There is something about Malcolm McDowell movies. Especially when you watch several of them (almost) in a row. One was a particular delight, after reviewing A Clockwork Orange, namely O Lucky Man! (1973). Why? Because I’d watched it as a child. Well, minus all the sex scenes!

By Emad Aysha
It was challenging to make sense of it when I re-watched it a couple of days later, but it was thoroughly entertaining, gripping, and well-made—quite a feat for a movie that almost hits the three-hour mark.

The erstwhile hero of the story is Michael Travis, a low-level employee of the imperial coffee company. (Note that the opening sequence features a silent movie about a coffee plantation in a Latin American country, planting the seed of the notion that Britain itself has become a banana republic.)

Travis hits it big; when the company’s top salesman in the North disappears under mysterious circumstances, he gets the job, with some sexploitation from his direct boss, the hefty Gloria Rowe (Rachel Roberts). He also gets in with the crowd that practically runs the business world there, with sex parties and in-house dealing.

FOOL'S GOLD: They actually tell the hero in the movie that it's not real gold thread, but in this world all that counts is keeping up old appearances.

The key scene is in this early phase of the story because he goes to a factory up North to sell coffee to the canteen, only to find it’s been shut down, for no good reason. When there’s no industrial economy, no creation of wealth and no real competition, all you can do is share in the spoils and corner the market.

When he’s headed north he witnesses a car accident, only for some self-interested cops telling him to piss off or they’ll arrest him, taking some goodies from the crime scene. The accident happens because a guy is celebrating his new sports car, racing into the fog and bashing into a van carrying foodstuffs.

Later, Travis becomes the personal assistant of an industrial tycoon, exploiting the Third World for its resources with the help of the local despot. He ends up in prison as a scapegoat for a shady deal involving chemical weapons to be used against the local resistance.

Again, post-imperial Britain is living off past glories, dealing in raw materials (copper) and agricultural goods (coffee); the classic definition of a Third World country. And recollecting that intro sequence.

There’s also allusions to rentierism, evident in the hotel he stays at up North, with the ‘eager’ landlady and her buffoon husband or manservant. (The same room the former top salesman stayed in, who himself now works for that copper tycoon).

Two other sequences are essential. One involves Travis being sent up (further north) to Scotland and getting caught at a nuclear facility, tortured and accused of being a spy. He has to sign a confession, but fortunately, the place blows up because of incompetence. He’s interrogated in German, as if the War is ongoing.

He’s helped by a Scottish woman – I won’t tell you ‘how’ exactly – but he does have fun when he’s far away from the city and in nature's bounty. Later, he ends up at a private clinic where they do experiments on people and volunteers in exchange for money and food. He finds a poor subject who has been turned into a ‘sheep’ from the neck down!

Talk about lambs to the slaughter, and the scientist who owns the place has the audacity of talking about genetically modifying the human race to improve its chances of survival with pollution and global warming. In reality, he wants to sterilise Travis, meaning the man is nothing more than a eugenicist.

That would explain what’s happening right now in the West, with the rise of neo-Nazis and white supremacy all over again. But again it’s all beating around the bush. The mad scramble for jobs, pitting the white man against the black man, is a product of slow and one suspects deliberate deindustrialisation, as capitalist fat cats go abroad in search of cheap, oppressed labour.

Even in the context of the Gaza War, you find upper class tosspots presiding over movements made up of racist yobs, using Arabs and Muslims as scapegoats. (Recollect The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

The story does end well, though. Travis gets out of prison a reformed man no longer interested in money, and he gets rejected and robbed by the very people he’s trying to help—the poor. He ends up auditioning for an acting gig and gets told to smile, which he refuses.

What’s there to smile about. He gets bashed over the head, finds his smile, makes it big, and recaptures his fame and fortune. He has a golden suit made for him by a friendly and wise older man, from the north, and also gets back with Patricia (the violently attractive Helen Mirren), the tycoon's daughter. (Caligula again).

The tycoon and the friendly older man are played by the same actor, Sir James Burgess, a common practice here. The message of the movie seems to be that you should smile at it all and not take things too seriously, whether you're a rebel or go along with the system.

SURREAL SCIENCE: The beauty of science fiction is that you can, quite literally, turn the figurative into the literal.

Find your little alcove, have fun there, and laugh. There’s even a scene with a slogan that reads revolution is the opium of the intellectuals. Just another group of elites that want to have a subservient crown (of sheep) to rule over.

Patricia’s a phony rebel herself, and the movie's central song is how you’re a lucky man if you can find people who don’t lie to you and want what’s best for you, and from the rock band that helps Travis at one point.

It’s like watching an Egyptian black and white movie where people in a lunatic asylum are happy because it’s the people on the outside who are mad. Third World indeed!