Mainly About Lindsay Anderson - Hardcover

Lambert, Gavin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679445986 ISBN 13: 9780679445982

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Presents a close-up portrait of British filmmaker and theatrical director Lindsay Anderson, based on the author's half-century friendship, set against the backdrop of postwar filmmaking on both sides of the Atlantic. 12,500 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Director Lindsay Anderson was one of the original Angry Young Men. He may have only made half a dozen features, but singularly anarchic visions such as "If ..." and "O Lucky Man" cemented the reputation of a socially aware auteur who saw British cinema very much from the outside. At his prep school in the 1930s, he pinned a notice to the wall that read "I Rebel". It was a vision to which he was to remain irascibly true, for better or worse, throughout his life.

Gavin Lambert, himself a novelist and screenwriter, met Anderson at Cheltenham College and they remained friends until Anderson's death in 1994. The title of his book is slightly misleading, for its main, if unstated, concern is the sibling dynamic between two school friends who pursue similar ends by different paths, with the attendant rivalry and myopia. The interest lies in what Lambert calls the "dual portrait" of one who stayed in the country of which he despaired but from which he drew fire, and the other who fled to pastures warmer and more liberal. Where Lambert is open about his homosexuality, Anderson repressed his sexuality almost completely, allowing glimpses of it privately, but in public only betraying it through his propensity to fall in unrequited love with his leading (often Irish and broody) men, such as Richard Harris and Frank Grimes (your card was marked if Lindsay expressed a desire to direct you as Hamlet). His most fertile working relationship was with playwright David Storey, whose novel This Sporting Life he memorably filmed, and whose plays he was to direct at the Royal Court under he left in a huff in 1975, only to continue the partnership at the National Theatre. Like his hero John Ford, Lambert remarks, Anderson was capable of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary meanness, the latter fuelled by a suffocating repression and which led him to remark to actor Malcolm McDowell that he wanted as his epitaph, "Surrounded by fucking idiots". This unique and thoughtful account serves as a far more eloquent memorial to an uncompromising iconoclast who was, as his schoolfriend opines, "faithful to his pungently original, shit-kicking talent". --David Vincent

Book Description:

Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, by Gavin Lambert, is an elegant, intimate and witty biography of one of the foremost figures of post-war British cinema and theatre.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0679445986
• ISBN 13: 9780679445982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 369