The Artist as Monster

Arriving for the showing of his new film, O Lucky Man!, at the Cannes Film Festival last May, Director Lindsay Anderson was incensed by the typical Cannes display of bared bosoms and battling paparazzi clamoring in front of the theater. He confronted one giggling "starlet" posing for photographers in the doorway and slapped her resoundingly on the bottom. "Get on inside and see the film," he told her, and then turned his wrath on Cannes' organizer. "This is a degenerate festival," he said. "I remember when it was fine. Now it's cheap and disgusting."

If the starlet did go inside to see the film, she would have found that Anderson the director reveals as much of his dour, sardonic Scots heritage as Anderson the man does. O Lucky Man!, now on view across the U.S. (TIME, June 18), presents the audience with visions of itself as it might be seen in fun-house mirrors, reality reflected as grotesque fantasy: Big Business in blue suits calmly watching a colleague throw himself from a skyscraper window; Inhuman Science manipulating evolution by transplanting a man's head onto the heaving hulk of a hairy hog. Critics have called the film everything from "heartbreakingly perceptive" to "a laborious, sophomoric dud."

Anderson rages in his films at the state of modern humanity, deadened by conformity and isolated in a world gone ludicrously amuck. His job, he seems to feel, is to jolt his viewers awake the same way he did the starlet: with a sound moral thwacking. "The artist must always aim beyond the limits of tolerance," he once wrote. "His duty is to be a monster."

As a young critic for the London film magazine Sequence, Anderson often made such arrogantly intellectual pronouncements. The son of an army officer, he was born in Bangalore, India, and educated at public schools and Oxford. Through his Sequence articles, Anderson won the opportunity to make his first short films--industrial documentaries sponsored by a conveyor-belt manufacturer. His first nonindustrial film, a gentle documentary on deaf children made in 1953, won an Academy Award.

In 1956, spurred by the emergence of the New Left in the English arts, Anderson and other young men like Directors Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz formed a loose association called "Free Cinema." Their self-assigned mission was to break away from the brittle, upper-middle-class-oriented British film tradition and make gritty, naturalistic movies about the life of the English majority--the working class. Anderson succeeded superbly with his 1963 adaptation of David Storey's novel about semipro rugby players, This Sporting Life. He then turned to "strong humanist statements," notably If . . . Set in Anderson's old school, Cheltenham College, If . . . ends with the students revolting against the stifling hypocrisies of the institution by mowing down faculty and trustees with machine guns and grenades.

Meanwhile, Richardson had helped to bring Anderson into the Royal Court theater. Over the years Anderson has also made a reputation as an unflashy, deeply sensitive stage director, notably with productions of several plays by Storey, including The Contractor, Home, and The Changing Room--low-keyed, subtly poetic accounts of seemingly mundane lives.

The old New Leftist fills in between his stage and film projects by making TV commercials. "In America, reputable directors don't do that," he notes. "In England they do. It's a better way of making bread and butter than making bread-and-butter feature films."

A stocky man with a serious mien and a sharp, witty manner, Anderson, 50, is so obsessive about his work that he has remained a determined bachelor; marriage, he says, "would be fatal. I would have obligations elsewhere." He has holed up in the same book-littered flat for 16 years, sometimes choosing not even to answer his phone. He dresses with studied shabbiness and cultivates an aversion for big hotels, big parties and fancy restaurants. "He hates anything fashionable," says Actor Malcolm McDowell. "If we go to a restaurant and there are socialites there, he gets up and leaves. I've been to three bloody restaurants in one evening with him."

His commitment has earned him a loyal coterie of actors and technicians who turn up repeatedly in his productions. "Any actor would do anything for him," asserts McDowell, who plays a character named Mick Travis in both If . . . and O Lucky Man! (The two Micks are not meant to be the same person; the name was repeated, says Anderson, "for old times' sake.") Continues McDowell: "The party scene in Lucky Man! was shot on Sunday--for free--because it was not in the budget. Lindsay asked if we would do it, and every single actor came in for nothing. The esprit de corps he gets from actors is amazing."

As a respite after 2 1/2 years of work on Lucky Man!, Anderson plans to return this fall to what he considers the easier business of the stage, directing a new Storey play. The program notes for his current London production of The Changing Room announce that Lucky Man! will be his "last film." Not precisely true, admits Anderson with a grin. "It was a sort of devilment. I like to advertise that directing a film is not the marvelous thing people think it is. In fact, I just like to make them think. Anyway," he adds, "when in pain I believe in groaning a lot."

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