Lindsay Anderson's "If...." begins rather slow, establishing itself as a typical boarding school drama, as students arrive and get into routine at a 500-year-old public school in Britain. In the second half, though, the film takes a turn for the surreal, becoming a dreamlike dark comedy with cultural relevance and artistic wonder.

Watching "If...'s" first few scenes, we expect that the main character will be a first-year student at the school who adapts to the institution's rigorous standards and social hierarchies. However, it slowly becomes apparent that our protagonist is actually an upperclassman named Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell).

With his two loyal friends Johnny (David Wood) and Wallace (Richard Warwick), Mick refuses to conform to the school's conservative agenda. Late in their academic career, the trio decides to give into their rebellious desires, relishing in rule breaking and defying the school's snootier patrons.

The film is thus a commentary on 1960s British counterculture just as much as it itself is a product of that revolution. Mick, Johnny, and Wallace reflect the time's rebellious youth as the rock-n-roll generation turning against society's archaic norms. Meanwhile, the movie partakes in the same counterculture as a piece of subversive art. The surrealist sequences, experimental editing, sexual undertones, and nudity all go against traditional British cinema to offer something novel, and perhaps even appalling for the formalists.

One of the most blatantly defiant methods that Lindsay Anderson endorses is the use of both black-and-white and color film in the same movie. Timing and lighting restraints initially forced Anderson to use black-and-white when filming in the school's chapel. Allegedly, he liked the effect so much that he decided to shoot additional scenes in the outmoded style. There's no telling why Anderson chose certain scenes for color and others for black-and-white, but the nonconformist blend aids the movie's dreaminess. The audience wonders what is real and what is depraved fantasy.

Malcolm McDowell certainly stands out for his performance as Mick. In fact, McDowell is so convincing as a rebel that this performance led to Stanley Kubrick casting him as the lead in "A Clockwork Orange." McDowell also reprised Mick in two additional Anderson films: 1973's "O Lucky Man!" and 1982's "Britannia Hospital." The character has been hailed as an "everyman," and he certainly has our attention, empathy, and support all throughout "If...."

An unfortunate outcome of that support, however, comes at the film's ending. The finale is climactic and in an odd way satisfying, but has aged horrendously. Without giving too much away, I will say that the denouement involves Mick, his friends, the school, and some guns. In the current age, it is hard to cheer the characters on through such a conclusion, given the real-world relevance of gun violence in schools.

None of this is to say that Anderson is at fault for finishing the movie in this way. In 1968, he could not have imagined the weight this ending might someday carry. Also, the conclusion is not necessarily inappropriate watching it today, but it is definitely darker. We can no longer champion Mick's rebellion in its entirety, but must come to terms with its limits and morality after the screen goes black.

Regardless of the lens we see it through, "If...." is an overlooked movie in British (film) history. While it might retain interest from scholars and critics, the general public - at least in America - has sadly forgotten it. Such is a shame, for it is a brilliant piece of cinema that acutely captures the light and dark sides of a pivotal transition in modern Western civilization.

Lindsay Anderson's "if...." presents a fable disguised (most of the time) as a slice-of-life set in a British upper-class boarding school. Bouyed by the twin-barreled audacity of Anderson and the film's breakout star, Malcolm McDowell, "if...." fiercely, timelessly encapsulates the spirit of 1960s rebellion even as it threatens to go off the rails every five minutes in the second half.

McDowell is Mick Travis, a returning upperclassman at College House, one of several houses that constitute a British boarding school. While other older boys, called "whips", enforce a nasty form of discipline on their juniors, called "scum", Mick and two friends contemplate an act of revolution to disturb College House's rigid hierarchy once and for all.

"Violence and revolution are the only pure acts," Mick declares.

In case one doubts his cold-blooded dedication and impatience for change, his next line sends Columbine chills up your spine. Told someone dies of starvation in Calcutta every eight minutes, his reply is a succinct: "Eight minutes is a long time."

There are points where one can't help feeling the script needed another round of polishing, like the way it introduces characters like the teacher Mr. Thomas and the "scum" Biles and Jute only to drop them in the second half as Mick's story takes over completely. But Mick's hardcore attitude of radical chic and the surreal nonsense that spurts out now and then before taking over entirely actually give "if...." much of its rich, iconoclastic majesty. With its attention to institutional detail, the sound of boyish babble echoing off the linoleum, you really feel yourself another inmate in College House, and are eager for Mick to effect your escape as well as his.

For me, that's why the first half works so much better than the second half. It sends up the public-school culture in such a way that its actual demolition later on seems unnecessary. Robert Swann sets the right tone as the head whip Rowntree, a toffee-nosed princeling who carries his thrashing cane like a kingly scepter and tells one young scum: "Markland, warm a lavatory seat for me. I'll be ready in three minutes." Swann's as brilliant a villain as McDowell himself would be in many later films.

Watching McDowell here is to see his Alex from "Clockwork Orange" in embryonic form, his simpering smile, his animalistic fury, his waggish ease-putting charm. A case can be made that Mick is a more disturbing character than Alex, since he is presented so much more sympathetically and acts out even more violently by the film's end.

Ah, the end, what can be said about that that hasn't been said. I won't spoil anything, but I do think the film's surrealism needs to be factored in more than it has in considering the moral implications of Mick & Co's final act. Logic seems to flee from the corners of the screen long before. One long sequence features Mick and friend Johnny stealing a motorbike without consequence and Mick coupling on the floor of a coffee house with a town girl, who later waves to him when he spots her with a high-powered telescope. If you can't see the madness in moments like that, then maybe you deserve to think the end of the film was played straight.

I'm not much for the ending of the film. "Do you find it facile?" asks the History Master played by the marvelous Graham Crowden, and my answer would be yes. As I said, I think it's a flawed finish, not just for its unpleasant resonances but the way nothing is resolved, no narrative or character arc.

But "if...." is still bracing, still tough, and still refreshing in the way it presents McDowell in raw, undistilled form, in a setting fully deserving of his visible scorn. Anderson makes you want to lash out, too, making the most of "if...."'s enigmatic tagline: "Which side will you be on?"

I saw "If . . ." on an American military base where I was stationed in 1969. It's hard to believe that a U.S. Army base would present a film about violent insurrection at a British boarding school. Somebody screwed up. The base's theater recently offered "Where Eagles Dare". However, the film "If . . ." provided a welcome diversion from the rigors of military life. It also triggered colorful conversations and head scratching back at the barracks.