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O LUCKY MAN!
June 23, 2015  | By David Bianculli

TCM, 1:45 a.m. ET

 

Set your recorders for this late-night, rarely televised treat. This is another pick from tonight’s TCM guest programmer, English director Edgar Wright, and this time he’s picking a strange, strange, strange movie. 1973’s O Lucky Man!, directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell, was McDowell’s follow-up to playing two powerful early film roles: the student anarchist in Anderson’s If…, and the futuristic, sadistic gang leader in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. What to do next? This: a stunningly original allegorical film in which McDowell plays a neophyte coffee salesman suddenly entrusted with a key route across the United Kingdom. What, you ask, makes that plot interesting, much less unique?  Almost everyone he encounters, across his journeys, recurs in various, vastly different roles. Providing the soundtrack, and also appearing in the movie as himself, is Alan Price, former keyboard artist for The Animals, whose songs here are among the best rock songs ever composed for the movies. And making her debut here, as the female lead, is a young, beautiful, and even then captivating Helen Mirren. It’s a bizarre black comedy, which, like Price’s lyrics, has a lot to say if you pay attention: “We all want justice / but you got to have the money to buy it / You’d have to be a fool to close your eyes and deny it….”

 
 
 
 
 
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