The Queen of Spades

Thorold Dickinson attended Keble College at Oxford, where he staged amateur theatricals. Dickinson entered films in 1925 as an assistant to Paris-based British director George Pearson. For the next decade, he functioned as editor, screenwriter, production manager and assistant director for a number of British filmmakers; he also spent a few months of 1929 in Hollywood, studying talking-picture techniques. His first solo directorial effort was High Command (1937), a slick espionage thriller starring Lionel Atwill. It was his next project, a no-nonsense documentary of the Spanish Civil War titled Spanish ABC (1937), that solidified Dickinson’s reputation. He went on to direct Gaslight (1939), a widely praised adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s stage success Angel Street; the film was so good that it was suppressed and ordered destroyed by MGM when that studio produced its own version of Gaslight in 1944 (fortunately, Dickinson’s version has survived).

During World War II, Dickinson directed or supervised seventeen military training films, including the cautionary effort Next of Kin (1942), which was exhibited theatrically to civilian audiences in both England and the U.S. After the war he continued to direct such first-rate productions as The Queen of Spades, a 1947 adaptation of a Pushkin story that bore evidence of Dickinson’s fascination with the techniques of the Soviet cinema; Secret People, a 1952 spy drama that served as the basis for a “how movies are made” volume by Lindsay Anderson, and 1955’s Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, the first Israeli film to gain a widespread international release. From 1956 to 1960, Dickinson was chief of film services for the United Nations Department of Public Information. During this period he supervised several UN documentaries, including the controversial Suez Crisis piece Blue Vanguard (1957). He also assumed the presidency of the International Federation of Film Societies, a post he held until 1966. In 1967, he accepted a teaching post at the Slade School of London University, thereby becoming Britain’s first Professor of Film. Thorold Dickinson retired in 1971, the same year that he wrote his fascinating semiautobiographical tome A Discovery of Cinema. —allmovie guide