The Lost Crusade: Lindsay Anderson’s Unmade Sequel to If … (1968)

This chapter explores the circumstances surrounding the failure to realise a sequel to If… (1968), one of the most iconic productions of 1960s British cinema. Despite having completed a script, begun pre-production arrangements, and previously collaborated on several equally ambitious projects throughout the 1970s and 1980s, director Lindsay Anderson, screenwriter David Sherwin and actor Malcolm McDowell never managed to make a direct follow-up to their most popular and culturally successful film. The chapter uses archival research, diaries and correspondence to reveal the industrial, financial, logistical, political, or personal reasons behind the failure to complete this sequel in the 1980s and early 1990s - Reunion, a.k.a., If 2… - examining, more specifically, the ways in which existing primary resources frame this ‘failure’ in reference to discourses of authorship and artistic production on the one hand, and industrial processes of finance on the other. The attempt made by Anderson and Sherwin to collaborate on a final filmmaking project can be better understood though a multifaceted analysis of preproduction materials and authorial documents. The chapter demonstrates how we can use such research materials to reveal the multifaceted relationship between discursive elements of creative failure, artistic integrity, finance and administration, and the vagaries of success. The case of If 2… will come to exemplify the ways in which unmade films - films which ‘fail’ to be made - can provide valuable insights into the tension between film as art and film as cultural product.