Director Lindsay Anderson’s obsession with the actor helps to explain the film’s enduring power
Richard Harris would always remember Mutiny on the Bounty as the film before which his mother died, and during which his dad died. He also remembered it as the time he met Lindsay Anderson. This meeting led to what many regard as Harris’s finest film, This Sporting Life.
Documentary filmmaker and figurehead of the Free Cinema movement in the UK, Lindsay Anderson saw Richard in the London production of The Ginger Man in 1959. ‘He gave a superb performance, a much more striking thing than he ever had a chance to do on screen,’ Anderson said. Then, in 1960, he saw in The Sunday Times a news snippet about an upcoming novel by David Storey called This Sporting Life. It told the tale of a rugby team in the north of England. Anderson was intrigued, pre-ordered the book, read it, and was particularly fascinated by its leading male character Arthur Machin. Three years later, a month before the movie was released, Lindsay published in Films and Filming an article in which he described what initially attracted him to Machin, whose name had been changed to Frank, for the movie, at Richard’s request.
‘Frank Machin was immediately striking, with an ambiguity of nature, half overbearing, half acutely sensitive, that fascinated me without being fully aware that I understood him. The same was true of his tortured, impossible affair with the woman in the story.’
That is a relatively accurate description of the character created by the novelist David Storey, who also wrote the screenplay. However, Anderson could likewise have been describing Harris, who he also tellingly remembered as ‘striking’ in The Ginger Man, and their ‘tortured impossible’ relationship, whether one wants to call it an ‘affair’ or not. A love affair with Richard Harris certainly is what Lindsay Anderson, who was homosexual, longed for.
That said, there are opposing views on whether Anderson was sexually active. In the Independent in 2006, Geoffrey McNab said Lindsay’s friend, novelist, critic, screenwriter, and biographer, Gavin Lambert, described Anderson as ‘a repressed homosexual’ who ‘fetishised the male body on film’. In the same article, Malcolm McDowell described him as a ‘celibate homosexual’ who ‘always fell in love with his leading man’ and would ‘pick someone unattainable because he was heterosexual’. McDowell then categorically states that Anderson was ‘in love with Richard Harris’.
However, this was not widely known during Anderson’s lifetime. He died in 1994. I certainly didn’t know he was gay, actively or otherwise, and in love with Harris. Consequentially, I never raised the subject with Richard. Nor, strangely enough, did Harris ever raise the matter with me. Although now that I know about their ‘tortured’ love affair, physicalised or otherwise, I have a deeper understanding of something Harris said casually to me in 1993. ‘I treated Lindsay appallingly when we worked together on This Sporting Life and afterwards. I still sometimes call him up and apologise for that. I behaved like a bastard.’