Conspicuously influenced by Jean Vigos Zéro de Conduite (1933), Lindsay Anderson's influential cinematic petard from 1968 offers precisely the class of civilised revolution you would expect from a man educated at Cheltenham College and Wadham, College Oxford.

Malcolm McDowell plays a cheeky student at a minor public school who, outraged by the hypocrisy that surrounds him, grabs a Bren gun and starts his own little rooftop insurrection.

Filmed partly in colour and partly in black and white, the film, presented here with a fascinating commentary from McDowell, has an intoxicated, off-kilter feel to it that evocatively sums up the spirit of '68. For all that, it is hard not to feel that the use of the school as a simplistic metaphor for England now seems somewhat crude. The alternative - to treat the film as an explicit criticism of something so obviously outdated as the public school system - is scarcely any more persuasive. Still, If . . . remains a key artefact in British cinema.

IF . . .  Directed by Lindsay Anderson. Starring Malcolm McDowell, Arthur Lowe, Christine Noonan, Peter Jeffrey, Mona Washbourne, David Wood 15 cert