In 1941 the British film-maker Thorold Dickinson, then 38, received one of David O Selznick's famous cables - "2,500 words, it was" - inviting him to Hollywood. It was a chance to follow in the footsteps of his fellow countryman and acquaintance Alfred Hitchcock, who had gone before, and it was a turning point in Dickinson's career. Or could have been. "I simply replied: 'Sorry ... there's a war on.' But it was an open-sesame to Hollywood. Had I gone, everything would have been utterly different."
What earned Dickinson Selznick's "open-sesame" was the brilliance of his 1940 film Gaslight, based on the play by Patrick Hamilton, an oppressively claustrophobic period thriller exposing what Dickinson called "the worst side of the Victorian male's attitude to women". This tale of murder, insane greed and extreme mental torture starred Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and was something special. As Dickinson said, "Something happened on that film, we had a close-knit intensity."
Gaslight has a sharp awareness of the pressures of English class and manners, which heightens the cruelty. The servants are always present as an audience for the persecuting husband to play to, sharpening the wife's humiliation as he deliberately drives her mad. Dickinson, who was brought on to the project at three weeks' notice, introduced details he remembered from the Victorian households in which he'd grown up, and insisted on shooting in sequence on a closed set. Among the film's admirers is Stephen Fry, who recently singled it out as a favourite: "Human angst, madness, evil - true evil, love, disappointment: all the great emotions are there - but constrained, which makes them all the more powerful."
It's a great British film; but it's typical of Dickinson's luck that - quite apart from the bad timing of Selznick's offer - things went wrong. The success of the Broadway production of the Hamilton play, and the excellence of Dickinson's own film (which had not yet been released in the US), persuaded MGM to buy the rights from British National. George Cukor went on to make a grander version under the same title with Ingrid Bergman (who won an Oscar for her performance) and Charles Boyer. All prints of the Dickinson version were destroyed - bar one, surreptitiously struck by Dickinson himself before the negative was removed. He was not allowed to show it to anyone, even though it was the ideal film industry calling card.
He must have felt the fates were against him. His career was beset by unlucky accidents, with many openings quickly closing and projects folding. Influential friends went off to Hollywood; the British film industry repeatedly plunged into crisis; a world war broke out; Technicolor location footage was ruined; he fell seriously ill; India (where he was planning a film) dissolved into civil unrest; Hollywood censored a script about Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia, based on Somerset Maugham's Then and Now (to have starred Trevor Howard and George Sanders); British penny-pinching nixed what might have been a tremendous Mayor of Casterbridge (the script is brilliant) with Ralph Richardson as Henchard.
Still, he had more chances than many, and on the two occasions when he was brought in at the last minute (both times by Walbrook) he made his greatest films, evidently liberated by the situation to show his skill as an improviser. His highest achievement is The Queen of Spades (1949), based on Pushkin's 1834 story and judged by Martin Scorsese "a masterpiece, one of the very best films of the 40s". Brought in to direct at only five days' notice, Dickinson persuasively recreated St Petersburg in 1815 on a shoestring, and all in a tiny old studio in Welwyn Garden City, next door to the Shredded Wheat factory. It's an astonishing piece of work, an intense study of desire, ruthless ambition and madness, with great performances from Walbrook as the obsessed Suvorin and Edith Evans as the Old Countess who has sold her soul to the devil. Dickinson weaves a hallucinatory vision from Oliver Messel's magnificent sets, Otto Heller's fluid cinematography and Georges Auric's richly various, atmospheric score.
By the time he started to direct in the mid-1930s, Dickinson had been in films a long time. In 1925 he'd interrupted his studies at Oxford to work in France with the British director George Pearson, the father of an Oxford friend. Like his near-contemporary Michael Powell, he picked up an all-round training in that free-and-easy milieu - as well as managing to watch Abel Gance shooting Napoléon next door. In the late 1920s he went to New York to examine the competing systems in the transition to sound, and on his return to London became involved with the Film Society, set up not long before by George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells and attended by Virginia Woolf among others. In the spare time left him by his editing work, he programmed foreign films, and met visiting directors including Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. A lifetime supporter of the film society movement, he proselytised tirelessly for what he called "cinematic literacy" in a Britain that undervalued film.
Politics - especially international politics - played a great part in Dickinson's life. His work took him to France, America, East and West Africa, the Soviet Union, India on the eve of partition, Italy not long after Mussolini and Israel, where he made the remarkable Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955), set during the war of 1948. As the artist, film-maker and curator Lutz Becker recalls, "Thorold, who stated that he was totally non-political, expressed his political views very forcefully and was a founding member and lifelong supporter of ACT, the film trade union." Dickinson was a man of the left, though not the hard left. Indignant at the mainstream media portrayals of the Spanish civil war, he endured the air raids of Barcelona in 1938 to make the subtle short film Spanish ABC. Back in England, he was officially labelled a "premature anti-fascist", as he subsequently found when he became involved in wartime propaganda work - making The Prime Minister (1941), with John Gielgud as Disraeli, and the impressive "Careless Talk Costs Lives" thriller The Next of Kin (1942). And as part of his contribution to the war effort, Dickinson gave the sympathetic leading role to a black actor, Robert Adams, in a thoughtful, liberal colonial drama - with a troubled production history - about the future of African civilisation, Men of Two Worlds (1946).
A supporter of the Popular Front in the 1930s, Dickinson, like many others, turned against the USSR at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact; and Secret People (1952), his film about political violence, was a commercial disaster partly because the Communist party organised demonstrations against it. As he put it, "To . . . find oneself associated with the right wing is just bloody comic." Secret People, featuring a young Audrey Hepburn alongside Serge Reggiani and Valentina Cortese, is a moving story, set in the 1930s, about the moral and emotional costs of political violence. Its heroine is persuaded to help with what Auden notoriously called "the necessary murder" - of a dictator who has had her father killed - but the film's heartfelt motto is the same poet's wiser line, "We must love one another or die."
In two decades of directing, Dickinson made only nine films, each strikingly different from the others. Despite his small output, he has eminent admirers. Graham Greene praised his second film, the low-budget, breezily inventive comedy-thriller The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939), calling it "as good to watch as either of the Thin Man films: [Dickinson] gives us wit instead of facetiousness - wit of cutting and wit of angle". For Scorsese, whose regard for Dickinson's achievement has been crucial in the effort to bring him back to wider attention, "he belongs in the first rank of British film-makers", while for John Boorman, he had "Michael Powell's daring, David Lean's taut editing and Carol Reed's emotional tension".
Above all, Dickinson's films are swift, often exhilarating, with a mobile camera and a great dramatic instinct for shifting compositions. The years he spent editing before directing gave him a keen sense of how cinema worked. "To edit films efficiently," he wrote in 1935, "takes all the nerve, power of concentration and courage that a man possesses." Four decades later, he declared: "When you're working in these divisions of a second, you realise what cinema is."
He was in the technical vanguard during the transition to sound, and his experience in sound-editing left its mark in his often thrilling handling of the relation between sound and image, as well as his Powell-like sensitivity to music (his scores were composed by, among others, Richard Addinsell, William Walton, Arthur Bliss, Georges Auric and the Catalan exile Roberto Gerhard). There's a dry, understated irony in his films, too - the delicately weighed style conveys the quiet presence of a controlling sensibility, compassionate and emotionally involved, aware of human cruelty, but not without humour. Dickinson's best movies, and the best scenes in all his movies, flow in a way that is extremely unusual in British cinema - which makes it all the more frustrating that he had such a difficult career.
He gave up directing at 52, and became head of film production at the United Nations in New York, where he supervised many enterprising films. In 1960 he returned to London and set up Britain's first university department of film studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London; in 1967 he became the country's first professor of film studies. Tall, bespectacled, toothy, giggly, open to new ideas, charismatic, he was an inspiring figure. One of his students, Gavin Millar, recalls Karel Reisz talking about why Dickinson hadn't made more films: "I think that Thorold was too good for the business. People just didn't understand him. He wanted to make great films, and he didn't believe in making artistic compromises just to make money. And he believed that people were as idealistic and good-hearted as he was."
Looking back, Dickinson commented: "I was so fed up with the British film situation all through the 1950s. So humdrum. I couldn't find anything that I wanted to do and that any distributor wanted to distribute." He wouldn't compromise. In his book A Discovery of Cinema (1971), there's an unsurprising acerbity about producers and studios: "It is the incomprehension of these men, who hold us all enmeshed in their bank balances, which inhibits and imprisons the artists and strangles ideas at birth." The driven Selznick, who also, in his own way, cared passionately about the work, might have been an exception.