Lindsay Anderson (1924 -1994 ) was a British film and theatre director whose abhorrence of conformity and his rejection of class-conscious British traditions are reflected in his incendiary, subversive, darkly humorous, anarchic films if . . . (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973).
if…. stars Malcolm McDowell in his first film role. It is satire of English private school life, focusing on a group of students who stage a savage insurrection at a boys’ boarding school. The film was very controversial when it was released, receiving an X rating. if…. won the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.
McDowell returns as Mick Travis the same character from if…. in O Lucky Man!, a comedy that serves as an allegory on life in a capitalist society. There are songs and a score by Alan Price and scenes of urban desolation as many of the characters end up homeless and living in cardboard boxes. Critics at the time accused Anderson of hysteria and exaggeration, yet much of O Lucky Man! looks like a documentary that could have been shot in our own era.
Anderson became famous as a filmmaking rebel during the 1960s and 1970s, and he helped lead the wave of what we now label British New Wave Cinema, but he was also an innovative theater director, and served as the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London from 1969 to 1975.
Anderson’s first film was the influential This Sporting Life (1963), a look at the socially restrictive society of a Northern English town as seen through the eyes of a rugby player. It stars Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, both of whom received Academy Award nominations for their work. The film was Harris’s first starring role, and he won the Best Actor Award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. Roberts won her second BAFTA Award for her performance, and Harris was nominated for the BAFTA.
McDowell said of Anderson:
“He was a very, very important man in my life. He started me off as an actor in film. The sad thing is he was itching to do something in the last few years but could never raise the money, and now it’s too late.”
Anderson’s other films include In Celebration (1975), an adaption of a play by David Storey (1933 – 2017) about three brothers who return to the coal-mining town of their youth, and Britannia Hospital (1982), a black satire where a chaotic hospital serves as a metaphor for decaying Britain, with McDowell repeating his character from if… and O Lucky Man!.
Anderson appears in small roles in most of his films, and he gives a brief, rich performance as a schoolmaster in the Oscar-winning Chariots Of Fire (1981).
Anderson was born in India, where his father served in the British military. He graduated from Oxford, where he was a classical scholar and co-editor of the magazine Sequence, for which he wrote passionate pieces championing the American avant-garde. One article, Free Cinema, gave its name to a new school of documentary-style British of filmmaking exemplified by bisexual director Tony Richardson.
In the 1950s, Anderson made documentary films, including Thursday’s Children, an Academy Award winner, narrated by Richard Burton, about the young people at The Royal School for the Deaf.
Anderson’s theatre work was centered on the works of Storey, his longtime friend and collaborator. From In Celebration in 1969 to the Royal National Theatre production of Stages in 1992, he directed every Storey premiere, including Home (1970), The Changing Room (1973) and Life Class (1974). On Broadway he directed Home and The Kingfisher (1975) and he did the Off-Broadway revivals of The Holly And The Ivy (1982) and In Celebration (1984). In 1985, he directed Hamlet in Washington DC, revising a production he had done in London four years earlier.
He directed the daffy Glory! Glory! (1989), a satire of television evangelism, for HBO.
Anderson developed an acquaintance from 1950 with the great Irish-American John Ford. Anderson’s About John Ford (1983) is one of the best books by a filmmaker about a filmmaker.
I was drawn to Anderson’s films as youth because they dripped with homoerotic subtext and contained scads of male nudity. In the early 1970s, I had an affair that melted into a friendship with writer Gavin Lambert (1924 – 2005); he was Anderson’s roommate at Oxford. Lambert was British-born, but lived part of his life in Los Angeles. His writing was mainly fiction and nonfiction about the film industry. He wrote a sort of memoir titled Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000), where he says that Anderson was queer, but repressed his gayness.
McDowell:
“I know that he was in love with Richard Harris. I am sure that it was the same with me and Albert Finney and the rest. But I suppose he always fell in love with his leading men. He would always pick someone who was unattainable because he was heterosexual.“
Lambert told me that Anderson was combative with a total refusal to compromise, which resulted in many battles and so few films. He was a difficult man, but he was also intensely likeable and invigorating to be with; and he may well have been the single most important individual in British film history. Anderson loathed the traditional British commercial films in the tradition of David Lean.
In This Sporting Life, Harris plays a brutal rugby player and Roberts is his widowed landlord. Their emotional and often violent relationship made for exceptionally intense and harrowing viewing. The film was a commercial flop; by 1963, British filmmaking was into escapism with the James Bond films washing away the last vestiges of realism and the sort of sexual repression that Anderson was dealing with.
After his Britannia Hospital bombed at the box-office, Anderson relaxed a bit with his last films. My favorite is the gentle The Whales Of August (1987), with Lillian Gish and Bette Davis as elderly sisters, and Ann Sothern and Vincent Price as their friends. Most film fans thought Gish and Davis would win scads of awards for the performances, but Sothern was the only one Academy Award-nominated. This movie serves as a loving tribute to all four of their talents and their careers. It marked a reunion between Davis and Price after 48 years, having last appeared together in The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex in 1939.
Many Golden Age greats were approached to play a role in this movie, including Shirley Booth, Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Paul Henreid. Davis had only recently recovered from several strokes and Gish was somewhat hard of hearing. Davis and Gish turned down their parts more than once before being persuaded by Anderson to star in the film.
Gish and Davis did not get along during the filming. Davis demanded top billing, an act of commercial aggression that Gish found appalling. Gish:
“Oh dear, I just can’t deal with that sort of thing. I don’t care what they do with my name. If they leave it off, so much the better. It’s the work I love, not the glory.”
Davis received left-side billing, but with Gish’s name slightly higher. Gish said Davis rarely spoke to her or looked at her except when the script required. Gish:
“That face! Have you ever seen such a tragic face? Poor woman! How she must be suffering! I don’t think it’s right to judge a person like that. We must bear and forbear.”
Davis:
“Miss Gish was stone deaf. She couldn’t have heard the cues if I’d shouted them through a bullhorn.”
Later, Gish admitted she actually could hear her cues, but invented a subtle version of the silent treatment because of Davis’s mistreatment. When Davis spoke a line, Gish often would look puzzled and gently protest: “I just can’t hear what she’s saying…”. While Davis sat seething, Anderson would repeat Davis’s line, and Gish would instantly pick up her cue and continue the scene.
In a 1990 interview Anderson said:
“I don’t exist anymore as a British filmmaker. I have never had a nomination, not that I give a damn, from the British Film Academy. That is perfectly OK because I know what I do is not to the English taste – fuck ’em.“
Anderson was taken by a heart attack in 1994 at 71 years old. He seems to have died as he lived, as an angry old man. If he had made it, he would have been celebrating his 99th birthday today, possibly in the company of McDowell.
