Financial Times (London,England)

September 1, 1994, Thursday

Lindsay Anderson – Obituary

By STEPHEN AMIDON

Lindsay Anderson, who died in France on Tuesday, was among the small group of directors who in the 1950s and 1960s transformed British cinema from a blinkered guardian of the nation’s institutions into a sharply satirical mirror of its many ills.
Along with his ‘Free Cinema’ colleagues Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, Anderson spearheaded a national film movement which rivalled its French and American counterparts for intelligence and trenchant social analysis. Current lamentations about the sad state of the British movie industry almost inevitably point to Anderson’s work as the ideal so rarely attained nowadays.
Born in Bangalore in 1923 into a Scottish military family, Anderson served with the Army Intelligence Corps in the second world war before entering Oxford, where he edited the influential film journal, Sequence. Upon graduation he pursued a career as a film critic for such publications as New Statesman, Sight and Sound and The Observer, platforms he used to rail against the conformity and anaemia of British film-making.

Before long, Anderson began to make films himself, cutting his teeth on a series of respected short documentaries that concluded with his Academy Award winning Thursday’s Children in 1955. During this period, Anderson also distinguished himself as a theatre director at the Royal Court as well as directing five episodes of the famous Robin Hood series for television.
Anderson’s career in feature films began spectacularly in 1963 with This Sporting Life, a powerful examination of celebrity and class dynamics in which Richard Harris portrayed a social-climbing rugby player. Although firmly in the tradition of the Angry Young Man school of gritty realism, Anderson’s first film distinguished itself through a crisp anecdotal style gleaned from his years as a documentary maker.
The director’s next triumph was his public school masterpiece If .. (1968), a quintessential study of 1960s alienation and surely one of the greatest youth rebellion films of all time. That film’s star, Malcolm MacDowell, was again featured in the final instalment of Anderson’s informal trilogy of decay in British life, O Lucky (1973), a technically-brilliant and blackly funny account of capitalism gone mad. In all these films the rigid institutions that held British society together were subjected to a brutal analysis, while at the same time an anarchic, emotional humanity was unabashedly triumphant. Though heavily schooled in theory, Anderson was above all else a visceral, instinctive talent who came to have little time for the visual technocrats currently masquerading as the avant garde of British film-making.
Anderson’s later work never quite reached the dizzying heights he achieved in his first decade of feature film-making. Britannia Hospital (1982), a scathing satire of the NHS, had its memorable moments, though the deftness of comic touch that marked its predecessors was missing. And The Whales of August (1987), Anderson’s only American film, was a sentimental drama of the first order that nevertheless had little to do with the dizzying darkness of his previous work. During this period he also continued to direct for the stage and television (most recently he returned to the National Theatre last year to direct a sell-out production of David Storey’s new play Stages) as well as to act, most notably his portrayal alongside John Gielgud of an anti-Semitic Cambridge don in Chariots of Fire.
In 1947, reflecting on the controversy surrounding Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, Anderson remarked that ‘perhaps the tendency is to treat the films of one’s own country like its prophets – with less than justice.’ It is a mark of Lindsay Anderson’s contribution as a director that it would be difficult for any justly-minded filmgoer to deny that his oracular, trenchant and altogether unique vision is one that remains unsurpassed in his nation’s cinematic tradition.