Lincoln Center Celebrates Lindsay Anderson

Though Malcolm McDowell achieved his greatest notoriety as Alex, the sociopathic lad-turned-lab-rat of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” he never struck it luckier as an actor than the day he met Lindsay Anderson.“I didn’t know who he was,” Mr. McDowell said. “But I soon found out. I thought to myself, ‘My God, this man is a heavyweight.'” The actor, then in his early 20s, had walked in to audition for the lead in the British director’s 1968 film “If …,” but he had no idea of Anderson’s reputation, nor of the impact that the screenplay would make. He hadn’t even read it, winging his performance opposite a sexy young actress, Christine Noonan, who punched him in the face an instant after he lunged for her lips. Well, it was in the script, had Mr. McDowell simply scanned a few lines ahead.As film fans know, Mr. McDowell got the part of Mick Travis, the rebellious student who ignites a revolt at an upper-class boarding school. Not long after, “If …” won the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival and became a landmark in British cinema. And, like Jean-Pierre Léaud with François Truffaut, Mr. McDowell became part of an exclusive circle of actors who grew up with their characters across a series of films. The Mick Travis trilogy also included the 1973 black comedy “O Lucky Man!” and the 1982 satire “Britannia Hospital.” The works are the core of a weeklong retrospective of Anderson’s career, which begins Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.“His idea always was to ruffle feathers, and to do it in a very poetic way,” Mr. McDowell said of Anderson, who died in 1994 at age 71. The actor will be on hand through the weekend at screenings of “Never Apologize: A Personal Visit With Lindsay Anderson,” a 2007 documentary in which Mr. McDowell delivers a one-man theatrical memoir about the director’s life and work, rife with colorful anecdotes, impersonations, and commentary. The project, directed by longtime Anderson associate Michael Kaplan, began as a performance at the 2004 Edinburgh Festival to mark the 10th anniversary of Anderson’s death, and now serves as a fitting introduction to the director’s six major films, as well as a pair of his favorite John Ford Westerns.The iconoclastic “If …” marked a sharp break from the incisive social realism of Anderson’s 1963 feature debut, “This Sporting Life,” which helped make a star of Richard Harris as a rugby player caught in an unhappy love affair with his landlady (Rachel Roberts), all against the grimy backdrop of a northern coal-mining town. Instead of aiming for a documentary-like truth, “If …” embraced elements of surrealism and the highly subjective reality of dreams, juxtaposing black-and-white footage with color, and happily tossing in visual non sequiturs intended to jolt the audience. A kind of parallel to Jean Vigo’s 1933 tale of revolution at a boys’ school, “Zero for Conduct,” the film ends with young Travis firing an automatic rifle from the roof of the tweedy boarding school, laying waste to the stuffy, stiff establishment.“It influenced a whole bunch of directors in that particular time,” Mr. McDowell said. “Even if you look at a later movie like ‘Taps’ [which starred Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton as mutinous military cadets], you’ll see ‘If …’ in there.”The film had long been out of circulation before it was reissued this year in a deluxe DVD edition by Criterion Collection; “O Lucky Man!” got a similar treatment from Warner Bros. The latter film, inspired by Mr. McDowell’s experiences as a novice traveling coffee salesman, is even more a product of its era: The rambling plot, which leads the naïve yet willing Travis on a series of outlandish misadventures, is a send-up of “Candide” crossed with cockeyed social commentary.“Very daring, very subversive,” Mr. McDowell said. “You could say that Lindsay was rather cynical, but maybe he was optimistic.”The film may be fondly remembered by rock fans for its original score by Alan Price of the Animals, which is performed in a studio during cutaways from the main action — a Godardian gesture that evolved out of a documentary project turned sideways. And then, of course, there’s Helen Mirren in her early prime, warning Mick that “all that glitters is not gold.”That’s timeless advice. “[Anderson] was an extraordinary character,” Mr. Kaplan, who also will attend screenings throughout the series, said. “He was a great maverick and iconoclast who always said exactly what he felt.”Through Thursday (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).

Lincoln Center Celebrates Lindsay Anderson

Lincoln Center Celebrates Lindsay Anderson

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