The Old Crowd: The film that never was
Erik Hedling, author Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker, University of Lund, Sweden.
When I was researching Lindsay Anderson’s career for my Swedish PhD thesis in the 1980s, I came to visit the director himself on many different occasions. Anderson was very kind to me, in spite of the theoretical film jargon in which I was trained, and which he utterly despised. And he gave me a lot of rare material to study. Among these, was a video of the play he had directed for London Weekend in 1979, Alan Bennett’s “The Old Crowd”. The play was ostracized by the British press, which deeply despised Anderson. I later came to read his own description of the production, and here I noticed a curious relation to my native Sweden.
Anderson, in a typically defiant manner, had tried to make a film of it after its critical failure, in Sweden of all places. He had met Jörn Donner, the controversial Finnish-Swedish managing director of the Swedish Film Institute (SFI), and they had come to an agreement. I realized that there must be archival materials in Stockholm documenting this. I contacted the people at the SFI, and was informed that I could not see this material without Donner himself approving. This struck me as somewhat odd, since Donner was more or less dismissed already by 1982, and had had nothing to do with the SFI for almost a decade. Anyhow, Donner approved, indicating that he wished this story to become public, even if he had not mentioned it himself in his own writings about all his failed projects – at the beginning of the 1980s Donner was totally devoting himself to the production of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. The Old Crowd was never made as a film, despite all the preparations, as is made clear by the archival materials I found. A pity, I think.
(Images: Photograph of Anderson directing the television production of The Old Crowd, ref. LA 2/3/4/1; press cuttings and Anderson’s notes on reviews of The Old Crowd, ref. LA 2/3/6/1; letter written by Anderson on the proposed film version of The Old Crowd, ref. LA 5/4/6.)
