FLIP A COIN

The book was better than the film? No way! The film was much better than the book?

if.... Mark Sinker (British Film Institute Classics, Paperback £8.99) Withnail & I Kevin Jackson (British Film Institute Modern Classics, Paperback £8.99) The BFI’s series of critical introductions to key movies has grown into a phenomenal library, characterised by wild eclecticism. From Marina Warner on L’Atalante to Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, the essayists in these vivid monographs veer from chatty subjectivity to formal academicism, sometimes in the same chapter, but are iinvariably driven by a passionate quality of ownership, as if they were somehow part of the original production team - the Film Explainer, perhaps, located in the credits between Key Grip and Best Boy. Mark Sinker sees “if....” as a far more ambiguous and compromised work than critical orthodoxy would have you believe. He traces the context of British social-realist rebellion not just through kitchen sink drama and Angry Young Men, but in the documentaries of Humphrey Jennings and the public-school contrarians of Kipling’s Stalky & Co. He sees Lindsay Anderson, the director, as caught between hatred of the public school as a breeding-ground of sadism and division, and a well-bred contempt for the counter-culture that was knocking at the door of the late Sixties. Well-bred because he was himself a public schoolboy (Cheltenham College) who couldn’t resist indulging the protocols he was notionally savaging. “Anderson looked at the world with cold fury and tenderness”, says Sinker, “and it’s the ambiguity of this mix ... which is worth exploring.” From the semiotics of flogging to the Bunuelian symbolism of the teacher lying in a drawer, Sinker leaves no celluloid pebble unturned. “if....” is in the BFI’s Film Classics series. In the parallel BFI Modern Classics comes Withnail & I - surely a film too draped with the lager-scented garlands of fans who enjoy reciting the film’s dialogue from memory and shouting “I demand booze!” and “What fucker said that?” in student bars, to be admitted to the hallowed Olympus of the Classics. Kevin Jackson confronts the accusations of callow self-indulgence and plotlessness, and presents the film as essentially a touching drama of male cameraderie and a subtle inversion of English pastoral dreams. As a cultural commentator, literary critic or film exegete, Jackson’s forte is knowledge, and he displays the formidably well-stocked, polydisciplinary index of references in his head to brilliant effect. Who but Jackson would know that the saxophone solo heard on A Whiter Shade of Pale over the film’s credits was taken from a live recording at Fillmore East after which the soloist was killed the same evening in the stadium car park? Jackson is also an alert and witty dealer in brisk descriptive precis” - he calls Withnail’s grotesquely corpulent gay Uncle Monty “several hundredweight of opportunistic sexual arousal”. His book stays closer than Sinker’s to the circumstances of the film’s production history, chases allusions like a spaniel in a field of butterflies, is written with airy charm and gleefully tells you, inter alia, where you can buy a Withnail Coat for only £595. No fan of vintage British movies could afford to be without both these insightful, impressively polymathic and strangely loving acts of film worship. John Walsh is Books Editor for the Independent on Sunday?????? Robin I'm checking. We should have covers for both books but the one for "IF" is corrupted ... I am trying for a replacement.