Michael Anderson
Film director whose work ranged from The Dam Busters and Around the World in 80 Days to The Quiller Memorandum and Logan’s Run
MICHAEL ANDERSON, the film director 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 RC Sherriff, a thunderous score by Eric Coates and the fact that it was made a mere decade after the events depicted. Ever-popular in Britain, the film has prompted numerous affectionate parodies.
International success for Anderson came nearly two years later with Around the World in 80 Days, an American-financed £2 million 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.
Scripted by the traveller and humorist SJ Perelman, the film contained a happily disproportionate number of references to The Daily Telegraph.
It was produced by the notoriously tough Mike Todd – “The Little Caesar of Chicago”– who secured some 46 stars in cameo roles (Hermione Gingold appeared in the cast list as “tart, London”) and brazenly used the episodic story as a vehicle for commercial novelties such as the wide screen.
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 (he angrily pointed out that Rule Britannia was played incessantly throughout the film) and that he was subsequently seen as a director of lightweight entertainment.
The son of the noted stage actor Lawrence Anderson, Michael Anderson was born in London on January 30 1920 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.
He then moved to Shepperton, where he worked as a third assistant director, graduating to second assistant director on films directed by Carol Reed, David Lean and Anthony Asquith.
Early in the Second World War he was unit production manager on Noël Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve (1942), and after serving with the Royal Corps of Signals he worked at Denham Studios. In 1949 he co-directed, with Peter Ustinov, Private Angelo.
Waterfront (1950) was Anderson’s first project as an independent director. A drama of Liverpudlian working-class life, deemed realistic for the time, with Robert Newton giving an acclaimed performance as a wastrel sailor, it was racily publicised – “The desires and loneliness of seafaring men and their women!” – and now seems unintentionally humorous.
Anderson’s version of Orwell’s vision of totalitarian society, 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.
Anderson returned to more comfortable, military territory (with Richard Todd starring) for Yangtse Incident (1957), a recreation of the daring flight of the frigate Amethyst from the Chinese. Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958) was a weak thriller with Todd again, and Anne Baxter.
Anderson was now becoming a globe-trotting film director. After The Wreck of The Mary Deare (1960) – a star-laden, faithful version of the Hammond Innes novel – Anderson directed The Naked Edge (1961), an early slasher movie with Deborah Kerr as a wife who begins to suspect that her husband is a murderer. Anderson experimented with montage effects borrowed from Hitchcock – a close-up of an eyeball, a bead of sweat – but the actors were let down by an inadequate script; the guilty looked too innocent and the innocent too guilty. Gary Cooper, in his final role, was aged and ashen, and his relationship with his young wife was unconvincing.
After Operation Crossbow in 1965 – a lush version of the Allied attempts to combat the flying bomb – the following year Anderson directed The Quiller Memorandum, with George Segal as a spy sent to West Berlin to eradicate a neo-nazi network headed by Max von Sydow. Scripted by Harold Pinter, the film was replete with cryptic banalities which Anderson complemented with ambitious set-ups and atmospheric use of seedy locations. The result was not wholly successful.
In 1968 he directed The Shoes of The Fisherman, based on the novel by Morris West, in which Anthony Quinn portrayed a former Russian political prisoner unexpectedly elected Pope as the world hovers on the brink of nuclear war. But despite Quinn’s fine performance and an all-star cast, including Laurence Olivier as a Russian premier and John Gielgud the outgoing pontiff, the film was over-long and lacked suspense.
The next was Pope Joan, prompting the critic Derek Malcolm to observe in The Guardian that Anderson was “a glutton for papish punishment”. In it, Liv Ullman survives stints as a monk and travelling preacher to become the first female pope. Described by one critic as “tedious beyond words”, the film was enlivened only by the appearance of Trevor Howard as a pontiff fond of exclaiming “Oh My God!”.
In 1989 Anderson directed La bottega dell’orefice (“The Jeweller’s Shop”), based on a play that Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, had written in 1960.
Of his other films, the best remembered were probably Conduct Unbecoming (1975) – an adaptation of Barry England’s play about regimental life under the Raj, in which Michael York’s temper frays when it is revealed that someone has done something unspeakable to Susannah York – and Logan’s Run (1976), a sciencefiction epic set in the 23rd century, when people are terminated at the age of 30. Michael York and Jenny Agutter escape into the wilds, where they encounter Peter Ustinov dressed as Time.
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.
Michael Anderson, born January 30 1920, died April 25 2018