Mainly About Lindsay Anderson: A Memoir
Gavin Lambert
Faber £20, pp302
Buy it at BOL
The French movie critics on Cahiers du Cinema - Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer - who became world famous as the Nouvelle Vague have received more publicity than their gifted British contemporaries, Lindsay Anderson, Gavin Lambert, Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz.
But a case could be made out for the equal importance of this Oxbridge quartet, who emerged as critics on the influential short-lived Sequence and the British Film Institute's quarterly Sight and Sound, which they transformed in the early Fifties into a magazine of world importance, before themselves becoming moviemakers.
They wrote with greater lucidity, their best films survive impressively and they operated in a culture much less sympathetic to the cinema than that of their French confrères.
Richardson was from a Yorkshire working-class background. Reisz came to England as a pre-war refugee from Czechoslovakia. Lambert and Anderson were products of the British upper-middle-class who met in 1939 at Cheltenham College, the setting 30 years later of Anderson's surreal satire If...
They became lifelong friends, and Lambert's affectionate but sharply unsentimental memoir deals with a close personal and professional relationship that lasted for more than half a century until Anderson's death in 1995 at the age of 72.
Two things brought them together - a passion for the cinema and a rebellious attitude towards the Establishment in all its manifestations. Their first joint act of defiance was to perform a Noël Coward sketch in drag to outrage their headmaster.
Lambert's title alludes to his friend's 1982 monograph About John Ford and is as much about the author as his subject and this is what makes it so fascinating. The book is in effect about the different responses of two sensitive, intelligent artists to British life and their sexuality during a period of rapid social change, and Lambert brings to it the skills he has honed as screenwriter and novelist.
Both Lambert and Anderson hated the snobbish, blinkered, unimaginative Britain into which they were born. But Lambert turned his back on it in 1956, resigning from the editorship of Sight and Sound to settle in America, embark on a successful career as a writer and become a confident cosmopolitan.
Anderson remained at home, engaging as a polemicist, theatre director, and moviemaker with a society that he wanted to influence and change.
From the age of 11 the precocious Lambert was a guilt-free practising homosexual. He became the lover and cinematic collaborator of Peter Brook at Oxford, was taken to Hollywood as an assistant to another lover, Nicholas Ray, and writes frankly of his cruising days in Los Angeles and the 12-year affair with a working-class Arab in Tangier.
He had 'always wanted Lindsay as a best friend' and they never became lovers. But Anderson, by Lambert's account, never came to terms with his gay nature. Born in India, Anderson was the guilt-ridden son of a domineering mother, who left her rigid military husband for another Army officer, and his unceasing struggles with a puritanical conscience were recorded in an eloquent journal of which Lambert makes good use.
'It seems then I'm homosexual,' he reluctantly noted at the age of 20, though he never formed a permanent relationship and endlessly complicated his life by falling in love with heterosexual married men, usually actors. Most notable among these inaccessible objects of desire were Serge Reggiani, and three stars from Britain whose careers Anderson helped launch: Albert Finney, Richard Harris and Frank Grimes.
Lambert, you infer, is at peace with himself. Anderson, on the other hand, was a stranger to serenity, a spiky man whose every activity involved severe moral challenges to himself and others. His refusal to compromise limited the amount of work he accomplished but was central to his important achievements, most notably This Sporting Life, If... and O Lucky Man.
Capable of being 'totally irrational,' according to his long-time time collaborator David Storey, Anderson was as complex a mixture of kindness and cruelty as John Ford, one of the triumvirate of cinematic poets he idolised, the others being Jean Vigo and Humphrey Jennings. The last two died young, leaving even smaller bodies of work than Anderson's, but every item a gem. Ford was an idealist whose belief in communities, large and small, became increasingly attenuated, until only the business of making films with friends sustained it. Something of the same happened to Anderson and his last film, the autobiographical TV essay Is That All There Is? concluded with a boat trip down the Thames accompanied by a party of friends to scatter the ashes of Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts on the waters.
