Lindsay Anderson’s third feature is a provocative look at British society’s vagaries, hypocrisies and amoralities.

Lindsay Anderson’s third feature is a provocative look at British society’s vagaries, hypocrisies and amoralities. A bold medley of surrealism, satire, polemic and spy film.

Malcolm McDowell would return to the screen twice to play Mick Travis, a cinematic everyman whose character arc across three films is less important than Anderson’s desire with each film to crack the veneer of ‘respectable’ British society.

In this picaresque journey through the British hinterland, Travis starts out as a travelling salesman, only to become implicated in arms-dealing and radical medical experimentation, before the film reaches its gleefully knowing conclusion (featuring the only on-screen appearance by Anderson in one of his films). A broad satire that succeeds in hitting a number of its many targets, ‘O Lucky Man!’ also features an early appearance by Helen Mirren.