Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Charles Herold (cherold) I've heard that If... and O Lucky Man were two must-see classic movies, but I regret to say I couldn't connect with either. I saw If... years ago and don't remember anything about it beyond my disappointment, but I still gave O Lucky Man a chance.A dark satire of England (as best I can tell), the movie follows the adventures of a likable and enthusiastic coffee salesman who meets a series of corrupt caricatures. While the movie aims for sharp satire, there is something half-hearted about it all. The pace is sluggish and the movie seems to wander here and there with little purpose.Some of it works. Malcolm MacDowell is quite good, and the movie perks up when Ralph Richardson is on screen. But I just couldn't keep interested.About a third of the way through my Internet went out. Had that not happened, I would have kept watching in hopes that things picked up. But I am not at all inspired to continue.I like satire, I like surrealism, I like the cast, and I love the songs by Alan Price (I have the album). But I don't like this movie.

Buckywunder My somewhat slow, long-term project of revisiting films of my youth that impacted me took me back to that staple of campus films societies at Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1970's, O Lucky Man!, where I first saw it. Unfortunately, it has not dated well, at least in my opinion. (I know, I used to have a romanticized memory of the movie in my head as well.) Seeing it again after many, many more years of film-viewing I see this movie as being too long by at least a third. I think it could have really benefited with stricter editing choices and a firmer hand on the story -- which is ironic since Lindsay Anderson himself allegedly kept telling Malcolm McDowell (and presumably the crew) that they needed to do that very same thing. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious -- and normally I'm a sucker for an ambitious "failure," ESPECIALLY by Hollywood standards -- but they lost the story for some of the anti-establishment points they were trying to make way too inconsistently to hold focus or interest. There are too many other reasons for falling short to mention here, but not the least of them is that it features the high-water mark of the career of Malcolm McDowell who was at the peak of his international fame between the two Lindsay Anderson films and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (although also very good later in Time After Time). Once his stock fell after the collapse of the British film industry and he was displaced to the United States (along with a very nasty cocaine habit), his career never fully recovered and seems to have tainted some of Anderson's legacy with him. History, as they say, is written by the winners and McDowell (though, admirably, he cleaned up and turned his life around) hasn't been on the winning end. And just to be clear, I like McDowell. The cast is terrific (including a very young Helen Mirren who looks amazingly similar to Jennifer Lawrence of today) which is why I give it a 5, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than for film history purposes (British New Wave film, the 1970's, Lindsay Anderson, etc.).

runamokprods Surreal, often hysterically funny, sometimes surprisingly sad, full of sly political and social satire, and jammed with wildly brave film-making choices, along with one of the great movie song-scores of all time by Alan Price. Its Candide meets 1970s Great Britan as a young man rambles through life in a series of absurd adventures, with the great supporting cast (Ralph Richardson, Helen Mirren, etc.) having the time of their lives playing multiple roles.The three hour running time may sound daunting, but it flies by as we watch our hero Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell, whose real life pre-acting experiences were the jumping off point for the story) slowly become wise to the ways of the world through a series of bizarre encounters, arrests, love affairs, and everything else that can befall a young man on the road. A must see film for anyone who appreciates unique films and British humor.

sddavis63 For the first hour or so of this movie, everything seems pretty straightforward. Michael (played by Malcolm McDowell) is a young coffee salesman who's just starting to climb the ladder of success. His slow rise is sometimes humorous, and - with its sexual content - was somewhat reminiscent of the later American movie "The Secret Of My Success." At about the hour mark, though, this turns increasingly bizarre, beginning with Michael's arrest at a military installation. At that point his identity as a coffee salesman seems, for some reason, to simply disappear, and for the next two hours (yes, this is slightly over three hours long!) the movie takes on a darkly satirical note, critiquing pretty much everything: capitalism, religion, socialism, intellectuals - "the system" in general. No doubt the critique has some validity. I appreciated its balance in skewering pretty much everything, and truly appreciated that it took on the left as well as the right - so that Marx's famous dictum about religion becomes rephrased as "Revolution is the Opium of the Intellectuals" and Michael ends up being not only rejected but attacked by the homeless he tries to help; I took from all this the suggestion that socialists are often quite disconnected from those they claim to represent. The critique is valid, then, and the movie does make you think. It's also quite rambling at times, though, and often seems to lose its focus - or perhaps its better to say that it never really found its focus. In the end, it leaves little hope for redemption of any kind. If everything is as bad as this movie portrays, then frankly Mrs. Richards was right - and I'll say no more about that; you can watch the movie to find out about Mrs. Richards. In the end, I found this to be a rather dark and even depressing movie. 4/10