The Circuit

In town to receive the Savannah Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award, Peter Bart reports on the event's retrospective of helmer Lindsay Anderson:

The focus of an evening’s retrospective here was near-forgotten filmmaker-provocateur, Lindsay Anderson, who was an icon in the English film community in the’60s and ‘70s but never achieved the panache in Hollywood of a John Schlesinger or Tony Richardson. Yet Anderson’s seminal films included “If,” about a revolution in a prep school, “O Lucky Man!” about a coffee salesman and “This Sporting Life.”

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Though Anderson resisted Hollywood and its emissaries, he venerated John Ford and doted on westerns and other Hollywood fare. When Schlesinger hit it big with “Midnight Cowboy,” Anderson scolded him as a “sell-out.” Anderson continued to make films that were very British (“Britannia Hospital”) and insisted he was dealing with society as it really was, not Hollywood’s perception of it.

Read it here.