observing, or becoming a victim of corruption in the name of money-making. Both times he is framed, it is by his employers in the names of business. Other times, Mick witnesses first hand or by the accounts of others, someone being screwed mightily. In fact, his experiences with the coffee company seem to mirror his experiences with Sir James considerably and you’re rather shocked he’d fall into the same trap twice before he finally moves on. The Mick Travis of If… would not be so stupid. This Mick Travis is, as Patricia describes him, “so hopelessly conventional.”

It is, however, the same hero, as seen due to small allusions to the first movie. When trapped in the military base being questioned, the inspector asks him if his headmaster was right to expel him. Actors from If.. make repeated appearances as well, particularly Christine Noonan and Hugh Thomas in near-lineless bit parts. Still, the question asked by the inspector seems to follow Travis throughout the film, that is, whenever he has a bit of time for self reflection during his determined quest for wealth.

The affects of this film are intriguing, not just to the viewer, but to the characters as well. The fate of Patricia is near-heartbreaking and unexplained while you are left wondering about Michael Travis’ future. Personally, I have trouble making out my own reaction to this film. Obviously it is an incredible movie  filled with quirks by director Lindsey Anderson, such as interrupting the film with chapter titles for the movie, cameos by past actors and blatant displays of the misuse of power. Nothing in this film is subdued, but bitingly frank. And yet, the brilliance of this movie is how it retains some mystery to the events and emotions throughout.

I very much enjoyed O Lucky Man! Despite liking If… more, it would be idiotic of me to truly compare the two. All I can say is, O Lucky Man! Is three hours long and I was not bored for one second. If that is not a sign of a terrific piece of cinema, I don’t know what is.