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‘What is There to Smile At ? Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! by John Izod, Karl Magee and others[*]


In the final scene of Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 film O Lucky Man!, the director steps out from behind the camera and places himself in the centre of the action. The film’s young hero Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) has been engaged on a futile quest for wealth and success which has ended with him destitute, wandering the streets of London. Enticed by a billboard to audition for a starring role, he is plucked from a drab group of similarly desperate young men by Anderson. Instructed by the director to smile, Travis asks ‘What is
there to smile at? I can’t smile without a reason.’ Anderson hits him across the face with the script and Mick smiles, a moment that has been described as the character experiencing a Zen-like revelation (see, for instance, Lambert 2000: 168).
What is Anderson saying about the director’s role with this provocative act? Is it a challenge to the traditional boundaries of film, a cinematic joke, or a piece of self-mockery, the brute on the screen reflecting Anderson’s bullish public persona? It is not wholly implausible to argue that Anderson was mocking his notoriously volatile temperament to amuse his associates.
However an insider joke says nothing to a film’s audiences. So something else has to be in play here (though that does not mean it cannot also reveal the director’s personal foibles). Anderson’s diaries and correspondence reveal that he invested the project with deeply held personal values and beliefs. Indeed, Lambert’s reading of the final scene picked up the association with Zen that Anderson noted in his diary in the hours after shooting it (Anderson, LA€6/1/64/160: 16€June 1972). Not that Lambert would have needed access to Anderson’s private writings to know it. In a 1957 review of Tokyo Story published in Sight and Sound (the journal Lambert edited until 1955), Anderson wrote of the wisdom and acceptance of life that comes with practising the Zen philosophy (1957: 582–583). When promoting O Lucky Man!, he expounded this idea to journalists, reflecting on the way the final smile echoed the grin with which Mick had ingratiated himself as a salesman at the start of his epic journey: ‘I thought of it more as Zen master and pupil than as directorand actor. It’s where the film comes full circle, where the smile at the end echoes the smile at the beginning, only it’s not the facile smile of compromise, but the hardened smile ofacceptance.’ (Blume 1973: 16)
Anderson had no doubt that as the film’s director he functioned as its key talent. He always referred to O Lucky Man! as his – as an auteur production. Intervention in the action would be one way of making the point. However, a dramatic intrusion such as that contrived for the final scene could fatally have ruptured the film’s narrative structure had it not in some way been prepared for. In fact, Anderson had been consciously influenced by the dramaticprinciples and practice of Bertolt Brecht since Mother Courage played in London in 1956.

For O Lucky Man! (like The White Bus and If… before it and The Old Crowd and Britannia Hospital to follow) Anderson adapted those dramatic principles for the screen, and broadly speaking shared their purpose of casting a fresh light on contemporary society. Like Brecht’s plays and Sergei Eisenstein’s films, these five productions keep the audience aware that they are watching a constructed artefact.
One of the many symptoms of this in O Lucky Man! is Malcolm McDowell’s presentation of Mick Travis’s journey. Mick has a chameleon nature and tries to adapt to fit the frequently changing milieux of his picaresque existence; but McDowell plays him with malfunctions to his camouflage. His performance illustrates Brecht’s concept of the ‘epic actor’ – defined as a player who does not seek to project a single, unchanging character but one that changes
all the time by leaps and starts (Gordon 2006: 231). Thus characters no less than plot are constructed in defiance of conventions guiding the creation of naturalistic, invisibly constructed and rounded personalities.
As Robert Gordon notes, Brecht sought to break from nineteenth- and twentieth-century naturalist and expressionist theatre in order to violate the identification of spectator with performer.
…epic theatre had to use every device of dramaturgy, acting and production to prevent the flow of empathy between spectator and performer. To achieve this, the actor had to avoid becoming identified with the character she was representing, but had to use her own personality as the basis for a dramatic role that involved her as both storyteller and character…
â•… The quality and style of epic performance is succinctly captured in Brecht’s injunction to actors to perform ‘consciously, suggestively, descriptively.’ The epic actor consciously describes character and suggests salient details to evoke the situation in a style appropriate to a street-singer or stand-up comic rather than a naturalistic actor. (Gordon 2006: 231–232). In English, the term ‘alienation’ is usually deployed to summarize Brecht’s intention in devising techniques to divest the world of its illusory appearance of being something natural, normal and self-evident. By making it unfamiliar and even unrecognizable, the alienation effect should require audiences to ask questions about the nature of the world so that ultimately it becomes more comprehensible in its underlying rather than its superficial reality (Slater 1977: 131–132). Despite his adoption and development of Brecht’s ideas in the cinema, Anderson (as he wrote in the introduction to the published script of The Old Crowd) was never happy with the term by which it was known.
‘Alienation’ is the Brechtian term – a translation of his Verfremdungseffekt – usually applied to such a style, but I have always thought this a heavy word and not a very accurate one.
The real purpose of such devices, which can include songs, titles between scenes, etc., is not to alienate the audience from the drama, but rather to focus their attention on its essential – not its superficial or naturalistic – import. (Anderson 1985: 140)

This at first seems little more than a quibble on Anderson’s part since on the surface his and Brecht’s positions appear very similar. However, their goals differ radically. A marxist, Brecht intended his productions ultimately to contribute to changing the world. Anderson, the Dean Swift of his age, had more limited ambitions, aspiring instead to excoriate the horrors and iniquities barely concealed in every stratum of British society. As he put it, People act from the worst of motives and you’ve got to anticipate that…If you are sentimental, then you are taking an unreal view of life. The whole essence of the film is to suggest we do have to understand the conditions of life, of being human beings. Stupidity must be mocked and laughed at. Wickedness must be mocked and laughed at. We have to accept we are human beings and our lot is not entirely a happy one. (Anderson quoted in Edwards 1973: 28)
Interviewed by Louis Marcorelles (1973: 19), Anderson volunteered that Brecht would not have been in agreement with the conclusion of O Lucky Man! because, although it corresponds to the poetic aspect of Brecht’s work, it does not embrace the marxist aspect.
Instead, its characters function as vehicles for keen satire, exposing the hypocrisies and corruption of rich and poor, powerful and powerless alike. Anderson would (contrary to Brecht’s ideals and marxist philosophy in general) have held with Matthew Hodgart that the form should be devoted to showing how things really are and demolishing existing follies rather than advocating a new dispensation.
The satirist appears in his noblest role when he accepts the challenge of oblivion, by taking on an ephemeral and unpleasant topic…[Politics] offers the greatest risk and the greatest rewards: politics is traditionally considered a dirty business, yet the satirist is most a hero when he enters the forum and joins in the world’s debate…What is essential is that he should commit himself boldly to his ‘impure’ subject, yet retain a purity of attitude, in his aesthetic disengagement from the vulgarities and stupidities of the struggle. (Hodgart 1969: 31–32). To flag up the satirical element, the characters in O Lucky Man! have a cartoon-like quality, noted by Anderson himself (Delson 1973: 30). That quality complements Brechtian principles and is further emphasized by the casting of actors in two or three roles apiece. Not only does each performer play various characters, but his or her roles differ radically from each other.
With the exception of Malcolm McDowell, none of these performers – some, like Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Mona Washington and Arthur Lowe, immensely popular in Britain – commands the screen long enough in any one role to draw the spectator’s empathy.
The film’s narrative structure is also fragmented in line with Brechtian principles. Episodes connect with each other only loosely in terms of character and plot development, giving priority instead to preserving purposeful thematic links. Shortly before the film’s release,

Anderson gave David Robinson, one of the few film critics whom he respected, an interview that set the agenda for many reviewers in the following months. He said that the form of the film was traditional in that the narrative featuring a hero journeying through numerous adventures and encountering lots of characters had stood the test of time. It was found in Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels and Tom Jones, not to mention Voltaire’s Candide. The people whom the hero meets along the way mostly have the two-dimensional nature of ‘humours’ – figures in the picaresque tale representing the baseline of certain human characteristics, sometimes in a cartoon-like manner (Anderson 1973: 129).

In reviewing O Lucky Man! George Melly wrote that while the Brechtian mode seldom works in cinema, it did so triumphantly in this case. That he thought due in part to a strong screenplay by David Sherwin, excellent multiple performances from the actors at large and particularly Malcolm McDowell’s performance as the hero. One of the principal factors supporting the Brechtian mode was Anderson’s coherent view of how society works, that had given the narrative its robust scaffolding (Melly 1973: 34). It should be said that more than one critic derided the film because, to cite one, they thought that ‘in presenting us with corrupt policemen, power-crazy tycoons, sadomasochistic judges, murderous meths drinkers or suicidal Cockney housewives, Mr Anderson doesn’t seem to be in England at all’ (Weightman 1973: 48). For Melly, on the contrary, all the incidents (police looting a crash site, the sale of arms to an African despot, scientific experimentation on human beings, etc.) could be paired with reality: ‘… in the week of the Watergate disclosures, the film’s relevance needs no underlining’ (1973: 34).
Melly also reported that the music helps avoid the evident looseness of the episodic form. He liked the way the wry edge of the songs links and illuminates the various episodes obliquely (ibid.). Indeed, members of the band participate as characters in the narrative and also comment as if from outside it like an all-knowing Greek chorus. In that role they have two functions – firstly, strengthening the structure, and secondly, providing the moral context that frames the protagonists’ self-seeking behaviour.
In his interview with Robinson, Anderson had described the method he and Alan Price had adopted in their collaboration over the lyrics and music. These were written explicitly for the film and its companion album (also released by Warner Bros). Early drafts of the
script simply note the themes (‘song of luck’, ‘song of opportunity’, ‘song of money’, etc.) on which Price was to write. In fact, for each point at which music was to be inserted, Anderson wrote a paragraph stating what he thought the song should be about. Price took that and reinterpreted it in terms of his feelings and attitudes, which the director found sufficiently different from his own to provide creative tension, but also sufficiently the same for that tension to be productive (Anderson 1973: 129).
After a production meeting in the month before shooting commenced, Anderson mused in his diary: ‘In a sense the final zen-existential feeling of the film corresponds to [Alan’s] own feeling about life: be what you are: you are what you are: decisions won’t change anything.
But of course this is mixed with an instinctive, romantic individualism…’ (LA 6/1/64/41, 8 February 1972). Anderson believed (and in our view the film justifies his assertion) that

this mix of the political and the deeply personal made the songs an effective form of chorus. He thought that the songs ‘express the ironic attitude of the film quite directly, [and] the persona that Alan presents takes on an air of knowledgeableness’ (Anderson 1973: 129). As for Price’s role as a character, Anderson reckons he remains purposely enigmatic. He stands apart from the action because he has already attained the attitude to life that it takes Mick the whole story to get to. In short, Price’s character is a portrayal of someone who knows what life is about (Anderson 1973: 129–130).
Price and the band are the only ‘actors’ not to appear in multiple roles (in the prologue even McDowell plays another role – that of a peasant). Perhaps this is another device emphasizing his being the complete character who knows what life is about. All in all, while Price fulfilled a purpose on screen similar to the street singer in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, he had a second major function: in the long process of making the film he was to Anderson what Kurt Weill had been to Brecht – an essential musical partner.
During the making of O Lucky Man! Anderson suffered recurrent despondency, even despair. His diary reflected on the difficulties that the Anglo-American cinema system posed auteurs such as Kubrick and Peckinpah. He thought it turned them into ‘monsters of
paranoia’ because only thus could they survive professionally. Noting the severe disturbance of his own emotions, he recorded feeling the enormous strain imposed by the attempt to straddle the worlds of personal (auteur) cinema on the one hand, and popular, commercial entertainment on the other (LA€6/1/64/7–8, 3€May 1972). Anderson’s exhaustion and depression continued through the weeks of post-production and he dreaded entering the cutting room to face the ‘dolts’ working with him (LA€6/1/64/236, 5€September 1972). It seems likely that such scathing remarks about his collaborators (of which this is typical), projected onto them his secret terror of suffering from a creative block. In one entry he diagnosed his own ‘critical sureness – after the event – but creative
uncertainty: which is what makes editing such agony’ (LA€6/1/64/201, 31€July 72, emphasis in the original). Paranoia aside, he had severe doubts over the quality of what he was seeing in the cutting room, thinking that some of it was adequate, but no more. Eventually his mood improved when Tom Priestley agreed to act as supervising editor. Under the latter’s guidance the movie began to take its eventual shape (LA€6/1/64/263, 3€October 1972).
When the time came to promote the film, Anderson’s paranoid doubts evaporated and gave way to enthusiastic commitment. Prior to its release, he submitted to numerous interviews with journalists and, as mentioned previously, the best of these set the agenda for
the majority of newspaper reviewers. With columns needing rapid filling, the latter found it convenient in time-honoured manner to draw on such material. For his part, Anderson seized the opportunity interviews afforded to not only promote the movie but also offer guidance toward what he thought was its proper interpretation.
Authorship was an issue that clearly mattered to him greatly; and in fact from 1948 he adopted a consistent concept of the director’s authorship in the cinema (as opposed to the theatre). He always asserted artistic ownership of ‘his’ films, referring to O Lucky Man!
both in public and private as if he had controlled both its scripting and direction. This was

not without a measure of truth since by his own admission he had constantly dominated his scriptwriter (and friend) David Sherwin as a means of bludgeoning work from him (Anderson 2004: 149). His relationship with Malcolm McDowell was different, but both enjoyed its intimate father–son quality. So here too he led even though the idea for the film started with ‘Coffee Man’, a rough script based on McDowell’s experiences selling coffee in the north of England (see LA 1/7/1/9–12). Anderson challenged his actor to develop the script and work with Sherwin before he himself introduced the ‘epic’ dimension.
With Alan Price, despite the age difference between the two men, Anderson achieved (not without minor difficulties at first) a relationship predicated on mutual respect and awareness that each had semi-autonomous command of his respective medium. In the case of his Czech cameraman, however, matters were different. It proved impossible for Anderson to dominate Miroslav Ondricek (Mirek) in the way he ruthlessly coerced Sherwin and others such as his production designer Jocelyn Herbert. A series of entries in Anderson’s diaries from March to August 1972 reads like a one-sided history of the two men’s contest for authorial control.
Anderson saw the nub of the problem as Mirek’s insistence on prioritizing composition and lighting. As director, however, Anderson tenaciously held the drama to have prime importance and reckoned that Mirek either did not read or failed to understand the script (not implausible since the Czech had limited command of English). By degrees Anderson convinced himself that he was partnered with an obstructive prima donna (see, for example,
LA€6/1/64/101, 12€April 1972; LA€6/1/64/108, 19€April 1972; LA€6/1/64/115, 26€April 1972; LA€6/1/67/3–6, 28€August 1972). The unhappy sequence ends with the director enraged after viewing poor rushes. He decides Mirek is a spoiled baby who has lost his respect because ‘he has not DELIVERED THE GOODS. FINITO’ (LA€6/1/64/226, 25€August 1972, emphasis in
the original). This outburst, in the final week of pick-up shooting, can be read as Anderson reclaiming authorship for himself.
Anderson did indeed believe that ‘cinema at its best and purest belongs to the director’ (1985: 139). He wrote these particular words 35 years after first expounding the same opinion in three articles published in Sequence between 1948 and 1950. Well before the Cahiers du Cinéma debate launched the politique that distinguished the work of metteur-en-scène from auteur, Anderson derived a broadly comparable dichotomy that differentiated two ways in which the film director might operate. He did not belittle the importance of contributions made by the principal talent; in particular he identified the scriptwriter and cameraman as indispensable creative members of a team (1948: 198–199). However, he argued that those writers who claim the dominance of their profession’s contribution most admire those films ‘in which the director’s function approximates closely enough to that of a stage director’ (1950: 207). For Anderson this view
puts the film director severely in his place, demanding of him technical capacity, sensibility to the ideas and characters provided for him by his author, but no independent response to his material, no desire to present it in the light of his own imagination, illuminated by it, or transformed (1950: 207).

For Anderson the almost miraculous fusion of the many creative elements that go into a successful film requires a central figure to bring those elements together, and that is the director. Implicit in this is more than the attribution of control alone. The work of the great directors who have made ‘rare and treasured works…alone entitles film to its present, indisputable position among the arts’ (1948: 199). In the making of those films of highest quality in which the director has a personal input, the authorial role becomes guarantor of the claim that the cinema is an art. Indeed, the director as author is often referred to as an artist. This was a theme to which Anderson returned often – see, for example, ‘Stand Up! Stand Up!’ (1956), and an unpublished piece ‘The Film Artist – Freedom and Responsibility!’ (1959). In this, as John Caughie has pointed out, Anderson was one of those who sought to install the individual, expressive and romantic artist in cinema (1981: 10). In his essays for
Sequence Anderson voices a position close to the idea of authorship that Andrew Sarris, the Movie group and others were to develop in elevating certain directors above all others for their artistry. But Anderson was contemptuous of the way these critics evolved that idea into a theory which exalted a bad film by an auteur over a good one by a non-ranking director.
Probably for that reason, he preferred in later writing to credit the Cahiers writers of the French New Wave with first formulating the idea that a director of a film should be called its author, rather than sharing the credit for something that he (among others) had advocated several years earlier (Anderson 1981: 271–272).
In a 1981 review of recent academic publications, Anderson’s contempt for auteur theory became all-engulfing. In part this was motivated by his disdain for ‘intellectual’ activity, with which term he condemned what he considered to be elitist self-indulgence that evaded the essential function of criticism. That function should be to discover and explore the relevance of art to experience (Anderson 1981: 274), an activity that he equated with the application
of intelligence. However, his complacent dismissal of developments in theoretical thinking about authorship cost him the opportunity to understand how audiences inevitably see authorship of films from a different perspective than their directors. To speak of one parameter alone, spectators stimulated by recurrent motifs, themes and unconscious traces that they discover in films directed by the same individual may construct through projective identification with them their own idea of a creative source. They name that source after the director but, as an imaginary construct, it is not identical with that person. To borrow Peter Wollen’s formulation: not Lindsay Anderson but the imagined ‘Lindsay Anderson’. To adapt an old warning, we should not uncritically trust the teller, but need to consider how the tale was received.
Projective identification shows clearly in some critical responses to O Lucky Man! not least because satire is a powerful weapon designed to arouse emotion in the receiver. The vivid contrast between personalized readings of the film by professional reviewers (some of whom clearly felt Anderson had attacked more than merely his lead player with a cinematic slap to the face) demonstrates these cathexes in play. In no review was this more clear than Stanley Kauffmann’s verdict that the film was ‘twisted by rancor’ and pickled in Anderson’s bile because he had not been called a genius for his previous movies. Kauffmann thought

it a three-hour effort at self-canonization exuding conceit and pig-headedness and steeped in self-display and self-reference (1973: 24). Less venomously, David Wilson found ‘an unappealing sanctimonious edge to this comprehensive spite…’ (1973: 128–129). In contrast, Charles Champlin observed that films are the man and Anderson – cool, guarded, rigorously unsentimental – finally preserves a certain detachment from his material and consequently from his audience.
If we are engrossed by his events and impressed by his characters we are denied some ultimate, easy empathy and moved to thought and admiration rather more than to deep feeling (1973: 22).
There is something to smile at (albeit ironically) for anyone reflecting on the respective careers of François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson. One cannot but note the many striking similarities between them: their absent fathers and distant mothers; their passionate championing of the cinema and their belief in the centrality of the author. Truffaut’s Cahiers article, ‘Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français’ is commonly regarded as the manifesto that launched both la politique des auteurs and the French New Wave. Anderson, a leading representative of the British New Wave, had financed and co-edited the film magazine Sequence until 1952. It is an instructive coincidence that Truffaut’s love poem about the near-impossible process of directing a feature film, La Nuit Américaine (also 1973), won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1974, whereas O Lucky Man!, despite being heavily tipped, had not won the 1973 Cannes Palme d’Or. In 2004 Cahiers du Cinéma marked the twentieth anniversary of Truffaut’s death (Burdeau 2004: 12–15). Their retrospective commences with a key sequence from La Nuit Américaine.
Truffaut, playing the director of the film within his film, steals a vase from the hotel where he and the film crew are staying, intending to use it as a prop. The Cahiers reading of the episode parallels our interpretation of Lindsay Anderson slapping Mick’s face in that both
men question the nature of cinematic reality. Que nous dit cet episode? Que le cinéma déborde sans cesse hors de son enclos. Qu’il
s’alimente à une source documentaire. Qu’il puise, vandale, dans la réalité. Mieux: qu’entre la vie et les films un partage s’opère – par exemple, celui d’un vase et de son bouquet. Partage dont le cinéma procède tout en le recueillant, puisque La Nuit Américaine combine film et film-dans-le-film. Leçon croisée: bien qu’arraché à la vie, le cinéma garde trace, à l’intérieur de lui-même, du rapt qu’il est. (Burdeau 2004: 12)
[The cinema ceaselessly outgrows its own limits. It takes advantage of documentary sources to feed off them: in the manner of a robber, it draws upon reality. More precisely, the cinema enables a meeting between life and the films themselves, just as the vase and the bouquet sequence exemplifies. The cinema both partakes in and of the very act of sharing as demonstrated by the film La Nuit Americaine which celebrates in its own right

Lindsay Anderson and Malcom Mackdowell on set

this ritual by allowing two experiences of the film to meet and merge: the film for the audience and the film within the film. A two-way lesson in short: the cinema has arguably been ripped off from life itself, and as a consequence it retains the trace of this very act of robbery within itself.]2
Seeing the film as overflowing into the real – feeding off reality as one would gather data from a documentary… The description of film as a ‘rapt’, a robbery from life, also sheds light on Anderson’s intervention in his own creation. Mick’s difficulty in smiling during the audition sequence effectively breaks down the fragile equilibrium that underpins the relation between cinema and reality. This is doubly persuasive in that McDowell found the smile
hard to perform and had to repeat the takes for five days (LA 6/1/64/160–162, 16–18€June 1972; LA 6/1/64/169, 25€June 1972; LA 6/1/64/208, 7€August 1972). Meanwhile Mick’s initial reluctance to give away part of his real self – his grin – to the fictional world which the mock audition foregrounds, mirrors Truffaut’s theft in La Nuit Américaine. Anderson makes his actor/ protagonist aware of the exchange with reality that needs to operate within the cinema. For his part, Truffaut gives the flowers from the vase to the script-girl in recompense for stealing. Burdeau reads the flowerless vase as a metaphor for Truffaut’s view of the way cinema moulds reality (2004: 13). Truffaut maintains the very equilibrium between life and art that Lindsay Anderson sought to challenge, a key difference between them.
The conscious choice on the part of Anderson and Truffaut to step into the screen as fictional versions of themselves suggests parallels with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. If Brecht was intent on making the audience aware of the artifice underpinning any artistic representation, Truffaut and Anderson supplement his technique with their own variants. As previously noted, Anderson was less interested in alienating his audience than in ‘focus[ing] their attention on its essential…import’. Arguably, the definition of this ‘essential import’ would account for the varying fortunes of Truffaut’s and Anderson’s films, O Lucky Man! being received with reactions much more divergent than Truffaut’s very popular movie.
Truffaut chose to show the audience how mainstream cinematic reality is constructed, whereas in O Lucky Man! Anderson engaged in visual and thematic deconstruction of cinematic realism. ‘Showing things how they really are’ implies total commitment to both the message and the medium – which Anderson’s film exemplifies better that Truffaut’s.
Since nothing is ‘natural, normal, or self-evident’, reflecting upon what is presented on screen requires the degree of acceptance and commitment that Zen philosophy calls for.
Revealingly, Truffaut’s alter ego in La Nuit Américaine never lets the audience know what function the stolen vase will serve in his film. As Burdeau remarks, Truffaut the ‘cineaste’ withholds as much information as he releases (Burdeau 2004: 12). Anderson bypasses any such ambiguity by stepping into the filmic space and challenging the dynamics operating between life and art.
When all is said and done, O Lucky Man! has epic qualities not only in its length, nor merely in observing the Brechtian paradigm (through does that too), but also by its deliberate inversion of the traditional epic framework. Whereas classic epic poetry surveys Britain presents a nation whose glory is a false memory deployed – but failing – to conceal meaner motives: greed, lust and the corrupting appetite for power. Whether a revelatory moment of Zen compensates in the dramatic balance for universal human unkindness and delusory hope is another matter altogether and (as the diverse opinions of the film’s critics and Anderson’s correspondents reveal) has always varied from one spectator to another.

Notes
1.╇When released in France, the film was titled Le meilleur des mondes possible, a direct quote from
Candide.
2.╇Translated by the authors.
References
Anderson, Lindsay, archived materials held by The University of Stirling are referenced in the text by
folder, document number and, where recorded, date.
Anderson, Lindsay (1948), ‘Creative Elements’, Sequence, 5, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise: The
Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 194–199.
Anderson, Lindsay (1950), ‘The Director’s Cinema?’, Sequence, 12, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise:
The Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 200–209.
Anderson, Lindsay (1956), ‘Stand Up! Stand Up!’, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise: The Collected
Writings, London: Plexus pp. 218–232.
Anderson, Lindsay (1957), ‘Two Inches off the Ground’, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise: The
Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 578–583.
Anderson, Lindsay (1959), ‘The Film Artist – Freedom and Responsibility!’, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never
Apologise: The Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 210–214.
Anderson, Lindsay (1973), interviewed by David Robinson, ‘Stripping the veils away,’ The Times,
21 April, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 129–136.
Anderson, Lindsay (1981), ‘Critical Betrayal,’ Guardian, 2 March, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise:
The Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 271–276.
Anderson, Lindsay (1985), Introduction to The Old Crowd, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise: The
Collected Writings, London: Plexus, pp. 137–147.
Anderson, Lindsay (2004), Never Apologise: The Collected Writings (ed. Paul Ryan). London: Plexus.
Blume, Mary (1973), ‘A Smile, an echo, a director’, International Herald Tribune, 27–28 October.
Burdeau, Emmanuel (2004), ‘Le Vase et le Bouquet,’ Cahiers du Cinéma, 592 (Juillet/Août), pp. 12–15.
Caughie, John (ed.) (1981), Theories of Authorship. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul/British Film
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Champlin, Charles (1973), ‘A walk on the vile side in O Lucky Man!’, Los Angeles Times, 24 June,
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Delson, James (1973), ‘O Lucky Man!’ Take One, May–June 1972, published 26€ September 1973,
pp. 29–30.

Edwards, Sydney (1973), ‘Watergate, W.1.,’ Evening Standard, 4 May.
Gordon, Robert (2006), The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Hodgart, Matthew (1969), Satire, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Kauffmann, Stanley (1973), ‘O Lucky Man!’, New Republic, 16 June, pp. 24; 33.
Lambert, Gavin (2000), Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, London: Faber.
Marcorelles, Louis (1973), ‘O Lucky Man! Le dernier film de Lindsay Anderson: Un conte, un récit,
une aventure’, Le Monde, 12 October.
Melly, George (1973), ‘Mick grins and bears it’, Observer, 6 May.
Slater, Phil (1977), Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective, London:
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Walker, Alexander (1973), ‘What happened after If…’, Evening Standard, 3€May.
Weightman, John (1973), ‘Fantasia’, Encounter, 41: 1, pp. 47–49.
Wilson, David (1973), ‘O Lucky Man’, Sight and Sound, 42: 3, pp. 126–129.

* ‘What is There to Smile At?’ Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man!
John Izod, Karl Magee, Kathryn Mackenzie and Isabelle Gourdin at Don’t Look Now
British Cinema in the 1970s. Edited by Paul Newland, The University of Chicago Press-Bristol-Intellect, 2010. Pages. 215-227.