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(1920– ). British director.
Assistant Director: Vice
Versa (Peter USTINOV 1948).
Appeared in: On
Location: The Shoes of the Fisherman (documentary short) (1968); Logan's Run: A Look into the 23rd Century
(documentary short) (Ronald Saland 1976).
To argue for Anderson as a major film talent, I think, would first requirement
the development of a theory of the set designer as auteur. Certainly, all of the setpieces
and scenery in Anderson's films always look
very nice; and with little about the actors or plot to attract one's interest,
a filmgoer ends up spending a lot of time staring at Anderson's sets and
scenery. To this day, except for some vague (suppressed?) memories of
a confused-looking Michael YORK and a speechifying
Peter USTINOV, the colorful futuristic sets are
the only things I remember about Logan's
Run.
Tellingly, Anderson began his career in film as an assistant director,
a position in which anything resembling directorial vision is a liability.
Promoted to director, he soon provided solid evidence of the Peter Principle
in action with an uninvolving adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. His splashy, episode
version of Jules VERNE's Around
the World in Eighty Days attracted more critical acclaim, and an Academy
Award for Best Picture, but even Hollywood could not bring itself to hand
its creator an Oscar for Best Direction, honoring George Stevens instead.
The success of Around the World
in Eighty Days led to a series of forgettable mainstream films, although
I do have a soft spot in my heart for the melodramatic absurdity of The Shoes of the Fisherman, with Anthony QUINN
amusingly cast as a Russian pope confronting a world crisis.
In the 1970s, Anderson's fortunes declined as the status of science
fiction films rose, and the two briefly met in passing, with disastrous
results. Doc Savage: The Man of
Bronze is so bad that it's not even funny, Orca: The Killer Whale improbably inspires a vast appreciation for
the talents of Steven SPIELBERG in dealing with
a similar subject, and please don't get me started again on Logan's
Run. After demonstrating that he also couldn't handle horror with
Dominique Is Dead and Murder by Phone, Anderson soon could only
find work doing television movies such as the aforementioned 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, an obvious
effort to recapturing old glories by returning to the world of Jules Verne.
But the saga of Captain Nemo provided no opportunities for surprising
star cameo appearances or striking location shooting, so one is left to
stare at an impressively-rendered faux-Victorian Nautilus
and randomly-inserted footage of underwater creatures as the only diversions
from Anderson's characteristically abandoned actors and indifferent pacing.
Late in his career, he briefly got back into your neighborhood theatres
with what proved to be (of course) a terrible adaptation of Pinocchio.
Still, there is precisely one Michael Anderson movie
that I would voluntarily watch again, and that is his version of Ray BRADBURY's
The Martian Chronicles, which I found
far superior to published reports and a film with flaws that can be solely
attributed to its source material. Unable or unwilling to impose his own vision
on Bradbury's loosely linked stories, Anderson provides an evocative and
revelatory exposition of the author's strengths and weaknesses. For, as the
history of science fiction film has repeatedly demonstrated, even mediocre
talents are capable of providing us with inadvertent insights.
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