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Printed Matter
Mainly About Lindsay Anderson
By Gavin Lambert
Alfred A. Knopf
$29.95
"In a sense," Gavin Lambert writes in
Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, "biography is history reflected in one person's life." He mentions this in relation to research for his biography of Norma Shearer and in that context, as it would be for his more recent and highly praised
Nazimova, it is true. But Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, a biography indeed - sensitive, intelligent, compelling - is the history of two person's lives: Lambert's as well as Anderson's, and is all the richer for the intertwining.
Lambert, stylish novelist
(Inside Daisy Clover, The Slide Area), screenwriter (Sons and Lovers, 1960;
Inside Daisy Clover, 1965), critic (Sight and Sound) movie chronicler
(GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind, On Cukor), and Lindsay Anderson, best known as director of such British groundbreakers as
This Sporting Life (1963), If…(1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973), had been friends for 55 years.
From their English boarding school days, they were drawn to each other by a mutual "passion for Hollywood movies," and wrote feverishly about films. They founded
Sequence, a substantive magazine in which they championed movies as "the director's medium" and "made a point of ignoring conventional distinctions between high and low art." Through letters, colleagues' comments and Lambert's access to Anderson's diaries, we follow each man's film-related career (and also get a look at the unique ways homosexuality affected their professional as well as private lives: Lambert was always comfortable with his orientation while Anderson remained conflicted).
One of the greatest gifts of the book is eavesdropping on everyone's candid, astute opinions about films and filmmakers across the decades. Among other directors found in these pages are George Cukor, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Nicolas Ray, James Whale. (Inconveniently, inconceivably, there is no Anderson
filmography).
Of pivotal significance for Anderson was John Ford, whose
My Darling Clementine (1946) "affected him 'more powerfully and ... intimately' than any other movie he could remember." Because of
Clementine, "he had begun to understand 'what is, after all, the essence of cinema: the language of style.'" Near the end of
Mainly About, Lambert asks, "Did Lindsay admire Ford, first and last, for a quality that he himself lacked? Although they had both endured the loss of 'some experience of community early on,' he was too skeptical by nature to compensate for it by making films that emphasized 'comradeship, family, love.' Unlike Ford, who became a 'poet of faith,' he became a poet of doubt."
Lindsay Anderson made documentaries (his
Thursday's Children, 1953, won an Academy Award), wrote books (About John
Ford), was an actor (Chariots of Fire, 1981), an exacting director for the stage
(Look Back in Anger) and screen (six features in 30 years). When he died in 1994, the
London Times wrote, "If [he was] one of the most imaginative film directors, he was also one of the least understood." After meeting him here, we can understand him better, appreciate what made him "the most original British filmmaker of his generation," and why he was so much more.
-Lisa Mitchell
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