Lindsay Anderson
About
Biography
Filmography
Bibliography
Notes
Bob Baker, of the British film journal Film Dope characterized Anderson as follows: "John Ford meets George Orwell."
"I'm not, unfortunately, a good careerist, and I'm not proud of that. It's just that to be a director today, you have to do so much more than actually direct. My problem is I don't speak the Hollywood language. I just don't." --Lindsay Anderson, in a 1987 Variety interview, quoted in his obituary in the September 1, 1994 issue of that industry trade.
Biography
"If you truly love human beings, you have to be able to be angry with them," Lindsay Anderson once said. An angry idealist and cerebral iconoclast, he implied--at least in his early feature film work--that the first step toward redeeming a corrupt system of values lies in contemplating its destruction.
Anderson served in WWII in a British Army Rifles unit and the Intelligence Corps. While a student at Oxford, he edited SEQUENCE, an influential film magazine, along with writer Gavin Lambert and future directors Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz. Like its fellow French journal, CAHIERS DU CINEMA, SEQUENCE favored Hollywood film, the new postwar realism and the avant-garde, and dismissed its homeland's national cinema as static and choked by empty "prestige" product. Anderson's own most important discovery during this time was the works of John Ford, which influenced his early affinity for the poetic aspects of cinema.
Anderson began his film career in 1948, making documentaries for industrialist Richard Sutcliffe. He continued to work in the nonfiction field through the 1950s, displaying a clear-eyed flair for visual detail and a sympathetic, even lyrically humanistic manner of gently stylizing the vignettes which make up these films. One of Anderson's earliest films to display his deeply personal approach to filmmaking was "Wakefield Express" (1952), a study of a newspaper. He won an Oscar for co-directing (with Guy Brenton) another short, "Thursday's Children" (1953), an exceptionally delicate, intimate look, doubtless influenced by Alexander Mackendrick's fictional "Mandy" (1952), of the efforts of deaf children to learn to communicate.
"Every Day Except Christmas" (1957), meanwhile, an affectionate tribute to the merchants of Covent Garden, displayed Anderson's sympathy for the proletariat, while "O Dreamland" (1953) even more tellingly pointed toward his later work as it savagely lampooned both the tawdry purveyors of amusement park diversion and their mindless, passive customers. In these films and in his writings, Anderson promoted the influential Free Cinema movement, which explored the universal significance of mundane events and the relationship of art to working-class experience.
In 1957 Anderson became a director at the Royal Court Theatre; his work there and at other venues embraced Shakespeare and Chekhov as well as contemporary playwrights, most notably David Storey, with whom he would collaborate regularly over the next 35 years, staging such Storey plays as "In Celebration" (1969), "Home" (1971) and "Stages" (1992). Anderson's first feature, "This Sporting Life" (1963), was adapted by Storey from his novel about a troubled rugby star and coal miner and brought Richard Harris, a suitably rebellious Anderson hero, to stardom. An extension of Anderson's documentarian concerns, the film was also important in the evolution of Free Cinema into the fiction-based "Angry Young Man" school of British "Kitchen Sink" realism.
"If..." (1968), Anderson's most important film, marked a fierce revisionist departure. In this icy ode to rites of passage, deliberately modeled on Jean Vigo's landmark filmic call for anarchy, "Zero de Conduite" (1933), Anderson painted a scathing portrait of the English private school system, using it as a thinly disguised metaphor for society as a whole. The film was the first of a trilogy ("O Lucky Man!" 1973, "Britannia Hospital" 1982) featuring the character of Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), who cavorts and lurches through a modern England characterized by absurdity and decay. The often bitterly hilarious "O Lucky Man!" led Travis into a series of encounters with the military and medical establishments, the industrial hierarchy and, finally, the media--in the shape of a director (played by Lindsay Anderson) looking for a star for the film we have just been watching. "Brittania Hospital" was a nightmarishly comic indictment of the British medical system of the 1980s, whose decay is again representative of society as a whole.
In 1981 Anderson completed a well-received documentary study, "About John Ford," and that same year played a very funny cameo role as a schoolmaster in "Chariots of Fire." "The Whales of August" (1987), his last feature, was an elegy to old age that paired legendary actresses Lillian Gish and Bette Davis as housebound sisters on the Maine coast. Though touching and well-played, it displayed neither the lyrical realism of his early career nor the abrasive satire of his later films. His last major work, "Glory! Glory!" (1989), a made-for-HBO TV-movie, sent up the televangelist phenomenon in more typical, unreserved Anderson style. But the director's iconoclasm in his later years seemed to yield to an awareness of the intractability of the problems he once railed against and, via frequent work doing voice-overs for documentaries, seemed to take comfort in a nostalgia for the history of cinema.
Filmography
Director (Feature Film)
Cast (Feature Film)
Writer (Feature Film)
Producer (Feature Film)
Editing (Feature Film)
Film Production - Main (Feature Film)
Misc. Crew (Feature Film)
Cast (Special)
Writer (Special)
Special Thanks (Special)
Director (Short)
Cast (Short)
Writer (Short)
Life Events
1925
Moved to England from India at age two
1943
Served as an army officer with the King's Royal Rifle Corps and later with the Army Intelligence Corps during WWII; military experience ended with a year in India working as a cryptographer
1945
Along with a number of his fellow army officers, raised a red flag over the roof of their camp's mess when a Labour government was elected in Britain
1946
Claimed that he received his "first real creative shock in the cinema" when he first saw John Ford's "My Darling Clementine"
1948
Made first short documentary, "Meet the Pioneers" (also narrator, writer and co-editor)
1952
Made "Wakefield Express" and "Three Installations", the first two of nine documentary collaborations over the next several years with cinematographer Walter Lassally
1952
Produced and acted in James Broughton's experimental medium-length film, "The Pleasure Garden"
1952
Published "Making of a Film" about Thorold Dickinson's production of "Secret People" (1952)
1955
Began directing occasional TV commercials, a kind of work he would intermittently return to over the years (date approximate)
1957
London stage directing debut, "The Waiting of Lester Abbs", Royal Court Theatre, London
1963
Feature film directing debut, "This Sporting Life"; also marked early collaboration with novelist and playwright David Storey, who wrote the screenplay based on his novel
1965
Stage acting debut in "Miniature" at the Royal Court Theatre, London
1967
Directed two short films, "The White Bus" and "Raz Dwz Trzy--The Singing Lesson/"One, Two, Three--The Singing Lesson", the latter made in Poland
1968
Feature producing debut, "If...", Which he co-produced with Michael Medwin and also directed
1968
Made feature-length film acting debut, as a barrister in "Inadmissible Evidence"
1969
Earliest acting for TV included a role on "The Parachute"
1969
First theatrical premiere staged in collaboration with playwright David Storey, "In Celebration"
1971
Directed David Storey's play, "Home", on Broadway, with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in the leading roles; received Tony nomination as Best Director of a Dramatic Play
1972
Narrated the documentary, "75 Years of Cinema Museum", directed by Eila Hershon and Roberto Guerra
1978
Received credit for "collaboration" on the independently-made feature film, "Nighthawks", about a gay male schoolteacher
1985
Directed a production of "Hamlet" in Washington DC, restaging and revising a production of the play he had done in London four years earlier
1985
Made a documentary film of a tour of China by the British pop group Wham!, "Wish You Were There/Foreign Skies"
1987
Directed last feature film, "The Whales of August"
1989
American TV directorial debut, "Glory! Glory!", A satirical miniseries made for HBO
1991
Played the role of the war minister in the made-for-HBO TV-movie, "Prisoner of Honor"
1992
Last theatrical premiere of work written by David Storey, "Stages"
1992
Last feature film acting appearance, "Blame It on the Bellboy"
1994
Was one of five filmmakers asked by the BBC to make semi-autobiographical films for a series, "The Director's Place"; Anderson's segment scheduled to open the series 9/17/94
Videos
Movie Clip
Trailer
Family
Bibliography
Notes
Bob Baker, of the British film journal Film Dope characterized Anderson as follows: "John Ford meets George Orwell."
"I'm not, unfortunately, a good careerist, and I'm not proud of that. It's just that to be a director today, you have to do so much more than actually direct. My problem is I don't speak the Hollywood language. I just don't." --Lindsay Anderson, in a 1987 Variety interview, quoted in his obituary in the September 1, 1994 issue of that industry trade.
