Movies – O Lucky Man

O Lucky Man (1973) is Malcolm McDowell’s (and certainly director Lindsay Anderson’s) shot at a modern-day Candide – the tale of a resourceful young man making his way in the world, having every good intention, but seemingly oblivious to the secret codes and rituals of those who have succeeded in life, love and society. And an argument is made, persuasively, that the chance to “cultivate our own garden” is slipping away in a morass of nationalist paranoia, under-the-table economics, populist opportunism and spiritual vacuity. That McDowell and Anderson made these points so concisely thirty-five years ago is both admirable and frightening – but for the absence of computers, cell phones and I-pods, this film could be easily mistaken for the present day.

The film starts with a seeming lark – McDowell’s character, Mick Travis, is transplanted to a ‘typical’ Latin coffee farm in a silent movie. He’s a toiling peasant, working in the hot sun alongside his comrades, friends and family. Unfortunately, he’s spied pocketing some of the beans by the machine-gun-toting field boss/soldiers. Brought before the white-suited cigar-smoking white plantation owner, he’s sentenced to have his hands cut off. But it’s a cheap Mexican serial, right? Things aren’t really that bad, are they? That elementary?

Now the film proper starts, in the present day, as Mick is going through his new-job orientation as a coffee salesman for the Imperial Coffee Company. Mick’s a born salesman – eager and optimistic, with a ready 300 watt smile and a gift for deferential conversational camaraderie. He seems to be hip to the contradictions and pretentions inherent in promotion and salesmanship. “Do you realize this Nigerian coffee is being packed straight back to Nigeria?” It’s a clever line, but delivered only in his efforts to flirt with a co-worker; he doesn’t really care that it’s ironically true, he just knows it’s a clever thing to say to her.

Mick’s enterprising attitude, and his way with the ladies, put him on the fast track. He’s given an important sales territory in the North, and discovers it’s a feast-or-famine world out there. Many of his clients are out of business or in the process of closing down, while others can wine and dine him elaborately, welcoming him into their small-pond secret society worlds of all-night parties, local sex shows and it’s-who-you-know wheeling and dealing. Even the small hotel he’s staying in reveals hidden indulgences and obscure partnerships. The hotel matron becomes a lover, and a mysterious fellow lodger graciously gives him an iridescent suit before he embarks on more far-flung coffee-purveying adventures.

Throughout the film, these ‘episodes’ are interspersed with filmed musical performance interludes by Alan Price and his band. One of the founding members of The Animals, Price’s music is smart, animated, tuneful and amiably sardonic, and acts as a perfect Brechtian foil for the ongoing story.

The further out Mick’s travels take him, the more surreal the circumstances become. His attempts to track down the catering manager at a remote military station lead to his capture and interrogation by a pair of overzealous intelligence men. When stern questioning gets no results, they buzz-box him. He, of course, just starts making up what he thinks they want to hear – to their satisfaction, apparently. Another ‘successful’ torture session. He escapes at the onset of a massive bombing raid by an unknown enemy force. Everything he owns is burned up in the blasts…except for the suit, of course. Wandering the country side, hungry and shellshocked, he happens upon an idyllic country church, where he is nursed (literally) back to health, and led back to ‘civilization’ by rosy-cheeked children.

Out on the highway, Mick is picked up by a driver delivering subjects for medical research to a nearby clinic. In need of some quick cash, he enlists. The efficiently-run hospital-clinic is led by the enthusiastic Dr. Millar, who sells his theories towards computer-generated eugenics to the credulous Mick, whose only real concern is getting paid 150 quid instead of the usual 100-quid fee. It takes a grotesque surprise right out of ‘Dr. Moreau’ to snap him out of it, and he again finds himself on the road, still broke, but picked up this time by… Alan Price and his band!, who, relievedly, bring him back to London.

Traveling and hanging with the band is, also, the capricious Patricia (Helen Mirren – yaayy!), an adventurous gadabout with a filthy-rich father. Patricia warns Mick of her father’s greedy treachery, but, again, all he can think about is the enormous amounts of money the man must have lying around, and he finagles an appointment with Sir James himself. Soon he finds himself as Sir James’ personal assistant, negotiating with the banana republic of Zingara for industrial investment assistance, as well as securing virulent chemical weapons to help put down native uprisings. Mick is becoming the rich worldly player he’s always aspired to, and doesn’t understand Patricia’s ambivalence. When the government fraud squad shows up, Sir James throws Mick under the bus – the deal with Zingara is completed while Mick is led away in handcuffs.

I suppose it seems I’m giving away some major plot points, but it’s not really a movie about the plot. A lot happens in each episode, but the plot itself is the simple engine for much larger ideas.
Mick’s successes are abstract and arbitrary, while his failures can be seen arriving, by us, well before Mick’s own comprehension. It’s an instructive fairy tale of sorts – certainly a dark and conflicted one, but a fairy tale nonetheless. The film opens with a “Once Upon A Time…” silent film card, and down the rabbit hole, or into the labyrinth, or into the woods we go.

Mick emerges from prison five years later with a ‘new’ outlook. No more wheeling and dealing, no more pursuit of filthy lucre; now he’s hip to man’s inhumanity to man, the scourge of poverty, and the absence of peace, love and understanding among the great unwashed, the salt of the earth. Mick debates ethics and man’s inherent goodness with a Salvation Army officer (while his pocket is picked), tries to talk a browbeaten mother out of giving up on life (he falls off the side of her building, then awakens to hear of her suicide despite his earnest efforts), and helps a nice lady in a soup van to feed indigents (she leaves him in an hobo jungle with a soup pot and some plastic cups, where the indigent beat hell out of him.) Among the homeless mob, he meets Patricia again, down on her luck as well, but cheery and resignedly philosophical. Mick – “But, Patricia, I thought you were going to marry the Duke Of Belminster!” Of course, the semi-comatose vagrant with his head in her lap is the Duke of Belminster. With almost all hope seemingly lost, wandering the streets aimlessly, Mick stumbles into a cattle-call job interview that proves, once again, that you can’t make reality up – it’s too strange. Is he saved? Has the ship finally come in?

Much of the source material for the overall story comes from Malcolm McDowell’s own life – he wrote an initial script that was then fostered and brought to life by the writer David Sherwin, the screenwriter of McDowell’s other Lindsay Anderson project, If… It’s interesting that McDowell’s character in If… is, apparently, the same Mick Travis we see here. But Sherwin uses Mick to entirely different ends here. In If…, Mick makes the journey from initially accepting the status quo of his posh private school to leading an armed rebellion against it. Mick in O Lucky Man idealistically tries out, and commits to, each individual tenet of Leading A Good Life – work hard, respect and defer to the fairer sex, tip a pint with your fellow proles, give 110%, support the government, help advance the cause of science, play hardball in the major leagues of business and finance. But he works hard for the wrong reasons; the women are nurturing and powerful, but transitory; the government indulges its own needs, not the peoples’ (“A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.” – Arundhati Roy) ; science advances itself first, everyone else when it’s to their benefit; and the last three months of life in America tell you far more about business, finance and capitalism than examples I could give from this film.

But the saving grace of O Lucky Man is its empathy and generosity towards Mick. Lindsay Anderson does a wonderful job of putting us in Alan Price’s shoes, gazing bemusedly from afar at Mick’s, or every man’s, follies and successes, and seeing the larger picture of how oddly noble and funny it can all be. There was never a moment where I thought Mick was just dumb, or just naive, or just clueless. I always felt like rooting for him anyway, always wanted to know what would happen next.

I couldn’t help but think of Eddie Murphy’s famous Saturday Night Live sketch, where he boards a New York bus in whiteface, and soon after all the blacks are off the bus, the white people break out the cocktails and music and start a party on the bus that the black people would never know was an everyday occurrence. O Lucky Man is about all those secrets we fear no one will ever let us in on. The lesson is to realize those secrets aren’t really that important after all.