The Thorold Dickinson Mystery

Thorold Dickinson was absolutely not an obsessive perfectionist

The rain that blows in sheets across the studio yard is lit only by flickering lamps that tower above a rattling chain-link fence. A lone figure scurries across the asphalt, hat pulled low against the gusting night. He takes the steps two at a time and, with a furtive glance over his shoulder, jams a key into the lock and wrenches open the door in one motion.

Inside the edit suite, the wind and rain are a whisper. Our man shakes off his overcoat and flicks familiar switches to conjur the sweet hum of machinery. Reverently, he takes three cans of film negative from the shelves and begins to copy them. It’s 1941. The film is the version of Gaslight you won’t have seen, and the figure stealing it is its director, Thorold Dickinson – the nearly man of British cinema.

Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook have that awkward "I'm-going-to-have-you-committed-to-an-asylum" conversation in Gaslight

What could possibly have brought this Oxford-educated Deacon’s son to the point of pirating his own work in the dead of night? Dickinson wasn’t a failure; by the time his own final credits rolled in 1984, he’d made some landmark British films, including The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1940) and The Queen of Spades (1949), and written the thoroughbred nostaligic flag-waver The Malta Story (1953). In the 1960s, he pushed the study of film as an artform, tutoring ground-breaking directors like Dony Levy and the influential critic Raymond Durgnat at the Slade, where he held Britain’s first ever professorship in film studies. But the Gaslight incident shows us Dickinson the outsider, even the rebel; a principled operator in a business in love with sharp practice and meteoric career paths but which increasingly shut out the

Dickinson had progesssed in a few years from editing austerity-era romcoms like Gracie Fields’ Sing As We Go to directing his first film. The High Command (1936), a controversial conspiracy thriller set among the Army top brass in West Africa, posits a colonial power structure riven with lies, betrayal and hypocrisy and peopled by a morally enfeebled elite for whom murder is simply another rung on the career ladder. Dickinson had a great source in Lewis Robinson’s novel, but budgetary problems and inexperience meant the film’s subject matter wasn’t its only problem: the movie was stilted, overly literal and displayed its tuppenny ha’penny production values at every turn.

The Arsenal Stadium Mystery: manager George Allison explains the advantages of Highbury's narrow pitch with a 1:1 scale replica

Real success came with The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, a frothy detective yarn surrounding a murder at the home of the Gunners that captures a free-spirited late 30s London rarely seen in films of the time and, sports fans, featured the real-life Arsenal squad of 1939. More importantly, it showed that the professorial Dickinson had commercial nous. When the director was offered an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gas Light, he had just three weeks to prepare. The stage production had been dark enough, but Gaslight, the merciless, claustrophobic film that Dickinson forged with Anton Walbrook in the lead, was astounding. The story of a husband’s meticulous attempt to convince his wife of her insanity for the sake of his own avarice, the movie lives in literal and metaphorical shadow and the shifting weight of madness back and forth between the characters is palpable. The public loved it.

In fact, Gaslight was too good. Across the Atlantic, the success of the stage version on Broadway had prompted MGM to buy the US film rights. David O. Selznick had Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer on board and the studio giant wasn’t about to let a low budget British thriller upset the apple cart, no matter how well received it had been. MGM promptly bought the rights from British National and included a clause that, extreme as it was, illustrates the regard in which they held Dickinson’s film: all copies, and the negative, were to be destroyed. Dickinson’s reaction isn’t recorded, except in the survival of his film in the form of a single copy he secretly made just before the MGM heavies administered their coup de grace.

Queen of Spades: utterly bonkers

The last minute rescue seems uncharateristically swashbuckling for the intelectual Dickinson, but he was never comfortable submitting to authority. His two other great films, the unsettling paranormal costumer The Queen of Spades (1949) (most recently lauded by Martin Scorsese) and the proto-terrorist thriller The Secret People (1952) both questioned received notions of right and wrong and divided opinion among critics and public. But the bare-knuckle morals of the industry had taken their toll and by 1960, with just nine features on his directorial resume including work for the Ministry of Information and an Israeli war movie, Dickinson had had enough of the men “who hold us all enmeshed in their bank balances, which inhibits and imprisons the artists and strangles ideas at birth" and moved into teaching film. As a director, his best work bears comparison with Powell & Pressburger and Carol Reed, but his stubborn adherance to his own course meant he has had to be rediscovered in the 21^st  century. His was an endearing commitment to personal values, summed up in his reply to David O. Selznick’s 2,500 word telegram of 1941, inviting him to come work in Hollywood: with contrasting brevity, it read “Sorry, there’s a war on.”