Elegist of Empire
"Aggressive and defensive in about equal measure, he was gentle and
irascible, bloody-minded and generous, courageous, uncompromising and
endlessly evasive." In this manner, the late English film and theater
director Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) described his artistic idol John Ford
in a 1981 tribute to legendary American director. However, as this
compassionate memoir by his friend, novelist and screenwriter Gavin
Lambert, indicates, these words might equally be used to characterize their
author. Lindsay Anderson was one of Britain's most noted and productive
theatre and film directors during the second half of the last century.
Pugnacious and driven by demons he could not control save through work,
Anderson was a member of the generation dubbed the "angry young men"
along with playwrights John Osborne and Harold Pinter and film director
Tony Richardson. Their work liberated the country's theater and cinema
from a regressive gentility as well as infusing its techniques with
foreign influences. As a group, their vitality waned as England descended
from the vigorous heyday of "Swinging London" to the economic doldrums
of the 1970s. A trace of cynicism and more than a strain of
dyed-in-the-wool conservatism emerged in the process, leaving these men
increasingly isolated from the culture for which they had once been the epitome of
experimentation and risk-taking. No longer savage critics of a
hidebound, class-driven society, they found themselves eager to preserve the
value of traditions that they observed crumble about them. Their
vehemence transformed into nostalgia.
Anderson typifies this fascinating cultural pattern, yet at the same
time he never wholly lost a hair-trigger disdain for the failures of his
countrymen. When asked what he wished on his headstone, Anderson
replied, "Surrounded by fucking idiots." That fervor was, in many ways, the
product of a damaged and divided temperament. He was gay, but found that
to be an impediment rather than a fact of life. In his diary while a
student at Oxford Anderson wrote, "I seems then that I am homosexual. Oh
God. It really is rather awful and I suppose I shall never get rid of
it." He never did, but that sense of alienation led him to be a
sympathetic appreciator of outsiders and a mindful critic of the excesses of
masculinity. His first feature, The Sporting Life (1963), remains a
masterful evocation of how the brutality of a soccer player's (Richard
Harris) emotions doom a relationship with his landlady (Rachel Roberts).
Anderson cast the story as a sequence of flashbacks as Harris's
character is being operated on following a serious injury. The bracing ferocity
of the team at play is paralleled by the equally tempestuous exchanges
between Harris and Roberts.
Anderson's best-known and most influential film remains If (1968), a
poetic and provocative evocation of the tyranny embodied by the English
school system. While This Sporting Life embodies the best qualities
of what was known as kitchen-sink realism, If alternates between
documentation of school customs and codes and surreal alterations of
reality. The very film stock switches without warning between black and white
and color. Characters are shot and then miraculously reappear. Images
switch into slow motion in order to underscore the vehemence of the
characters' emotions, most memorably as an upperclassman works out on the
parallel bars under the ardent gaze of a love-struck younger student.
If's trio of protagonists, led by Malcolm McDowell (in his premiere
role), remain outsiders in this hidebound world. They eventually succumb
to revolutionary fervor and lash out in the final scene. While If
concludes with change wrought through the barrel of a gun, what lingers
about the film is the breadth of Anderson's imagination and the passion
with which he at the same time savages and memorializes the environment
of his youth.
Anderson's subsequent major films comprise a trilogy along with If.
O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britania Hospital (1982) incorporate
McDowell's Mick Travis as a recurring character yet yield to an ever more
corrosive cynicism and despair over any possibility of social alteration.
Both pictures are imbued with a style of characterization associated
with Bertolt Brecht, a kind of formalized exaggeration that lends an
inhibiting distance to the proceedings. Vigorous and often wildly comic
though the events might be, one finds it be easy to be engaged by the
proceedings but hard to be sympathetic. On the other hand, Anderson's use of
music does bear mentioning. In If, he underscored the characters'
revolutionary yearnings with an African mass, the Missa Luba, while a
set of extremely effective songs by the English rocker Alan Price
(keyboard player with the Animals on "House of the Rising Sun") act as
Brechtian commentaries in O Lucky Man!. Their lyrics retain a sobering
recognition of life's limited opportunities for individuality and
self-statement. Anderson felt those constraints most painfully. Age forty-eight
when he began the production, he wrote in his diary, "Nobody realizes
what a mess of loneliness and inadequacy I am inside."
That painful sense of inadequacy is balanced by Anderson's impressive
productivity. In addition to his films, he had a string of notable
successes directing works in the theatre by David Storey, Joe Orton, and
others. Never able to find a permanent companion, Anderson nonetheless
remained passionately devoted to friends and family, aiding many people
financially and putting them up — in some cases for many years — in his
own home when they fell on hard times. Lambert's memoir chronicles this
fascinating yet heartbreaking odyssey. The two men had known once
another since their schooldays, both having attended St. George's School,
where Anderson returned to shoot If, and later Oxford. Together, they
founded the first serious British film journal, Sequence, while still
in college. Lambert went on to work for the British Film Institute,
direct a single film, Amber Sky (1955) and write a set of novels and
screenplays, which include the adaptation of his narrative Inside Daisy Clover (1965). The two life-long friends were both gay, yet Lambert
never felt abused by those circumstances nor did he suffer in solitude as
Anderson chose to do for much of his life. Lambert possessed a
resilience that his friend lacked, switching careers and residences several
times. Much as he loathed elements about England, Anderson rarely left the
country except to travel to film festivals or to engage in occasional
business meetings in Hollywood. That intransigence constituted the core
of Anderson's character, yet what was once a matter of principle
succumbed over a period of time to a kind of grumpy denial. And yet, that
"absoluteness of stance," as his friend the director Karel Reisz
(Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960) put it, was the force that drove his
conscience. Much as that "absoluteness" could not permit him to enjoy
his life as much as others enjoyed sharing it with him, Anderson
possessed a dedication that our age of prevarication and flim-flam makes all
the more admirable. Much as the world broke Anderson's heart, it never
broke until the very end his capacity to respond to our cupidity as well
as our capacity for grandeur.
