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'O difficult man!' by Philip French
Sunday December 5, 2004. The Observer
Review of Never Apologise: The Collected Writings Lindsay Anderson edited by Paul Ryan andThe Diaries, edited by Paul Sutton.

Lindsay Anderson, who died 10 years ago at the age of 71, was a major figure on the British cultural scene for much of the second half of the twentieth century, as film critic (beginning with the influential magazine Sequence he edited for five years after the Second World War), as director of documentaries, feature films and commercials and as theatre director in the West End and on Broadway.

He published just two books in his lifetime - Making a Film, an account of the production of Thorold Dickinson's Secret People, and About John Ford, a critical celebration of one of the three directors he most admired (the others were Jean Vigo and Humphrey Jennings).

Now we have two substantial works, his collected writing on film and theatre, and a selection from the voluminous diaries he kept intermit tently from his last year at Cheltenham College up to his final days.
Anderson was, as those of us who knew him can attest, and as these new books confirm, a difficult, contradictory man. He was a brilliant writer, with great observational and analytic gifts, a charismatic figure who commanded the attention of a generation of serious cinephiles, a person of warmth, charm and integrity who attracted a loyal band of actors and other associates.

He could, however, be a moral bully, compelling people into acquiescence, casting into outer darkness those he thought weak and irresolute, who succumbed to 'the trivial and the mendacious'. His best-known essay - 'Stand Up! Stand Up!', a withering state-of-the-nation piece published in 1956 - is a powerful polemical sermon; he was also the scourge of complacent British middle-class filmmaking for 50 years. His most famous single review, the 1955 demolition of On the Waterfront, defies you to disagree at the peril of your soul and, as with his denigratory piece on Ford's The Searchers (referred to by Paul Ryan in his excellent introduction, but oddly enough not included in an otherwise admirable selection), a great film's reputation was damaged for a decade.

In his contribution to Declaration (1957), the long-forgotten collection of manifestos by a variety of dissidents identified as Angry Young Men, Anderson wrote: 'We must start being able to use words like duty, service, obligation and hope again - without blushing - and community, and conscience, and love.'
Though a liberal humanist, he found it hard to love humanity in the mass or individually, and difficult to sustain hope for mankind or for the England which, as a self-proclaimed 'child of Empire', he hated, berated and could not leave. He felt most at home sharing the pressures of fellow film-makers in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Anderson went through three periods of hope created and dashed: the failure of the 1945 Labour government to transform Britain; the false dawn of a new, true radicalism in the mid-Fifties that came to a head with the Suez crisis, and CND (he directed and edited a film on the first Aldermaston march); and the inability of the 1960s international revolutionary mood that culminated in les événements of 1968 to effect permanent change. These three phases correspond to the dramatic arc from hope to despair that marks his Mick Travis trilogy, If... (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982), his most important contribution to cinema.

The diaries show how Anderson's beliefs were formed early on. Aged 18, in his first term at Oxford, he dismisses conservatives and communists alike, and takes a dim view of what lies between, reserving his greatest hostility for liberal intellectuals. The worst thing he has to say in the 1980s about his friend, the Italian film-maker Lorenza Mazzetti, is that she has 'the taste of a Guardian reader!'

Already in 1942, a confrontation with his Wadham College room-mate concludes with the boast: 'I crushed him by sheer volubility.' Another factor that emerges at that time is the guilt he feels over his homosexuality and his dislike of effeminacy and open gays. He was drawn to straight men and was to have unrequited crushes on his leading men, most especially Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Richard Harris, Malcolm McDowell and Frank Grimes.
His masochism was cruelly exploited by Harris who treated him with contempt, constantly humiliating him during the making of This Sporting Life and throughout the years Anderson wasted on projects for Harris such as productions of Dylan, Wuthering Heights and A Long Day's Journey.

'One of my most cherished moments,' Anderson recalls, 'is of Richard planting his booted foot heavily on mine and grabbing me by the throat.' Ultimately, despite Anderson's candour and sharpness of vision, these are sad and, at times, depressing books. His life, for all its professional frustrations, was one of probity and considerable achievement. He championed the ideal of 'right to fail' over the commercial 'Bums on seats'. He was dropped as the New Statesman's stand-in film critic when he prominently reviewed a Polish movie that hadn't found a British distributor and gave four dismissive lines to The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Yet he comes across as bitter and querulous, sneering at virtually everyone he meets or works with, from Tony Richardson ('self-gratifying troublemaker') to Peggy Ashcroft ('worried, charming, stupid liberal face') via every critic you can name. David Robinson, Kevin Brownlow, George Devine and David Storey (almost) are among the handful that get by unscathed. He makes Victor Meldrew sound like Dr Pangloss.

While Never Apologise should attract new admirers, The Diaries will win few new friends and upset many of his old ones. These journals were mined by his closest friend, Gavin Lambert, for his outstanding memoir, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, and some may think they should have remained as source material in the University of Stirling's archives.

Philip French

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