Anderson, Lindsay

Anderson, Lindsay (1923-1994), film, theatre, and television director. Anderson, perhaps the most important of all post-World War II British film directors, was born in Bangalore, India, the son of a serving army officer. He reacted in radical opposition to his conventional upper-class education at public school and Wadham College, Oxford University, to become the scourge of British middle-class smugness. His mere handful of feature films are among the most important and influential in British post-war cinema, allegories of British life with its obsession with class and its denial of feeling. This Sporting Life (1963), If ... (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), and Britannia Hospital (1982) are acerbic observations about a society bound together by self-interest and class contempt. As with George Orwell, another child of the Indian subcontinent who spoke out against the cant and hypocrisy of the British class system, Anderson was an uneasy companion of the political left with which he was associated. For Anderson, its “bloody-mindedness” and philistinism were as corrosive as anything the political right could muster.

Anderson was closely associated with David Storey in the theatre, and for his first feature film, in 1963, converted Storey's novel This Sporting Life, the story of a miner turned rugby player, into one of the most passionately argued British films since the war. It made a star of its leading actor, Richard Harris, but, as with all of Anderson's feature films with the exception of If ..., it failed at the box office. His pictures, although solidly British, are informed by the intellectual rigour of the French writers Voltaire and Louis Céline. In the cinema, he was attracted to the poetic imagery of the works of John Ford and of the British documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Early documentaries, such as Thursday's Children (1953, with Guy Brenton), set in a school for deaf children, and Every Day Except Christmas (1957), which takes place in Covent Garden market, combine these influences, while About John Ford (1981) and The Whales of August (1987) celebrate a cinematic inheritance.

Anderson's observations on Britain, notably in his documentary O Dreamland (1953) and in his feature films, can provide uncomfortable experiences. If ..., set in an English public school, transforms the gentle rebellion of Zéro de Conduite (1933; Zero for Conduct), by Jean Vigo, into a fully-fledged revolt against synthetic patriotism and establishment snobbery. O Lucky Man!, perhaps his masterpiece, and Britannia Hospital are lacerating indictments of a nation dancing at its own funeral.