Professor Thorold Dickinson
Blog by James Oliver on January 5th, 2010
Way back when – 1967, if we’re being specific – the Slade School of Fine Art appointed Britain’s first ever Professor of Film Studies. The new Prof was a chap called Thorold Dickinson, who’d taken to teaching after working in the British film industry as, variously, editor, writer and director.
Dickinson is an obscure figure, even to fans of British cinema. Regardless of the merits of his work, he never established much of an identity as a filmmaker; his versatility is sometimes mistaken for inconsistency.
Recent years, however, have seen something of a reassessment. No less a figure than Martin Scorsese has proclaimed Dickinson a master. Most importantly, it’s becoming easier to actually see his films. Over the next few months, three Dickinson movies find their way onto DVD: one of them is surely a masterpiece.
Dickinson was born in Bristol, son of that city’s Archdeacon, and entered the film industry via Oxford. Like his contemporary David Lean, he apprenticed as an editor before graduating to director with The High Command.
The Arsenal Stadium Mystery was his first major success. To call it the best film about association football is to damn it with faint praise: it’s better than that. It’s a charming, breezy romp – entertaining even for those of us utterly indifferent to the beautiful game. Graham Greene declared it preferable to the similarly spry Thin Man series.
Dickinson’s best known film is Gaslight. Whereas The Arsenal Stadium Mystery is goofy fun, Gaslight is an all-out melodrama, with Anton Walbrook as a smooth-talking murderer preying on his unsuspecting wife. It was good enough for David O Selznick to offer Dickinson a Hollywood contract, just as he’d done for Hitchcock. Unlike Hitch, however, Dickinson didn’t feel able to leave his country when it was at war.
Worse was to come: since Selznick planned his own remake, he wanted to suppress Dickinson’s version. The director struck a surreptitious print before the negative was destroyed but, because of Selznick’s restrictions, couldn’t show it and was thus unable to use it as a calling card once the war was over.
Still, at least Anton Walbrook hadn’t forgotten and, after an altercation with another director, he called upon Dickinson to take the helm of The Queen of Spades. With only five days of preparation, Dickinson might have been expected to keep it simple, with lots of nice, easy set-ups to cover the script. Instead, he really goes for it. The resultant film is a masterpiece.
The camerawork (always a Dickinson strength) is flamboyant, the décor baroque and the emotions outsized. It is hard to imagine a less ‘British’ British film this side of Ken Russell. It’s one of the greatest films made in this country during the 1940s – easily equal to the best work of Carol Reed, David Lean or Powell and Pressburger.
By all accounts a kindly, decent chap, Dickinson was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to the film business and, after a stint working for UNESCO, he retired to academia, where his first students were critic Raymond Durgnat and director Don Levy (Herostratus).
What’s dispiriting is the the thought Dickinson is not an isolated case. There must be hundreds of similar stories. Who knows how many other masterpieces are waiting to be brought to light?
February 9th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
It is perfectly understandable that an article in ‘Movie Mail’ should concentrate on films that are available on DVD but the omission of any mention of a, possibly the, key work in Thorold Dickinson’s directorial output gives a sadly unbalanced aspect to Mr. Oliver’s summary of his career. The film to which I refer is ‘Men of Two Worlds’. I have to admit that I have seen it only once, when I was at school, and that with a 16mm. print in a room where the sound quality was very far from ideal.
It was released by the Rank Organisation in 1946, which suggests that Dickinson was rated by that company alongside Carol Reed (who directed ‘Odd Man Out’ under its auspices) and David Lean (the two Dickens adaptations). The credits make impressive reading. Eric ortman and Phyllis Calvert head the cast, Geoff Unsworth was the director of photography and Arthur Bliss wrote the score, an important element in a film in which the central character is a concert pianist. As well as Dickinson himself, the names of the writer and critic E. Arnot Robertson and the now unjustly neglected novelist and African specialist Joyce Cary (father, incidentally, of Tristram Cary who wrote the scores for ‘The Ladykillers’ and ‘Sammy Going South’) figure on the script credit.
To-day the film’s attitude on the question of colonialism would probably seem naive and embarrassing. Until ‘Men of Two Worlds’ can be considered in the context of the time, as an honest attempt to present the liberal position of the immediate post-war period, it is unlikely to enhance Dickinson’s reputation. The courage of those in charge of production at Rank ought not to be overlooked. Unlike the Reed and Lean films, a film about African colonialism could not be expected to find distribution in the United States, which was an avowed objective at the time. And unlike Reed and Lean, Dickinson did not move over to the Korda ’stable’. There was, however, a listing under ‘forthcoming productions’ in ‘Sight and Sound’: a film version of Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ with Dickinson as director. So far as I know it never went into production but that could have been very interesting.
Dickinson’s career should not be considered as that of an interesting ‘might have been’. He left a substantial body of work, aimed primarily at those appreciative of intelligent film-making. He deserves recognition form that achievement
February 9th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
I’m ashamed to say you have me at a disadvantage – I haven’t seen Men of Two Worlds. But that’s really part of my thesis; Dickinson doesn’t get the recognition he deserves because the films are not readily available or widely screened.
Those that are show a director who is very far from being an also-ran. Indeed, I’d put Queen of Spades up against the very best of Lean and Powell (and recall they enjoyed budgets considerably larger than those of our hero.)
I can only hope I get a chance to see Men of Two Worlds (and I don’t see that naive-but-liberal colonial attitudes should prevent a release, given some of the jingoistic tosh available on DVD. A subject, perhaps, for a future entry). And, indeed, I’m very much looking forward to seeing more from this director.
As for The Mayor of Casterbridge, Dickinson had apparently lined up Trevor Howard (i.e. perfect casting). I understand the failure to bring it to fruition was one of the reasons he became disenchanted with ‘the biz’.
February 11th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
In reading further about Dickinson, and “Men of Two Worlds” in particular, I came across the following passage in ‘Films 1945 – 1950′ by Denis Forman: “Gaslight”….’remains the best thing Dickinson has done. Two later films, “Next of Kin”, a war-time propaganda film on the danger of careless talk, and “Men of Two Worlds”, the story of a negro pianist who returns to his native Tanganyka, were both effective films of their type but remote from the creative climate in which Dickinson is at his best.’ Presumably, the feeling is that much of the work on “The Queen of Spades” – the casting, the choice of Oliver Messel as production designer – had been done by Rodney Ackland, that the success of the finished film can only partly be attributed to Dickinson. Forman goes on to express the hope that he will return to the standard achieved in “Gaslight” with the forthcoming “Secret People” and is encouraged in this hope by the fact that it is being made for Ealing Studios.
The other intriguing passage is contained in a 1976 interview which Dickinson gave to David Badder and Bob Baker and is reprinted in the booklet accompanying the DVD version of “The Queen of Spades”. He recounts the tribulations suffered during pre-production work on “Men of Two Worlds”. They shot footage in Tanganyka but could not take a Technicolor camera because of its bulk and were using film stock that was already past its expiry date. The inherent risks were compounded by transportation delays in getting the material to Technicolor, Hollywood for processing, only to encounter a further wait because of a strike by the staff at the laboratories. When a print was finally viewed, all the colours had run. But what was this material? Presumably it could only have been for use in back projection. That might have mitigated somewhat the ‘obviously studio’ sets of scenes supposedly set in Tanganyka but would be unlikely to have made a substantial difference to the overall impact of the film. At a cost of about half a million pounds, Forman considered the film ‘expensive beyond reason’.
The inescapable conclusion has to be that Dickinson was unfortunate in not finding a strong producer to help him fight the customary battles with the Rank ‘front office’.
February 12th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Thanks for this: most interesting.
I’m really desperate to see Men of Two Worlds now!
October 21st, 2010 at 4:52 am
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