The director who dared to tell uncomfortable truths: Lindsay Anderson at 100

With films such as O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, the British auteur portrayed his country as a bleak dystopia in decline – what would he make of today’s Britain?

‘No film can be too personal,” declared Lindsay Anderson in the Free Cinema manifesto of 1956. A decade later he lived up to this slogan when he shot his elegy to youth rebellion If…. at his old school, Cheltenham College. Winning the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes film festival, it was the first in a loose trilogy of films that held up a mirror to a contemporary Britain that Anderson considered to be in a state of moral decline.

O Lucky Man! followed in 1973. Malcolm McDowell, who had played the chief rebel in If…., returned as a modern-day Candide who discovers that 1970s society offers very little grounds for his natural optimism. A brilliant score from Alan Price underpins the film’s bleak viewpoint. In the words of the title song: “If you have a friend on whom you think you can rely, you are a lucky man!” Perhaps paradoxically, Anderson had many friends on whom he could rely even if he didn’t think so and I was lucky that some of those friends became my friends, too.

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