Dam Busters director who craved art
Michael Anderson, who has died aged 98, was once heralded as the successor to Carol Reed and David Lean, but is remembered – perhaps unfairly – for little other than The Dam Busters
(1955) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Although he intermittently attempted projects with higher artistic pretensions, Anderson was at his best with a strong narrative and solid characters who displayed little overt emotion and ‘‘stuck it out’’.
Such stories, and characters, were naturally to be found in the
British military legends of the officer class (one critic unkindly remarked that Anderson was ‘‘completely demoralised by the presence of characters who didn’t sound their aitches’’).
His gifts for narration were shown to best advantage in The Dam Busters, the story of the RAF attack in 1943 on the Ruhr dams using Barnes Wallis’s ‘‘bouncing bombs’’.
The film benefited from a memorably rigid impersonation of Wing Commander Guy Gibson by Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave as a donnish Barnes Wallis, a script by R C Sherriff, a thunderous score by Eric Coates, and the fact Director b January 30, 1920 d April 25, 2018 that it was made a mere decade after the events depicted.
International success for Anderson came nearly two years later with Around the World in 80 Days, an American-financed spectacular based on Jules Verne’s novel, with David Niven as Phileas Fogg, a Victorian gentleman who, accompanied by his valet, endeavours to circumscribe the globe in record time in order to win a bet.
It was produced by the notoriously tough Mike Todd – ‘‘The Little Caesar of Chicago’’ – who secured some 46 stars in cameo roles. Anderson was originally due to film only the English sequences, but he so impressed Todd that he was soon given the whole production.
The film became an amiable pageant, with the director encouraging Niven’s vein of British sang-froid while Todd urged extravagance (exotic locations in 13 countries, thousands of extras, and, for the time, breathtaking special effects).
The two instincts happily combined for such moments as, when crossing the Alps, Fogg bumps against a peak and scoops up snow with which to ice his champagne.
Around the World enthralled audiences and won five Oscars, including Best Picture. Although Anderson was nominated for one, he was disappointed that Todd received most of the credit, that the British input went unrecognised and that he was subsequently seen as a director of lightweight entertainment.
The son of stage actor Lawrence Anderson, Michael Anderson was born in London and educated abroad, where he learnt to speak a number of European languages fluently.
At 15 he told his father that he intended to enter the film business and subsequently found work as a tea-boy and runner at Elstree studios.
Early in World War II he was unit production manager on Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve (1942). Waterfront (1950) was his first project as an independent director.
Anderson’s version of George Orwell’s 1984 (1956), with Michael Redgrave and Donald Pleasence, was considered effective at the time but quickly forgotten – not least because Orwell’s widow objected to the defiant ending added for the British market, and had the film withdrawn from circulation.
Of his other films, the best remembered were probably Conduct Unbecoming (1975), and Logan’s Run (1976), a science-fiction epic set in the 23rd century, when people are terminated at the age of 30.
Anderson is survived by his third wife, the actress Adrienne Ellis, and by three sons and two daughters from his first marriage and three stepchildren. His son Michael is an actor.
– Telegraph Group