Lindsay Anderson was first a film critic and always a film critic. Even when he directed the fiction films This Sporting Life, If, O Lucky Man and The Whales of August, he displayed an awareness of film as both art and social statement. That’s the significance of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s current Anderson retrospective through Aug. 21. It features the theatrical premiere of Never Apologize, a bio-doc in which actor Malcolm McDowell reads the British director’s journals and reminiscences.

Anderson had introduced McDowell in the 1969 movie If—a film about youth rebellion—where Anderson employed rhetorical fantasy to exercise his social consciousness in time to the era’s social unrest. Anderson’s career showed an attempt to balance political observation with artistic expression. He always had a critic’s tenacity. McDowell narrates Anderson’s life through personal anecdotes and accounts of film and theater productions that made an impact on British pop culture. All that, despite Anderson’s infamous irascible temperament. The point is, the work matters and the man must be understood—perhaps even excused—because of the quality of the work.

Never Apologize’s director, Mike Kaplan, records the one-man stage Anderson showcase that McDowell performed in Los Angeles and expands it with revealing film footage that links Anderson’s cinema legacy. Frankly, nothing in Anderson’s career reaches the magnificent level of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Kaplan previously directed the valuable making-of Short Cuts documentary Luck, Trust and Ketchup: Altman in Carver Country). But Kaplan conveys Anderson’s significance while honoring the intransigent critic-auteur.

Lincoln Center also features Anderson’s films along with movies he admired in his first profession as a film critic in the series “Lindsay Anderson: Revolutionary Romantic,” including such as John Ford’s They Were Expendable. Interesting that Anderson revered the least romantic Ford film. His own best film was the 1963 This Sporting Life where a critique of England’s class system was inseparable from the fierce physical urgency of Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts’ working class characterizations. (That film suggests that Kazan meant as much to Anderson as Ford.)

I find the celebrated O Lucky Man (McDowell’s biggest role after Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange) to be an over-obvious slog, but Anderson’s critical virtues shone in his earlier film the 1957 London documentary, Every Day Except Christmas, one of the best movies ever made about labor, culture and human habit. These are a critic’s concerns; they still challenge the commercial film industry. And as McDowell demonstrates (even in funny, gossipy asides), disagreeable Anderson kept to his principles.

Every Day Except Christmas memorably concludes its consideration of Coventry Garden market workers with Anderson’s own tribute: “Young faces follow old, and old ways will change to new one of these days. But work will still be with us one way or another. And we all depend on each other’s work as well as our own. On Alice and George and Bill and Alan and Sid and all the others who keep us going.” A critic and filmmaker who knows the way the world works is a rare thing. It’s no wonder when McDowell reveals Anderson pronouncement of his own, still critical, epitaph:  “Surrounded by fools. As usual.”

Never Apologize: A Personal Visit With Lindsay Anderson
Directed by Mike Kaplan
at Walter Reade Theatre
Through Aug. 21