FANTASIA OBSCURA: This Surrealist Film Makes the Case for Lindsay Anderson as a Genre Filmmaker
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, the club is not as exclusive as you think it could be…
The White Bus (aka, Red, White, and Zero) (1967)
(Dist.: United Artists; Dir.: Lindsay Anderson)
There are probably very few critics of genre filmmaking that would put Lindsay Anderson at the top of their list of notable directors in the field. There’s a substantial number of them that would not at all consider Anderson one of their own, largely because of the way his supporters would have shrieked in horror at the suggestion that the director of If… and O Lucky Man! would ever be associated with science fiction or fantasy, despite that fact that one of his greatest collaborators in front of the camera, Malcolm McDowell, has strong pedigree in the field.
Anderson’s supporters would declare him one of the founding fathers of British New Wave as reason to keep him from such consideration. Having come on the scene adapting and supporting all the “angry young men” that Harold Pinter and Kinsley Amis were writing about starting in the 1950s, it’s easy to imagine that there was a solid wall between Anderson and all forms of genre work, and that anything that looked suspect from him was just heavy-handed allegory.
However, his adept use of the tools of magical realism in films like O Lucky Man! and the later Britannia Hospital put him on the same plane as other genre-identified directors that make him worthy of consideration. The fact that other British New Wave directors like Nicholas Roeg and Richard Lester that came up at the same time as him could more easily be considered genre directors by others further weakens any prohibitions against such labels.
So it should not be a shock to look at Anderson’s first feature as an interesting piece of fantasy, in addition to any other considerations one can make of the work.
The story and screenplay written by Shelagh Delaney (the playwright who premiered with A Taste of Honey and who’s Morrissey’s proclaimed muse), and adapted from a story from her collection Sweetly Sings the Donkey, opens in London with an unnamed woman (Patricia Healey) who we see working away typing even as the cleaning staff around her tidies up and ignores her. They even ignore her for a brief moment when she hangs herself…
…although she gets back to work before leaving for the night. Amidst fans following England’s progress against the Albanians (who were not in the World Cup the year before) and other distractions, she takes the train out of town, going to sleep briefly before she gets off in an unnamed city.
After some wandering, she comes to a bus stop, where a white bus picks her up and offers to show her all aspects of the city. She shares an all-encompassing tour of the town that takes her to housing developments, factories, parks, and schools with a wide array of citizens, from foreign visitors to the city’s mayor (Arthur Lowe), who never give their names but dress in a representational manner,
The visitors see and take part in plenty of aspects of the city, getting demonstrations along the way that include a school chorus singing to them, a recitation of work from Bertolt Brecht (presented by Anthony Hopkins in his first feature role), and a live fire demonstration by the civil defense services, during which her fellow passengers transform into shop dummies, leaving her to wander into the denouement.
Like any surrealist work with lots of fantastic elements and few hard explanations, we’re tempted to fill in the blanks ourselves. Is this her passage to the afterlife after she kills herself that we’re seeing? Are we seeing this woman’s spirit trying not to die inside forcing her to try and be more empathetic? Is the transformation of her fellow travelers into dummies during a disaster drill about fire and destruction an allegory about nuclear war? Is the overall theme about how hard it is to consider others outside our limited scopes?
Just about all of the above could easily be applied by any viewer. Anderson’s not willing to guide us to an answer as he films this woman’s ride and walk through the city in stark black and white, which gets interrupted at random intervals for color stock that unspools for random amounts of time. We’re never explicitly told which city she goes to, the lack of name adding a layer of separation between the viewer and the theme, though there are clues throughout the piece to tell us that this is Manchester, as detailed in this fan film that notes the landmarks:
How much of this ambiguity is merely Anderson being coy is hard to say; originally the film was supposed to be part of a longer work with two other sections also adapted from stories in Delaney’s collection, but directors Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz did not complete their sections, leaving The White Bus as a stand-alone piece with a mere 44-minute run time. (As a result, the film got only a brief theatrical window in the UK before finding its way to audiences through television and related media.) Would the work have a different set of interpretations as part of a larger piece? We may never know.
All we have are challenges and questions from the film, among them whether Lindsay Anderson deserves to be part of the genre pantheon. And while some may still resist, the case is clearly in favor of inclusion.
Perhaps clearer than the message of his work…
NEXT TIME: Be nice to Mother Earth, because when she decides to get back at you for your abuse, it gets real nasty real fast…
