From Publishers Weekly
"It was the differences that kept us close," writes novelist (Inside Daisy Clover) and film critic Lambert about his old friend, British film director Lindsey Anderson. Indeed, this loving narrative of Anderson's life and critique of his work is a beautifully written, thoughtful meditation on art, politics and sexuality. Writing as much about himself as his friend, Lambert has crafted a pungent, tell-nearly-all biography/memoir that deftly elucidates Anderson's troubled personal life and the genesis of his art. Lambert and Anderson met in the late 1930s, as teens, while attending a British school for those interested in the arts. They both went to Oxford and eventually began working in theater and film. Lambert moved to Hollywood in 1956, where he began having an affair with director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause). Meanwhile, Anderson stayed in England, becoming a prominent player in the thriving 1960s theater scene and directing the plays of John Osborne, Joe Orton and David Story, as well as such pathbreaking films as This Sporting Life and If.... Lambert is forthright about his own sex lifeAfrom his first affair with a man at age 11, and his relationship with director Peter Brook, to his later liaisonsAyet he's compassionate when detailing Anderson's inability to deal with his own sexuality, which often manifested itself as tormented "crushes" on heterosexual actors such as Albert Finny and Richard Harris. Without exploiting this sexual content, Lambert weaves it into a seamless narrative of how sexuality and eroticism are inseparable from the creation of art. Along the way, he gives us a perceptive study of the psychology of artists, a history of an exciting time in British filmmaking and a fine explication of Anderson's work. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Lindsay Anderson left a legacy as one of Britain's most engag creators. As a filmmaker, he directed such important features as This Sporting Life, If, and O Lucky Man! As a theatrical director, he attracted the services of actors like John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. As a theorist, he cofounded and coedited Sequence, a film periodical militating against staid British attitudes, during the late 1940s. He was also one of the driving forces behind the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s, which advocated contemporary settings and problems. Anderson's engagement with art and politics is ably chronicled by his lifelong friend Lambert, himself a novelist and accomplished biographer (Nazimova). With its distinctly personal touch, this book compares favorably with David Sherwin's Going Mad in Hollywood: And Life with Lindsay Anderson (Andre Deutsch, 1997. o.p.) and Erik Hedling's Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Filmmaker (Cassell, 1998). Recommended for large film collections.DNeal Baker, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Novelist-biographer Lambert and film and theater director Anderson (1923-94) were friends from their late teens on. Being so close to Anderson, Lambert elected to write a memoir rather than a formal biography, and to devote substantial space to his own life and career. He shifts focus throughout between Anderson and himself, which effectively contrasts the two men and points up Lambert's interpretation of his friend. Both were homosexual, but while Lambert adapted, taking lovers and sex in stride, Anderson resisted and, as his diary confirms, fell in love with one unattainable coworker after another, including Richard Harris, star of Anderson's first feature film, This Sport ing Life. Loneliness plagued Anderson, and so he filled his home with informal dependents, became a mainstay for anguished souls such as actress Rachel Roberts, and strove to work steadily. He became, first, the most important post-World War II British film critic, then, with If . . . and O Lucky Man , Britain's best filmmaker. But he never had a major hit and the clout that goes with it, and most of his work was done in the theater, primarily in a long partnership with playwright David Storey, author of the novel This Sporting Life . Anderson is fascinating, and Lambert describes his work with the keen insight of a fine critic. The relatively well adjusted Lambert is tedious in comparison, especially when telling celebrity anecdotes. Those stories are actually pretty good, though no competition for Anderson's story and achievement. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
A beautifully written, thoughtful meditation on art, politics, and sexuality. Writing as much about himself as his friend, Lambert has crafted a pungent, tell-nearly-all biography/memoir that deftly elucidates Anderson's troubled personal life and the genesis of his art . . . Along the way, [Lambert] gives us a perceptive study of the psychology of artists, a history of an exciting time in British filmmaking and a fine explication of Anderson's work."
-- Publishers Weekly


Review
A beautifully written, thoughtful meditation on art, politics, and sexuality. Writing as much about himself as his friend, Lambert has crafted a pungent, tell-nearly-all biography/memoir that deftly elucidates Anderson's troubled personal life and the genesis of his art . . . Along the way, [Lambert] gives us a perceptive study of the psychology of artists, a history of an exciting time in British filmmaking and a fine explication of Anderson's work."
-- Publishers Weekly


Book Description
Lindsay Anderson was the most original British filmmaker and theatrical director of his generation. His films If . . . , O Lucky Man!, and Britannia Hospital created a Human Comedy of life in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century and were witty, daring, and often prophetic. This Sporting Life and O Lucky Man! made Richard Harris and Malcolm McDowell international stars; The Whales of August provided Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, and Ann Sothern the opportunity to give extraordinary farewell performances.

He also directed notable documentaries in several countries: in Britain, the Academy Award-winning Thursday's Children, about a school for deaf-mute children; in Poland, The Singing Lesson, a personal impression of a group of students at a drama school. In China, he recorded the 1985 concert tour by George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of WHAM!

As a theatre director he collaborated with playwright David Storey on a series of successes (The Contractor, The Changing Room, In Celebration, Home), and he worked with such actors as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, Joan Plowright, and Rachel Roberts.

Anderson was, as well, an outspoken and sometimes ferocious critic of British films--and of Britain itself. He was the author of the most important and acclaimed book on John Ford. And he was one of Gavin Lambert's closest friends for more than fifty years.

Lambert's book begins with his and Anderson's days as movie-struck schoolboys, becoming fast friends, growing up in the shadow of World War II. He shows us their postwar creation of and collaboration on the influential magazine Sequence--a magazine that was produced on love and a shoestring, and which shook up the British film world with its admiration for both Hollywood noir and MGM musicals (at the time unfashionable genres) and its celebration of such directors as Ford, Buñuel, Cocteau, Vigo, and Sturges.

He describes how both men rebelled in opposite directions--Anderson remaining in England, Lambert leaving in 1958 for Los Angeles--and traces their unorthodox paths through the film industry.

An illuminating, multifaceted portrait--of a friendship, of postwar moviemaking on both sides of the Atlantic, and, mainly, of the remarkable Lindsay Anderson.


From the Inside Flap
Lindsay Anderson was the most original British filmmaker and theatrical director of his generation. His films If . . . , O Lucky Man!, and Britannia Hospital created a Human Comedy of life in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century and were witty, daring, and often prophetic. This Sporting Life and O Lucky Man! made Richard Harris and Malcolm McDowell international stars; The Whales of August provided Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, and Ann Sothern the opportunity to give extraordinary farewell performances.

He also directed notable documentaries in several countries: in Britain, the Academy Award-winning Thursday's Children, about a school for deaf-mute children; in Poland, The Singing Lesson, a personal impression of a group of students at a drama school. In China, he recorded the 1985 concert tour by George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of WHAM!

As a theatre director he collaborated with playwright David Storey on a series of successes (The Contractor, The Changing Room, In Celebration, Home), and he worked with such actors as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, Joan Plowright, and Rachel Roberts.

Anderson was, as well, an outspoken and sometimes ferocious critic of British films--and of Britain itself. He was the author of the most important and acclaimed book on John Ford. And he was one of Gavin Lambert's closest friends for more than fifty years.

Lambert's book begins with his and Anderson's days as movie-struck schoolboys, becoming fast friends, growing up in the shadow of World War II. He shows us their postwar creation of and collaboration on the influential magazine Sequence--a magazine that was produced on love and a shoestring, and which shook up the British film world with its admiration for both Hollywood noir and MGM musicals (at the time unfashionable genres) and its celebration of such directors as Ford, Buñuel, Cocteau, Vigo, and Sturges.

He describes how both men rebelled in opposite directions--Anderson remaining in England, Lambert leaving in 1958 for Los Angeles--and traces their unorthodox paths through the film industry.

An illuminating, multifaceted portrait--of a friendship, of postwar moviemaking on both sides of the Atlantic, and, mainly, of the remarkable Lindsay Anderson.


From the Back Cover
A beautifully written, thoughtful meditation on art, politics, and sexuality. Writing as much about himself as his friend, Lambert has crafted a pungent, tell-nearly-all biography/memoir that deftly elucidates Anderson's troubled personal life and the genesis of his art . . . Along the way, [Lambert] gives us a perceptive study of the psychology of artists, a history of an exciting time in British filmmaking and a fine explication of Anderson's work."
-- Publishers Weekly


About the Author
Gavin Lambert is the author of seven novels, among them The Slide Area and The Goodby People; five works of nonfiction, including Nazimova, Norma Shearer, GWTW: The Making of "Gone With the Wind," and On Cukor; and many screenplays, among them The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Inside Daisy Clover, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Gavin Lambert lived in Tangier for fourteen years and now resides in Los Angeles.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One

On November 20, 1994, three months after Lindsay Anderson died, a Memorial Celebration was held at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The evening also celebrated almost forty years of English stage and screen history, for it was at the Court that the English Stage Company, founded in 1956 by George Devine with Tony Richardson as his associate, had introduced the London theatre to contemporary life. At the Court Tony directed John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, and Lindsay directed several plays by David Storey, including The Changing Room, The Contractor, and Home with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.

As well as David Storey, several other friends and colleagues of Lindsay's onstage that evening had worked at the Court. They included actors Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay, and Albert Finney, designer Jocelyn Herbert, and Anthony Page, Lindsay's assistant before directing plays there himself. And present in spirit was ninety-year-old Gielgud, who sent a letter that David read to the audience: "Dearest Lindsay, I am so very sorry not to be with you this evening, but I am filming early tomorrow and do not think you would want me to be too tired to work. Such happy memories of our work together, you and David Storey, of acting together inChariots of Fire, and your unique friendship. You were always so honest and direct, whether in approval or stricture, and I miss you more than I can say."

Also present onstage were Alan Bennett, with his own wry view of Lindsay being honest and direct when they collaborated on a brilliant TV movie, The Old Crowd -- "He looks at me enquiringly, then puts a straight line through half a page. 'Boring, don't you think?' "; Richard Harris and Malcolm McDowell, who recalled how This Sporting Life and If . . . had virtually launched their movie careers; Alan Price, who performed the songs he wrote for O Lucky Man; and myself with some memories of a friendship that began during our schooldays. Tony Richardson, who launched Lindsay's career in the theatre by offering him a play to direct at the Court, had died in 1991. But in the audience that evening was Karel Reisz, another major link in the historical chain. The success of Look Back in Anger had enabled Tony to form his own film company, Woodfall, which produced Karel's first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning -- and soon afterward Karel produced Lindsay's first feature, This Sporting Life.


"He was a man with a set of values seemingly in place since birth," said David Storey in his introduction to the evening. "They were values by which he observed, scrutinized and judged everything around him, [and he had] an appetite for a world nobler, more charitable, and above all more gracious than the world in which he found himself." But this didn't mean that in person Lindsay was always charitable or gracious, and after noting that he was also "a man of vivid contradictions," David proceeded to list them. "He could be cantankerous and vituperative, he could be obdurate and acerbic, yet he was incorrigibly loyal and unfailingly generous. He was authoritarian, yet unmistakably a liberal. He was a stoic, yet undeniably sentimental. He was a self-confessed atheist, and yet he was imbued with what can only be described as a religious spirit."

Next day I recalled another contradiction. Monty White, the executor of Lindsay's estate, and two of his closest friends, Jocelyn Herbert and Anthony Page, had asked me to write his biography. My first reaction was that I could never be objective enough. But then I thought of Lindsay's book that he called About John Ford-- which was really about the two of them. A generation separated them, Ford was not an intellectual and Lindsay was not (in the conventional sense) a family man, they grew up and worked in different countries, but at moments each recognized a kindred spirit in the other. Lindsay, like Ford, was at once a rebel and a traditionalist, and in Ford he perceived "a divided man" who could be "gentle and irascible" in equal measure. Ford, when Lindsay remarked that he responded primarily to individuals and detested any form of group discipline, answered at once, "I had the same problem." And perhaps not coincidentally, their movies provoked violent critical disagreement -- a sure sign, as Oscar Wilde remarked, that "the artist is in accord with himself."

Alternately personal and objective, About John Fordwas in part a memoir of a guarded friendship that began in 1950 when Lindsay first met Ford in Ireland, where Ford had just finished location shooting on The Quiet Man, and ended in 1973, with a visit to him on his deathbed in Palm Desert; in part a thoroughly researched, critical biography with comments from actors (Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery) and screenwriters (Dudley Nichols, Nunnally Johnson) who had worked with Ford; and in part a tribute from one director to another, acknowledging Ford as the filmmaker who first alerted Lindsay to "the essence of cinema, the language of style," when he saw My Darling Clementine at the age of twenty-three.

About John Fordwas also a dual portrait. The man whom Lindsay came to admire as "a poet in the original Greek sense of the word, 'one who makes, a maker, the creator of a poem,' " appears in intimate close-up, distanced medium shot, and point-of-view shot from Fonda and others. Lindsay appears in frequently intercut reaction shots, stunned by Ford's perversity, touched by his moments of warmth, mocked as "some kind of intellectual," and receiving out of the blue a photograph inscribed "with sincere thanks and gratitude for your friendship."


This book is also a dual portrait, but with a difference. Although Lindsay and Ford developed a great regard for each other, they met only six or seven times in twenty-three years. Lindsay and I knew each other for fifty-five years, and interacted far more closely. As contemporaries we lived parallel lives, sharing a past that determined our futures in many ways, and, after I moved to Los Angeles, a continuous present. As well as corresponding fairly regularly, we became each other's first port of call in California and London. So Mainly About Lindsay Anderson contains more autobiography than About John Ford, and its subtext is one of Lindsay's favorite quotations from E. M. Forster: "Only connect . . ."

We both grew up in England during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and both rebelled against "respectable" families, encrusted with middle-class tradition. But I exiled myself to Los Angeles, where the past was half forgotten although still very young; and Lindsay exiled himself at home, where the past was "a snug refuge," as he later wrote, from the present. And while Lindsay understood why I left England, just as I understood why he preferred to confront it, neither of us could imagine adopting the other's solution.

Unlike Lindsay, I never kept a diary (except for a few weeks during the early 1960s), and was often negligent about preserving my working notes. Lindsay's files proved a rich source for re-creating some of his life and much of his work when I started to write this biographical-autobiographical-monographical memoir; but my own files are comparatively meager, with gaps that only memory can fill. Fortunately my memory is tenacious.

But although my own life, and Lindsay's in the early years of our friendship, came back to me in the form of direct recall, after I left England in 1956 I could recall Lindsay directly only through our subsequent meetings, and the numerous letters he wrote me. The rest of him is a compilation, partly from those extensive files (my letters to him, his diaries, articles, clippings), partly from conversations with his friends and colleagues. So at first the flow of memoir carries Lindsay along, then he passes through the filter of biography.


In Ford's films, with their Whitmanesque view of men as brothers, Lindsay heard "America singing," but when he visited America he heard a different kind of song, and didn't much like it. I never felt at home in Britain, and first heard "America singing" in the seductively bitter romanticism of Scott Fitzgerald, the sardonic human comedy of Ring Lardner, and some indelible Hollywood movies of the 1940s: Notorious, Sullivan's Travels, The Big Sleep, Remember the Night. After I came to live in California I heard increasingly darker variations on the same song, from Touch of Evil to Vertigo to Casino; but by the 1990s Scorsese's film was an exception that proved the rule. From the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard cycles to The Bridges of Madison County, Titanic, and Meet Joe Black, Hollywood movies have rarely been seductive, least of all when supposed to be romantic. These days America usually sings for me in off-Hollywood movies: Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, the stories of Rachel Ingalls and Tobias Wolff.

Although Lindsay once described Britain as "this remarkably irritating, paradoxical country" and satirized it with increasing ferocity over the years, he never considered leaving it. The bond of love-hate was too strong, and stimulated his finest work. But by the time we last met, in 1993, the most original British filmmaker of his generation had become a displaced person in his own country, unable to raise money for the movies he wanted to make. "I'm afraid that age, and too much speaking one's mind in the past, have finally caught up with me," he wrote me a few months before he died. "We're not at a time now when dissidence is regarded as a virtue. Once upon a time, I often reflect, people thought highly of the right to fail, but now all that matters is the obligation to succeed." As David Storey pointed out, the man who had so often deplored "the grotesque disparities between talent and recognition," and championed unfashionable artists, finally suffered the "personal pain" of becoming unfashionable himself.

In Europe and the United States Lindsay continued to have a cult following, which often made him feel marginalized and less often gave him great pleasure. That same discouraged letter ended with an account of his recent visit to the European Film College in Denmark, where two of his films were shown. He was particularly happy that the student audience received Britannia Hospital "with a lot of laughter and understanding, very different from the scorn and hostility with which it was received in this country. Well, I don't want to go on about Britain -- but it really was extraordinary to find how universally that film was derided as 'humourless' and 'undergraduate.' Of course those are the standard epithets with which anything unpleasant or threatening is dismissed."

"It was the differences that kept us close," I once wrote about Lindsay, and the differences have helped me to see him (and perhaps myself) more closely. So have the diaries that he kept from 1942 to 1992. They record in detail another kind of personal pain, something that Lindsay was able to disclose fully only to himself. On separate occasions he allowed David Storey, Anthony Page, and me to catch a glimpse of it, and although we knew that his emotional life was a series of frustrations, did any of us realize how lacerating they were? Pride, and the actor in him, created at least a partial smoke screen. But the ache of repression in his diaries makes an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast with Lindsay at his sharp, humorous, dynamically self-assured and reassuring best. In the same way, a bitterness that he couldn't always control, and that surfaced in flashes of disconcerting cruelty, led Anthony Page to sum up the sum of Lindsay's parts: "Not always likable, but often lovable."


The diaries are a dark mirror. The abrasively unhappy and overly judgmental person who inhabits them reflects all Lindsay's negatives and few of his positives. Some experiences, Nietzsche wrote, either kill a part of you or make you stronger, and in Lindsay's case they did both. The alienated child who perceived himself as an emotional orphan became a young man who sentenced himself, at the age of twenty-one, to grievous psychological stress for life. But by this time, as he later noted, Lindsay had also discovered "a mysterious appetite for drama." He began by responding to movies and the theatre (like me, like millions of others) as a way of escape. Then they awakened a sleeping talent. By directing films and plays, Lindsay was able to work through the feelings he'd locked away, release his imagination, and live out loud as an artist.


Would he have wanted me to draw freely on his diaries? I think so, because if someone wishes this kind of private material to remain a secret forever, he leaves instructions in his will for it to be destroyed or placed off-limits in an archive. Or he may expurgate the most confessional passages and give permission for the rest to be published. But Lindsay's will, very detailed in other respects, simply left all his papers in the hands of his executor. As well as the diaries, handwritten in more than fifty notebooks, the papers included extensive correspondence files. (Lindsay was one of the great letter writers. Soon after he made This Sporting Life he began dictating his letters to a secretary, who kept copies -- another sign, surely, that he kept an eye on posterity.) One of his friends who understood Lindsay best also gave me a nudge. "His life and work," said David Storey, "were indivisible." And in responding to them indivisibly here, I felt a posthumous nudge from Lindsay himself. Toward the end of that Memorial Celebration, clips from his various TV interviews were projected. " 'Personal,' " he said at one moment, evidently in answer to a question that we didn't hear, "is a very important word."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Lindsay Anderson was the most original British film-maker and theatrical director of his generation. His films If ..., O Lucky Man!, and Britannia Hospital created a Human Comedy of life in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century and were witty, daring, and often prophetic. This Sporting Life and O Lucky Man! made Richard Harris and Malcolm McDowell international stars; The Whales of August provided Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, and Ann Sothern the opportunity to give extraordinary farewell performances.

He also directed notable documentaries in several countries: in Britain, the Academy Award-winning Thursday's Children, about a school for deaf-mute children; in Poland, The Singing Lesson, a personal impression of a group of students at a drama school. In China, he recorded the 1985 concert tour by George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of WHAM!

As a theatre director he collaborated with playwright David Storey on a series of successes (The Contractor, The Changing Room, In Celebration, Home), and he worked with such actors as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, Joan Plowright, and Rachel Roberts.

Anderson was, as well, an outspoken and sometimes ferocious critic of British films -- and of Britain itself. He was the author of the most important and acclaimed book on John Ford. And he was one of Gavin Lambert's closest friends for more than fifty years.

Lambert's book begins with his and Anderson's days as movie-struck schoolboys, becoming fast friends, growing up in the shadow of World War II. He shows us their postwar creation of and collaboration on the influential magazine Sequence -- a magazine that was produced on love and a shoestring, and which shook up the British film world with its admiration for both Hollywood noir and MGM musicals (at the time unfashionable genres) and its celebration of such directors as Ford, Bunuel, Cocteau, Vigo, and Sturges.

He describes how both men rebelled in opposite directions -- Anderson remaining in England, Lambert leaving in 1958 for Los Angeles -- and traces their unorthodox paths through the film industry.

An illuminating, multifaceted portrait -- of a friendship, of postwar moviemaking on both sides of the Atlantic, and, mainly, of the remarkable Lindsay Anderson.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

"It was the differences that kept us close," writes novelist (Inside Daisy Clover) and film critic Lambert about his old friend, British film director Lindsey Anderson. Indeed, this loving narrative of Anderson's life and critique of his work is a beautifully written, thoughtful meditation on art, politics and sexuality. Writing as much about himself as his friend, Lambert has crafted a pungent, tell-nearly-all biography/memoir that deftly elucidates Anderson's troubled personal life and the genesis of his art. Lambert and Anderson met in the late 1930s, as teens, while attending a British school for those interested in the arts. They both went to Oxford and eventually began working in theater and film. Lambert moved to Hollywood in 1956, where he began having an affair with director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause). Meanwhile, Anderson stayed in England, becoming a prominent player in the thriving 1960s theater scene and directing the plays of John Osborne, Joe Orton and David Story, as well as such pathbreaking films as This Sporting Life and If.... Lambert is forthright about his own sex life--from his first affair with a man at age 11, and his relationship with director Peter Brook, to his later liaisons--yet he's compassionate when detailing Anderson's inability to deal with his own sexuality, which often manifested itself as tormented "crushes" on heterosexual actors such as Albert Finny and Richard Harris. Without exploiting this sexual content, Lambert weaves it into a seamless narrative of how sexuality and eroticism are inseparable from the creation of art. Along the way, he gives us a perceptive study of the psychology of artists, a history of an exciting time in British filmmaking and a fine explication of Anderson's work. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Lindsay Anderson left a legacy as one of Britain's most engag creators. As a filmmaker, he directed such important features as This Sporting Life, If, and O Lucky Man! As a theatrical director, he attracted the services of actors like John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. As a theorist, he cofounded and coedited Sequence, a film periodical militating against staid British attitudes, during the late 1940s. He was also one of the driving forces behind the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s, which advocated contemporary settings and problems. Anderson's engagement with art and politics is ably chronicled by his lifelong friend Lambert, himself a novelist and accomplished biographer (Nazimova). With its distinctly personal touch, this book compares favorably with David Sherwin's Going Mad in Hollywood: And Life with Lindsay Anderson (Andre Deutsch, 1997. o.p.) and Erik Hedling's Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Filmmaker (Cassell, 1998). Recommended for large film collections.--Neal Baker, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Internet Book Watch

British filmmaker Anderson's films were witty social commentaries for the late 20th century, while his documentaries were revealing and educational. Mainly About Lindsay Anderson provides a biographical review of his life and an assessment of his career and achievements, from his early days as a movie-goer to his later influential creations within the industry. Any studying modern film history will find this a fine study.

Stanley L. Kaufman