cult film freak: MALCOLM MCDOWELL ROAMS LINDSAY ANDERSON'S 'O LUCKY MAN!'

Malcolm McDowell as the resilient Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson's bizarre cult epic O LUCKY MAN! Year: 1973 Rating: ****

Typecast as an offbeat lunatic, Malcolm McDowell is the Anthony Perkins of England, and O LUCKY MAN is to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE what Orson Welles' THE TRIAL is to PSYCHO... as McDowell's more breezy, earthy and naïve Mick Travis tours England in a road movie dotted with just about every quirky/dreamlike bulwark imaginable...

Ranging from bearing witness to a lethal auto accident to a nuclear power plant's time-ticking emergency meltdown to a rural hospital using humans as lab rats (or pig-sheep), McDowell is, once again, the perfect cinematic pawn...

Malcolm McDowell in O LUCKY MAN!

And he's always moving, slithering about and searching, even while bedded/seduced by a string of women: from the coffee company boss (Rachel Roberts) to a Vicar's wife (Mary MacLeod), to lead ingenue Helen Mirren as a rich girl groupie of Alan Price's band — the latter providing a groovy Roman Chorus throughout...

At first jamming inside a studio separate from the action, both worlds eventually converge, providing our wandering nomad a literal ride that eventually eradicates the linear salesman story. But, alas, the second half... while remaining a dark/deranged attack on the senses... gathers moss, often seeming weird for the sake of weirdness...

Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren in Lindsay Anderson's O LUCKY MAN!

All this following a rather clumsy anti-corporate message as Travis becomes part of Mirren's father's billion dollar business, idealistically relating to director Lindsay Anderson's politically-charged IF... where McDowell's Mick Travis is introduced as a more sharpened student revolutionary in a boarding school run by sadistic boy-loving bullies...

But here he's a spontaneous and optimistic deer-in-headlights, like only McDowell can pull off... in complete control of having no control... crossing paths with an assortment of bizarre characters, often played by the same actors and actresses, making O LUCKY MAN more a collection of skits than a singular epic-length motion picture. Yet it's that too.