The film which best sums up the spirit of 68 is Lindsay Anderson's iconic
'if....', in which a group of disenchanted schoolboys climb on to the roof
of the school and shoot down their oppressors -- masters, pupils, parents,
everybody. The spur to the making of the film was not the May Day riots in
Paris -- though, curiously, the film was in active production when the riots
kicked off. The sparks to its creation, and many key images, can be traced to
Anderson's own life.
He was the son of an officer in the occupying British army in India. His father
rose to the rank of Major General. At the age of twelve, in his final year at
St. Ronan's prep school in Kent, Lindsay Anderson saw a film which impressed
him sufficiently for him to want to share his opinion of it with his world. He
persuaded two fellow pupils to put together a magazine -- St. Ronan's News
-- which ran for four issues. Lindsay wrote the film reviews. His review of
Kid Millions, an American film starring Eddie Cantor and Ann Sothern (whom
Anderson himself would direct in The Whales of August) drew attention to a
scene in which a gangster fired a machine gun and the film turned from
black-and-white into colour. The technique and the image stayed with him all of
his life.
From St. Ronan's he moved on to Cheltenham College, where he became a prefect
and stopped the indiscriminate caning of juniors. From Cheltenham he moved on to
Oxford University to study Classics. This was 1942. The Second World War was
raging. A second consecutive generation of young Englishmen were Dying For
Their Country. Anderson wrote a film script with the aim "to combine a
present day theme with an authentic picture of features of English life all too
frequently misrepresented by the movies". The script, which told of a young
man preparing for war, opens at Public School. It features three boys, one of
whom "is passing through a stage of 'materialist' cynicism who
"indulges in a mild flirtation" with a female character called The Girl.
The film wasn't made because the British Film Industry had never taken young
men's work seriously and because there were enough people around to tell him
that he shouldn't be trying to make films, he should be busy laying down his
life. He was helped to this decision himself by a sentimental visit to his old
school, Cheltenham College, and a war-glorious lecture by an old boy. He
postponed his Oxford career, enlisted in the Infantry corp, and was stationed
for long periods on an airbase where his colleagues liked nothing better than
swearing, bullying, skiving off to gay bars and playing cards. His diaries,
which I edited for publication, paint a vivid picture of the army as a
wasteful, dehumanising machine staffed almost exclusively with philistines and
bullies. Out on a training course he fired a blank straight into his Section
Leader's face and wrote the adventure into the screenplay that, in time,
became 'if...'.
Anderson spent the final months of the war in the country of his birth, India,
having transferred to the Intelligence Corps. Essentially a desk-tied
bureaucrat, he spent his free time cycling to the cinema to watch Hollywood
films, the best of which starred Bette Davis (whom he would also direct in The
Whales of August).
At Oxford, he switched from Classics to English and he founded a film journal
called Sequence to champion the masculine poetic films of John Ford, and to
pour scorn on the British print media which was falling over itself to
over-praise the latest crop of mediocre British films. Their response to the
war film, The Way To The Stars, was particularly irksome. Anderson wrote in his
diary:
"28 April 1946: I want to write something about British films - the time is
ripe for constructive criticism. There is too much adulation flying about at
the moment... later this morning I went to see Michael and unburdened to him my
soul on the subject of The Way To The Stars, which we discussed - I becoming
more and more vehement in my condemnation as the nauseatingly smug
sanctification of English inhibition and class prejudice appeared to me more
and more distinctly in its true form."
The Way To The Stars was directed by Anthony Asquith, whose father had been the
British Prime Minister during the First World War. It claimed to tell the truth
about life on a British airbase during the War. Lindsay Anderson had lived that
life and knew that the film was offensively false. English officers on airbases
didn't have stiff upper lips and did not always act with decency. Two World
Wars in quick succession had robbed Britain of millions of citizens, but the
country's leaders were again peddling the same propaganda to a pliant public
and an compliant print media.
Sequence ran for fourteen issues and earned Anderson film writing jobs on the
Observer, The Times, Sight and Sound and The New Statesman, the last of which
he was sacked from for refusing to join in with the media praise of David
Lean's stiff-upper lip war film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. More
importantly, his Sequence writings also won him a contract to make a
documentary film about a factory in Wakefield. He called it Meet The Pioneers
(1948). Between 1948 and 1954, Anderson made four documentary films about real
people doing real work in real places; and he made Thursday's Children, a
documentary about a school for deaf-and-dumb children. It won him the American
Academy Award. Every Day Except Christmas, his film about Covent Garden
porters, won the Grand Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival.
But these personal, poetic films were not appreciated in Britain. He and they
were at odds with an industry and a public that lapped up middle-class
mediocrity, propaganda and stereotypes. Unable to generate interest in his
films among those who controlled film distribution, bought films for
television, and contributed to the press, Anderson hired the National Film
Theatre in London (Sequence contributor, Karel Reisz was on the staff) and, in
six different programmes between 1956 and 1958, he screened his own films and
the early works of 'committed individuals' such as Reisz, Tony Richardson,
Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. To drum up press interest he called this
'Free Cinema' and like all good revolutionaries, he issued a manifesto:
'These films were not made together; nor with the idea of showing them
together. But when they came together, we felt they had an attitude in common.
Implicit in this attitude is a belief in the freedom, in the importance of
people and in the significance of the everyday. As film-makers we believe no
film can be too personal. The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments, Size
is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim. An attitude means a style. A style
means an attitude.'
The films helped Tony Richardson and then himself to be employed as artistic
directors at the pioneering Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London. Here,
Anderson continued to break down the bourgeois restrictions of theme and style
in narrative drama in revolutionary new plays such as Serjeant Musgrave's
Dance by John Arden, which has a machine gun as a central image; Billy Liar,
which also has machine gun fire at a key moment; and a series of dark poetic
dramas by David Storey (one of which, In Celebration, he filmed in 1975). As
well as honing his skills as a director of actors, and as a creator of
feature-length productions, Anderson was assembling the team with whom he would
make 'if...' -- the designer, Jocelyn Herbert; the composer, Marc
Wilkinson; the actor Graham Crowden (destined to be everyone's favourite
bicycle-riding schoolmaster).
But there was still the considerable problem of getting British film producers
to let him make a feature film. His Oscar and festival awards were not enough
to prevent him from being rejected from the jobs of directing the film
adaptations of two hugely successful plays he brought into being -- The Long
and the Short and the Tall (1960), starring Robert Shaw and Peter O'Toole --
for which he was replaced by a hack, Leslie Norman (Barry Norman's dad) --
and Billy Liar (1962) -- on which he was replaced by TV director, John
Schlesinger.
But the revolution was gaining force. Lindsay's 'Free Cinema' friends,
Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz had a sensational critical and commercial
success with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, starring Albert Finney and
Rachel Roberts as East Midlanders ground down by social conditions and
pregnancy. Offers flowed their way. Reisz accepted an offer to produce a film
about David Storey's novel This Sporting Life, about a Northern rugby player
ground down by social conditions and a doomed relationship with his landlady
(Rachel Roberts in the film) on the condition that Lindsay Anderson was allowed
to direct it.
The film won the acting prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, and it won Oscar
nominations for its stars, Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, but almost six
years passed before Lindsay Anderson made another film.
The main reason for the delay was that he was disillusioned by the feature
filmmaking process in Britain. In the theatre, the whole company would work
together to realise the vision of the director. In the cinema, films could only
be made under strict union rules, with huge and hugely inefficient crews who
cared more for their wages and working hours than the work itself.
Disillusioned, Anderson spent much of the coming years abroad. He took up
invitations to witness at first-hand the growing national cinemas of India
(under Satyajit Ray); Poland (under Andrzej Wajda) and Czechoslovakia (under
Milos Forman), all of whom were making Free Cinema-style films that dominated
the local box-office and the international award circuits. In April 1965,
Anderson was in Czechoslovakia at Forman's invitation. Forman screened for
him his first feature film, Konkurs (Greetings). Anderson adored the quietly
spectacular cinematography by Miroslav Ondricek. The opening scenes take place
at a motorbike race. Ondricek's camera follows the action with thrilling
skill. Meeting up with Ondricek on the location of Forman's new film, A
Blonde in Love, Lindsay was hugely impressed by Ondricek's artistry and
seriousness. Ondricek was as far from a time-watching by-the-book British
cameraman as it was possible to be. Lindsay Anderson had found not only his
right-hand man but a desire to return to filmmaking.
The following month, after the Cannes Film Festival, Anderson attended a
conference of 'New Wave' filmmakers at Pesaro. Pier Paolo Pasolini, on a
one-man crusade to the death against Italian conservatism, Catholicism,
politics, and the Italian language itself, opened the proceedings. Lindsay
Anderson talked about his own sacking from the New Statesman and the
closed-ranks state of the moribund British film industry. The conference left
him feeling invigorated and keen to make a 'national' British film that
could stand with the films of the new greats.
His theme would be 'England'. But what would be the story? and who would
write the script? and where would the finance come from?
John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which premiered at the Royal Court, had
shaken up London theatre to such an extent that eight years after it's
premiere, the lazy popular press were still referring to Anderson and the Royal
Court team as the Angry Young Men. Anderson accepted an invitation to direct
Tadeusz Lomnicki, the star of Wajda's calling card film 'A Generation',
in a play of his choice in Poland. He took Osborne's play Inadmissible
Evidence and directed it in Polish. It worked. Perhaps Osborne could write the
British masterpiece with world appeal that he was seeking? He also took with
him a script by an unpublished writer, David Sherwin, which had been rejected
by every film company in Britain. The script was called The Crusaders. It was
about a rebellious boy at boarding school.
The script had its faults. It had a sentimental puppy love theme and the
leading man died, in true disaffected youth style, impaled on the school
railings after falling off the school roof, but some of the dialogue was
electrifyingly original:
"Run! Run in the corridor!"
"Biles, warm the lavatory seat for me."
"Ringworm, eye disease, music lessons, VD, confirmation class?"
Anderson had found his writer, and the writer had given him the locale -- the
public school with its juniors and seniors, it's traditions and codes, would
serve as a better microcosm of England than the airbase in The Way To The
Stars.
On returning to England early in 1966, he encouraged Sherwin to give the film a
more organic, epic, structure by studying Buchner's plays Woyzeck and
Danton's Dance and by screening for him the French poetic fantastia, Zero de
Conduite (1933). Then he fed him an image which encapsulated the film -- a
boy and a girl on a motorbike. The girl riding pillion but with her arms held
up to the heavens.
With the search for financing under way, Lindsay Anderson accepted an offer
from Oscar Lewenstein, the General Manager of the Royal Court Theatre, to make
a short film in a series of three on the general theme of freedom. The three
films were to be based on stories by Shelagh Delaney and called Red, White and
Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski reworked the idea in the 1990s). Lindsay chose
White, called his film The White Bus, and, after winning the battle with the
communist bureaucrats to bring Ondricek over from Czechoslovakia, he used it as
a dry run for his Great Film About England.
The White Bus starts with the poetic image of a boy on a barge releasing a
dove, the spirit perhaps of a suicidal young woman who revisits the town of her
birth and is taken on a tourist tour of the social, industrial and educational
facilities. Like Vigo's Zero de Conduite the film ends with a speech day
ceremony where the visitors are cheekily replaced in shot by showroom dummies.
Like Cantor's Kid Millions there are sequences in colour. Arthur Lowe, in
mayoral costume, stars as the tour guide and was cast almost at once as the
guide, of sorts, on a tour around Lindsay Anderson's old school --
'if....' .
Finance for the film come in from the unlikely source of the Gulf and Western
Oil Company who had recently taken over Paramount Studios and whose top man was
a fan of Albert Finney. As founder of Memorial Pictures, Finney's name was on
Lindsay's letterhead.
Permission to film at Cheltenham College was secured by a splendid piece of
subterfuge -- a doctored script, stripped of all rudeness and savagery, which
included the disclaimer:
'The film is intended is intended to be a poetic, humorous view of life seen
through the eyes of the boys. The film will show the general life of the school
into which will be woven the lives, and also the adventure fantasies, of three
particular boys.
The overall effect of the film is to be lyrical - to show the reality of the
world and its innate lyricism.'
Because the title 'The Crusaders' had an 'action' premise and would
have prompted questions about what were the boys crusading about, an in-house
competition was held to find a title for the doctored script. The winner was
Albert Finney's secretary, Daphne Hunter who suggested "If" after the
Kipling poem.
Lindsay Anderson moved "If" to lower case and added four dots....
Adverts drafted by Anderson himself were placed in all the best establishment
newspapers (and Melody Maker) calling for 'Boys 12-19: Do you want to be a
star? THIS IS YOUR CHANCE!'
Five-Thousand-Three-Hundred-and-Twenty-Three turned up at the Marylebone Town
Hall on the first and second of January 1968. All the boys were photographed
individually holding books and holding guns.
The year of Revolution had begun.
(c) Paul Sutton, 2008
For the complete story about Lindsay Anderson and 'if....', read Paul Sutton's
books, 'Lindsay Anderson, The Diaries' (Methuen) and 'if....' (Turner
Classic Movies Guide, I.B. Tauris).