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Lindsay Anderson,

b. Bangalore, India, 1923 1948; Meet the Pioneer,? (d). 1949: Idlers That Work (d). 1951: Three Installations (d). 1952: Wakefield Express (d)- 1953: Thursday’s Child (codirected with Guy Brenton) (d); O Dreamland (d). 1954; Trunk Conveyor (d). 1955; Foot and Mouth (d); A Hundred Thousand Children (d); The Children Upstairs (d); Green and Pleasant Land (d); Henry (d); £20 a Ton (d); Energy First (d). 1957: Every Day Except Christmas (d), 195!): March to Alder-maston (codirected) (d). 1962: This Sporting Life. 1966: The White Bus (s). 1967: Raz, Dwa, TrzytThe Singing Lesson. 1968; If. … 1972; 0 Lucky Man!. 1974: In Celebration. 1979; The Old Crowd (TV); Red White and Zero. 1982: Britannia Hospital. 1987: The Whales of August 1989: Glory! C/ory.’ (TV).
By now, it looks as if the contradictor!ness in Anderson’s personality will be vigorous

13 Lindsay Anderson
enough to prevent him from a filmmaking career that has any continuity. And yet since the war he lias been one of the more active and idiosyncratic figures in the British arts. Anderson has been so fiercely engaged with the problem of why it is so difficult to make good films in England, one cannot escape the feeling that his energies are unresolved and that his rather prickly talent has never been fully expressed. England’s fault or Anderson’s? The question is crucial because Anderson has been involved in some of the most thorough scrutiny of the British cinema. And just as there was never much doubt that he was more talented than his contemporaries—Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz— so he never allowed his solution to the questions to become tied to any noncine-mutic dogma. Briefly, in the mid-1950s, his sense of commitment fastened on that left-wing emotion that inarched to Aldermaston. But Anderson is too good an artist to swallow politics whole. His need to he committed is itself the chief impulse of his career, and the catalogue of his causes is, by implication, the story of dissipation. His productions of David Storey’s stage plays have an earnestness and need for significance that might alarm an author and certainly expose the texts. In retrospect, he seems a lesser figure than, say, Robert Hamer or Seth Holt—if only because he has made so few features—and already too inflexible In an age of Eranagh and Stephen F rears.
Anderson was the son of an officer in the Indian army. He came back to England to go to Cheltenham and Oxford; which underlines the biographical elements of Kipling and public school in If. . . . His period at university was interrupted by war service. But, still at Oxford, in 1947, he was one of the founders of the magazine Sequence (Karel Reisz was the other). He edited it for five years, by which time he was involved in documentary filmmaking. The simultaneous criticism and creativity was vital to Sequence but sadly peripheral to filmmaking and appreciation in Britain. Anderson’s documentaries are no advance on the films of the 1930s and 1940s, while Sequence is an uneasy and inconsistent proponent of a director’s cinema. Anderson’s own taste was for what he called “poetic” cinema; but that led him to liking John Ford as much as Vigo, The beginnings of a proper appreciation of American cinema in Sequence were always evaded, perhaps through ultimate critical shortcomings, perhaps through distaste for America. In any event, Anderson missed the chance that Cahiers du Cinema gobbled up, of a new movie aesthetic that took American sound films as its models.
Bui, even in 1958, Anderson seemed torn between irritation with Cohiers and the recognition that it had taken a rewarding path, above all in the way it led fo actual, and marvelous, films: “Here you have a magazine like Cahiera du Cinema, terribly erratic and over-personal in its criticism, which has been enraging us all for the last five years. But the great compensation is that its writers make films, that three or four of its critics art; now making films independently. And this means that they have a kind of vitality which is perhaps finally more important than critical balance.” Tbat comes from a Sight and Sound discussion with Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, and Penelope Houston in which Anderson alone seems disturbed by English inertia. Those films he saw corning made Free Cinema—the hopeful blanket description of British documentary in the mid-1950s—look dreadfully insipid.
In fact, Anderson worked in TV and began to direct for the theatre. His first feature. This Sporting Life, was from a novel by David Storey and still smacked of Free Cinema in its flashy use of tenements, pubs, and rugby league. But the dogged boorishness of its subject, epitomized in the inescapable presence of Richard Harris, gave it a sad, plodding feeling in place of the sheer working-class tragedy to which it aspired.
In the 1960s, Anderson was more heavily involved in the theatre than in films. The White Bus was broken by production problems, and The Singing Lemon showed Anderson’s rather forlorn resort to East Europe as an artistic influence. Indeed, Milos For man owns up to a large debt to Anderson’s encouragement. If.. ., in 1968, and for Paramount, was a real film, rooted in a world and feelings that Anderson knew, but alight with idbas and passions that would not have shamed Vigo. Its ending is bleakly and helplessly destructive (as if Anderson now was disenchanted with politics), but //. . . makes other English school films look halfhearted. It is pungent, sexy, socially accurate, funny, and exciting— what a film for a young man to have made. O Lucky Man!, though, is something an older man hopes to forget.
Anderson remains his own man: despite the geriatric delicacies of The Whales of August (nothing else has ever shown him as such a softy), Britannia Hospital was a rowdy satire on bureaucracy, while Glory! Gtoryl tore TV evangelism limb from limb with astonishing zest and Swiftian vengeance.