by Nathaniel R
We lost one of our oldest Oscar nominees this weekend. 98 year old film director Michael Anderson passed away of heart disease. The quadrilingual reportedly very amiable director had a long career stretching from a couple of acting gigs in the 1930s through directing The New Adventures of Pinnocchio in 1999. His two biggest claims to fame were the Best Picture winning blockbuster Around the World in 80 Days (1956, one of the biggest hits of its decade) and the sci-fi hit Logan's Run (1976). People keep referring to Logan's Run as a cult hit online but it was actually just a regular sized success ("cult" is a really strange term in the modern vernacular which doesn't seem to mean what people think it means when referring to the fanbases of films. I've even heard Mean Girls described as a cult-classic. Child, that is mainstream!)
His two most famous pictures were both naturally eyed for remakes...
Michael Anderson Jr, Michael York, Jenny Agutter, and Farrah Fawcett in "Logan's Run"
Around the World in 80 Days was remade rather uneventfully in the Aughts and Hollywood keeps threatening to remake Logan's Run but there have been a lot of false starts over the years with that one.
His personal favorite from his career was the British war picture The Dam Busters (1955) -- have any of you seen that? Other notable films include The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959) on which he replaced Alfred Hitchcock when he vacated the director's chair (!), the Natalie Wood/Robert Wagner duet All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960), Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), and Jaws rip-off Orca (1977). His son Michael Anderson Jr, who seems to have retired from acting, followed his dad into the movie business appearing in films like The Sundowners, The Sons of Katie Elder (as "Bud") and Logan's Run (as "Doc") .
Do you have any strong memories of Anderson's films?