NEW YORK: "Thorold Dickinson’s World of Cinema" (March 19-25) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to an important but largely forgotten figure from the early history of the British cinema. The unassuming but movie-mad Dickinson worked his way up from editing jobs and various assignments pitch-hitting behind the camera on various productions before making his official directorial debut with the 1937 thriller The High Command. Dickinson got his chance to go Hollywood after the producer David O. Selznick saw his 1940 melodrama Gaslight; Dickinson turned the offer down, and Selznick showed him that there were no hard feelings by not only remaking Gaslight in slick Hollywood style (with George Cukor directing) but seeing to it that screenings of the original was suppressed in America. Dickinson's other films include the Pushkin adaptation The Queen of Spades, the Disraeli biopic The Prime MInister starring John Gielgud, and Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955), his last film but the first ever produced in Israel. He lived almost another thirty years, which he largely devoted to teaching, as Britain's first university professor of film in 1967. "It's terribly difficult to direct a film you don't want to make," he once said, by way of accounting for his early retirement with a total output of nine features. "That's why I've made so few."
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