"Lindsay Anderson's film is about the apparently ineradicable toleration of what, in our rare moments of sanity, we recognize to be impossibly insane. The public school in If...., neither real nor imaginary, is the perfect metaphor for the established system all but a few of us continue to accept..., an Establishment so entrenched and pervasive that our only response to it is wish-fulfillment fantasy, as quixotic as Mick (Malcolm McDowell)'s half-despairing cry that 'Violence and revolution are the only pure acts.' On Speech Day, Mick's fantasy is acted out: the assembled Establishment is attacked by the rebels installed on the chapel roof.... Vigo said it over thirty years ago in Zero de Conduite. But the important thing is that no one in the British cinema has said it since in so uncompromisingly honest a way, which makes Anderson's homage to Vigo in (the) final scene entirely appropriate. The icons of the British system-of which this school is a microcosm-persist, and the Establishment will see to it that being iconoclastic will get you nowhere.... The episodic structure is exactly right for the film's careful accumulation of mood. And the much criticized blend of fantasy and realism, color and monochrome...is here an essential part of the development.... The distinction between the real and the unreal is gradually blurred until in the final scene they become one and the same thing. 'Something like the Writing on the Wall,' Anderson has called If...." David Wilson, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1968