Director: Lindsay Anderson, 15, 1968
Stars: Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Wallace
Out to buy on DVD
Three years before playing another Establishment baiter in A Clockwork Orange, McDowell got a taste of ultra violence in Anderson’s public school allegory, railing against abusive prefects, who are called whips, in a nod to another set of institutional tormentors.
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Anderson’s assistant was Stephen Frears, who describes the late director as “a classicist and an anarchist”, and what is striking is his avant-garde inversion of a fusty world with surreal interludes, experimental editing and African tribal music. If . .. was shot months before the Paris riots, and you can smell the revolution.
DVD extras
Commentary, BBC special, Thursday’s Children documentary