O Lucky Man! is a 1973 British comedy-drama fantasy film directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, whom McDowell had first played as a disaffected public schoolboy in his first film performance in Anderson's if.... (1968). O Lucky Man! is the second film in the Mick Travis Trilogy, all starring McDowell, concluding with Britannia Hospital (1982).

Plot

The film is prefaced by a short story that begins "Once Upon a Time", a silent, black-and-white film that depicts an unnamed country filled with peasant laborers. They pick coffee beans while armed foremen push rudely between them. One worker (McDowell with black hair and a mustache) pockets a few beans for himself ("Coffee for the Breakfast Table"), but he is discovered by a foreman. He is next seen before a fat magistrate who slobbers as he removes his cigar only to say "Guilty." The foreman draws his machete and lays it across the unfortunate laborer's wrists, bound to a wooden block, revealing that he is to lose his hands for the theft of a few beans. The machete rises and falls, and the laborer draws back in a silent scream. The scene blacks out and the title "NOW" appears onscreen and quickly expands to fill it.

Awards