Re-discovering Thorold Dickinson

Posted on: 12 December 2011

The video release of The High Command was delayed in production when Philip Horne, who has done so much to revive a sustained interest in Thorold’s work (through a National Film Theatre retrospective, articles in Sight and Sound, and the book Thorold Dickinson: a World of Film), discovered ten minutes were missing from the transfer to DVD and had to be rectified. Thus I have not had access to a review copy.

Philip Horne contributes an insightful and informative analysis as an extra on each of the three DVDs, and The Queen of Spades also has an introduction by Martin Scorsese, who describes it as ‘one of the few real classics of supernatural cinema’. This DVD also has extracts from two audio interviews with Thorold himself, and two trailers, including the one for the original release. To emphasise my belief that experience should precede analysis, I would strongly suggest that those who do not know the films ignore all these extras until they have watched the film at least once.

Both Scorsese and Horne rate The Queen of Spades and his 1940 version of Gaslight (which is not yet available on DVD in this country) as Dickinson’s two masterpieces, and clearly he left his creative mark on both, but I feel that Secret People (available here in a top quality print) is a far greater film in both ambition and achievement. Certainly it reveals Thorold’s commitment to what he felt and argued was the potential of modern cinema, in which,

… selection, emphasis and timing … had become an asset of the shooting process… This is what Renoir had been working towards with the limited equipment at his call: to show action (including speech) and reaction at one and the same time in the same set-up and to make the cut a perceptible, positive act.

Thus the director had become again ‘the dominant personality’ in the production process, ‘the film-maker’ (all quotes from Dickinson’s 1971 book, A Discovery of Cinema).