A peril of filming live performance is the effect audience reaction has on the screen viewer. Malcolm McDowell presents his memoir of director Lindsay Anderson before a movie-literate crowd. Yet many of the jokes fall flat, and the more poignant anecdotes lose their intimacy for being declaimed to the back row.
There’s plenty of fascinating material here, with McDowell packing in stories about Alan Bates, Lillian Gish and Bette Davis, but he never really nails Anderson’s iconoclastic personality, with the closing account of his encounter with John Ford typifying the piece’s self-congratulatory superficiality.