Lindsay Anderson's film if... (1968), starring Malcolm McDowell as a schoolboy who leads a guerilla insurgency, imagines how repression, conformism and fusty ritual at an English Public School could lead to anarchy and bloody revolt. Its title is a sardonic nod to Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem, and its story a radical updating of Kipling's 1899 story-sequence Stalky and Co, in which prankish rebels are groomed to police the Empire. Released at a time of unprecedented student uprisings across the globe, if... provided a peculiarly English perspective on the battle between generations - the perennial war of the romantically passionate against the corrupt, the ugly, the old and the foolish.<BR>With hindsight the forces of conformity proves better able to exploit the Generation Gap than their foes: Anderson was quickly out of sympathy with the post-1960s counterculture, and if...now seems presciently dense with ambiguity. It is stylistically varied - shot in both colour and black-and-white, a mix of mock-documentary and quasi-surrealism - and far more contradictory than first viewing or fond memory allow. Though its emotional surface is authentically anti-authoritarian, its intellectual substance, as Marak Sinker argues, is rooted in a deep familiarity with the symbols of English ruling-class values. No longer a vehicle for shock or dissent, if... is today enjoyed comfortably, even nostalgically - but for Sinker this renders its many knots and paradoxes, the moments of poetry that Anderson argued were cinema's raison d'etre, all the more fascinating.