Synopsis
O Lucky Man! (1973) is Lindsay Anderson's satirical fable, and you can watch online on iFILM all 184 minutes of it. Malcolm McDowell plays Mick Travis, an ambitious coffee salesman who sets off across England with a sample case, a winning grin and a wholehearted belief that the system rewards good men.
What follows is a near-three-hour road through every con Britain has to offer. A sales triumph, a literal gold suit, a secret military base, a clinic running grotesque experiments, prison, romance, betrayal, repeat. Anderson marches his hero through business, the army, science, the courts and the church, and each institution turns out to be a bigger swindle than the last. The cast doubles and triples up — Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts and Arthur Lowe keep resurfacing as bankers, wardens, judges. A young Helen Mirren turns up too.
It's the middle film of the "Mick Travis trilogy," sitting between If.... and Britannia Hospital. Alan Price's songs play on screen, with Price himself at the piano in the studio, the story pausing again and again to comment on itself in music. Caustic, strange and thoroughly British — for anyone who likes their satire with the gloves off. Stream O Lucky Man! (1973) online on iFILM.
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