Background
Thorold Dickinson was born on 16 November 1903 in Bristol.
director producer professor screenwriter
Thorold Dickinson was born on 16 November 1903 in Bristol.
Dickinson was a refugee from moviemaking. In 1956 he was appointed chief of film services for the UN Department of Public Information, after which he became head of London University film studies at the Slade School. It was a loss, hardly made up for by the results of his teaching or by the publication of A Discovery of Cinema in 1971. As more young people study film with the old- fashioned zeal that once marked potential poets, do they notice that they are often taught by older men who gave up the hope of making films?
Dickinson had begun as assistant on Mr. Preedy and the Countess (22, George Pearson). He wrote The Little People (36, Pearson), edited Peifect Understanding (33, Cyril Gardner), and was production manager on Midshipman Easy (35, Carol Reed). That rather spasmodic involvement was borne out by his work as director: High Command was a conventional and stagy thriller, while Spanish ABC was a Civil War documentary. But Gaslight has a great reputation for stylish melodrama, and The Queen of Spades is both very frightening and a brilliant evocation of Pushkin and Eisensteinian pictorialism.