‘Dam Busters’ director Michael Anderson dies
Michael Anderson, a British director whose 1955 film “The Dam Busters” became one of the most popular wartime dramas ever made and launched him to a filmmaking career that included the all-star Oscar-winner “Around the World in 80 Days” and the sci-fi fantasy “Logan’s Run,” died April 25 at his home on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. He was 98.
His family announced the death and said the cause was heart disease.
Anderson was born into an acting family and entered British cinema as an errand boy and movie extra. He became an assistant to directors Noel Coward and David Lean on the first-rate World War II film “In Which We Serve” (1942) and began his professional rise after service in the British army’s Royal Signal Corps.
His breakthrough was “The Dam Busters,” about the 1943 British raid against the Ruhr dams in Germany’s industrial heartland. The mission involved the dropping of “bouncing bombs,” which skipped along the surface to avoid torpedo netting, hit the dam and exploded many meters down. The British Lancaster bombers, flying at the perilous height of 60 feet above water, were raked by German antiaircraft fire, and 53 of the 133 men in the aircrews were killed.
“The Dam Busters” emphasized the rigors of scientific trial and much error as well as the understated, sardonic humor among the principal players, which included Michael Redgrave as aeronautical engineer and bouncing-bomb mastermind Barnes Wallis and Richard Todd as Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who led the squadron on the mission.
To re-create the sortie over the Ruhr, the Lancasters had to fly far lower even than on the actual raid. “Sixty feet didn’t photograph like 60 feet,” Anderson later told an interviewer. “It photographed like 200 feet. We had to go down to 30 feet in some cases.”
For all its primitive special effects, the attack sequence was said to have been echoed in the climax of “Star Wars: A New Hope” (1977) when rebel pilots fly into the heart of the Death Star.
“The Dam Busters,” Britain’s top-grossing film of the year, vaulted Anderson to the attention of Hollywood producers. He was recruited to showman Mike Todd’s big-budget adaptation of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days” (1986), starring David Niven as balloonist and adventurer Phileas Fogg and Cantinflas as his trusty manservant.
The film was a bloated affair, shot in more than 100 locations worldwide and with cameos by Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton and Marlene Dietrich providing much of the thrust. But it garnered five Academy Awards, including best picture, and earned a best director Oscar nomination for Anderson.
His subsequent career included promising material often hampered by uneven scripts. His adaptation of “1984” (1956), with Edmond O’Brien as George Orwell’s dystopian hero Winston Smith, featured the jolt of an alternative “happy” ending for American audiences.
The suspense drama “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), with Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston, sorely lacked in pacing, as did the spy thriller “The Quiller Memorandum” (1966), with George Segal as an American secret agent and Max von Sydow as a neo-Nazi.
One of Anderson’s finest mid-career efforts was “Conduct Unbecoming” (1975), based on Barry England’s play about an officer in colonial India accused of rape. It starred Michael York. “Its taut construction, mounting tension and polished performances make for a fascinating entertainment,” New York Times film critic A.H. Weiler wrote.
The next year, Anderson directed York in “Logan’s Run,” a special effects-laden drama about a futuristic society that encourages hedonistic abandon by young people—until they are killed at age 30, to control population growth. It was a commercial smash but critical flop.
Michael Joseph Anderson was born in London on Jan. 30, 1920. His first outing as a solo director was “Waterfront” (1950). His final credit was “The New Adventures of Pinocchio” (1999), a live-action movie starring Martin Landau as Geppetto.