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In a long and varied career, Lindsay Anderson made training films, documentaries, searing family dramas and blistering satires, including This Sporting Life, O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. This book is about a director whose work came to public attention with Free Cinema but who, unlike many of his peers in that movement did not take the Hollywood route to success. What emerges is a strong feeling for the character of the man as well as for a remarkable career in British cinema. Making use of hitherto unseen original materials from Anderson's extensive personal and professional records, this book is valuable as a study of how the films came about: the production problems involved, the collaborative input of others, as well as the completed films' promotion and reception. It also offers a finely argued take on the whole issue of film authorship. It prompts renewed respect for the man and the artist and a desire to watch the films all over again.
themes (clearly an attraction of Anderson the satirist after If.... ); but even when a cinematic triumph may bathe a distributor in reflected glory, that is usually of secondary importance to marketing opportunities. The mid-period of Anderson’s filmmaking illustrates the phenomenon. Reviewing If.... , Gene Moskowitz wrote in Variety , ‘It reveals Lindsay Anderson as one of the more individual and dynamic
directors experienced greater creative freedom than their peers in Hollywood where at that time the studios operated producerled regimes. 3 For Lindsay Anderson (as later for Truffaut and the young Turks writing for Cahiers du Cinéma ), the author was the director. Anderson believed this was the person who fused the contributions of all the other craftspeople involved into the finished whole. 4 He certainly did cite European
contemporaries all wrote sophisticated film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, in which Truffaut formulated the intellectual basis for auteurism, ‘La politique des auteurs’ in 1954, and Ingmar Bergman was an aspiring author of dramas, short stories and film scripts in Sweden in the early 1940s. 4 Britain and Sequence had, among others, Lindsay Anderson, the writer who would most eloquently formulate
’s ascription of authorship, in demonstrating how this film holds the complete dialectic (the tenderness towards humanity and the satirical perspective) coincides with our observation of such tensions as underlying almost the entire body of Lindsay Anderson’s screen work. 20 Lindsay Anderson and crew prepare to shoot a scene for his final film Is That All There Is
the final scene, Lindsay Anderson as director steps out from behind the camera and places himself in the centre of the action. The film’s young hero, coffee salesman Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) has been on a long picaresque journey reminiscent of Voltaire’s Candide , Fielding’s Tom Jones or even Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (another character falsely seduced by society’s obsession with
relationship between director and his male lead can with hindsight be seen to have imprinted the film with a private authorial signature – Lindsay Anderson’s. Three early letters from Harris to Anderson, written after their meeting and while the former was still on location with Mutiny on the Bounty , leave no doubt that the actor badly wanted the part and sought to impress the director by persuading him of his high regard and
to say that during the production process of The Old Crowd a significant change had taken place in Anderson’s authorial practices. The same cannot be said for critical perceptions of ‘Lindsay Anderson’. ‘Anderson’ the perceived auteur Analysis of the play as transmitted often focused on the same topics. But while some reviewers did offset what they thought had been well achieved
Diary or journal? Lindsay Anderson’s diaries surprised the archivists in our team because they are so neat and well ordered. For the most part they read as though everything had been planned out and sifted through before being written down. This suggests that he went through a careful decision-making process, whether conscious or subconscious, about what to remember and what to omit. Occasionally we
channel HBO responds with a deliberate counter-programming niche strategy, explicitly airing programming with ‘darker’ and ‘more difficult’ advertising-unfriendly content. 86 19 Lindsay Anderson and Mike Fash on the set of Glory! Glory! (1988