GrimPrecise I'll tell you why so serious

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

SnoopyStyle Michael Travis (Malcolm McDowell) is a coffee salesman trainee who is put into a prominent position after the previous salesman in the Northeast runs off. He finds a corrupt system in decline. He gets lost driving in the North. He runs across a military installation and gets tortured for a confession. He escapes when fire breaks out. Then he gets involved with medical experiments by Dr. Millar. He escapes and lives with Patricia (Helen Mirren) in London. This is dated. The surrealism is interesting for the first half hour. I get the general rant against the world. However the movie loses tension as each weird thing seems to randomly occur. I lose interest in the narrative. It's a fascinating bit of 70's British film. They are obviously throwing the traditional playbook out the window and trying something different. In addition to McDowell, it's fascinating to see Helen Mirren in her 20s.

Buckywunder My somewhat slow, long-term project of revisiting films of my youth that impacted me took me back to that staple of campus films societies at Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1970's, O Lucky Man!, where I first saw it. Unfortunately, it has not dated well, at least in my opinion. (I know, I used to have a romanticized memory of the movie in my head as well.) Seeing it again after many, many more years of film-viewing I see this movie as being too long by at least a third. I think it could have really benefited with stricter editing choices and a firmer hand on the story -- which is ironic since Lindsay Anderson himself allegedly kept telling Malcolm McDowell (and presumably the crew) that they needed to do that very same thing. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious -- and normally I'm a sucker for an ambitious "failure," ESPECIALLY by Hollywood standards -- but they lost the story for some of the anti-establishment points they were trying to make way too inconsistently to hold focus or interest. There are too many other reasons for falling short to mention here, but not the least of them is that it features the high-water mark of the career of Malcolm McDowell who was at the peak of his international fame between the two Lindsay Anderson films and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (although also very good later in Time After Time). Once his stock fell after the collapse of the British film industry and he was displaced to the United States (along with a very nasty cocaine habit), his career never fully recovered and seems to have tainted some of Anderson's legacy with him. History, as they say, is written by the winners and McDowell (though, admirably, he cleaned up and turned his life around) hasn't been on the winning end. And just to be clear, I like McDowell. The cast is terrific (including a very young Helen Mirren who looks amazingly similar to Jennifer Lawrence of today) which is why I give it a 5, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than for film history purposes (British New Wave film, the 1970's, Lindsay Anderson, etc.).

ygwerin1 The intent of this film review is to encourage the viewing of this underrated film O' Lucky Man, by a largely neglected English film director Lindsay Anderson. Readers should be aware from the onset that it may be considered a spoiler providing too much information, it's a fine line between too much/ too little information and I hope I've struck the right balance.Lindsay Anderson directed a trilogy of films around the central character of Mick Travis; they follow his travails through lives vicissitudes. The first film if... relates to his education in the bourgeoisie class ridden English education system. The second film O' Lucky Man covers his experiences in the world of work how he attempts to cope with having to make a living for himself in the dog eat dog world of 1970's England. I have to correct the misstated description here on IMDb of the film being a 'musical', it is NOT a musical, this is to clear up any misconceptions of people who could easily be put off watching it by taking this literally. Musicals in the popular consciousness conjures up the considerations of Oklahoma, and Mamma Mia where the films characters sing about their lot, whereas O' Lucky Man uses music as a 'soundset' to set or underline film scenes in an organic way with the musicians featuring an integral part of the film as characters in the films story. This is an important and not semantic delineation of the use of music as an essential element in the films storytelling.The third film of the trilogy is Britannia Hospital a savage satire of 1970's Britain of the fault lines of contemporary society, where no side comes out completely unscathed from Lindsay Anderson's biting criticism. It features Mick Travis as an investigative journalist endeavouring to undertake an expose of the Hospital to uncover its 'secrets'. The Hospital really stands as a metaphor for British society containing all of its foibles and idiosyncrasies.The three films don't need to be viewed in sequence they stand as individual works in their right they merely cover the journey of self discovery of Mick Travis through the formative period of his existence. I thoroughly recommend all three of them to anyone familiar or not with Lindsay Anderson, they can serve as an introduction to him and his abilities as a film director as well as providing a prism through which to view contemporary English/British society of the latter 20th Century or at least the decade of the 1970's.

fkkemble What a wonderfully self indulgent director Lindsay Anderson was. This movie was the result of a concept spring boarding from the bowels of the subconscious straight onto the silver screen with precious little intervention from the conscious mind. I also think that he had a wonderfully warped and colourful sense of humour. I loved Artur Lowe and his three wonderful roles, Malcolm Macdowell's characters always seem so much more real and substantial than he is, a true actor I guess. I quite lost my heart to Helen Mirren who is a goddess. I also loved seeing Britain in the early seventies, a country that, at the time, was still uniquely quaint, contrary and individual. Even though I don't live there I found myself hungering to be there at that time. I loved this movie even though it was gorgeously weird.