DVD Andrew Nickolds
Director Ray Boulting, 1943, 105 minutes To order for £11.99 including UK p&p ring 0844 376 0009, quoting 139692 and The Oldie
WRITTEN IN 1939 by Robert Ardrey as a wake-up call to fellow-americans as war loomed across the Atlantic, the original play Thunder Rock flopped on an uninterested Broadway, but went on to become something of a British repertory standby in the 1950s and 1960s, in the same vein as Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. It’s easy to see why: both have a mysterious and compelling central figure, surrounded by a close-knit group of damaged characters whose dark secrets and tragic stories are teased out in the course of the action. But while Priestley’s upper-class family are gradually revealed as complicit in a death, Ardrey’s characters are dead already, conjured up by David Charleston, played both on the West End stage and in the Boulting Brothers’ fascinating film version by Michael Redgrave.
Thunder Rock is the site of a lighthouse on the wild northern shores of Lake Michigan, and its keeper is former journalist Charleston, who has retreated there from England where his warnings about the rise of fascism in Europe have gone unheeded: his bosses on the newspaper spike his dispatches lest the readers become alarmed, readings from his book
The Darkening World are given in empty halls and in a news theatre scenes of Nazi mobilisation and the plight of Czechoslovakia are less interesting to the audience than a Popeye cartoon.
Charleston’s employers are alerted to something amiss on Thunder Rock when he repeatedly refuses to cash his pay cheques (a sure sign of an unhinged writer). Visited by his old friend Streeter – well played by James Mason as a feckless boon companion now doing his bit flying planes for China against the Japanese – Charleston half-drunkenly asserts that he has given up on the living and concerns himself only with the dead, in particular the crew and passengers of the Land O’lakes, which sank a hundred years previously, the disaster commemorated by a plaque on the lighthouse wall. Fruitlessly Streeter begs him to ‘Give up this ivory tower stuff – build the goddamn thing out of stone, put a light on it and stick it in a hundred miles of fresh water and it’s still an ivory tower’.
Left alone with his pipe and bottle and the Land O’lakes log-book, Charleston is visited first by the ship’s captain (Finlay Currie), a sort of Marley’s Ghost figure who shows Charleston the lives in Europe from which the passengers have fled in search of a better future in the New World. Here the film opens the play out to show Charleston’s progress for his newspaper through a disintegrating Spain and Italy. Back in 1849 political and social conditions were equally dire: for early feminist Ellen Kirby (a steely Barbara Mullen, a long way from Janet in
Doctor Finlay’s Casebook) repeatedly jailed and humiliated for her independence not to say scandalous reading of Mary Wollstonecraft; for the hapless Briggs family, ground down by working conditions in Victorian factories and in search of a healthy Californian climate; and for Viennese doctor Stefan Kurtz (Frederick Valk), persecuted for trying to bring comfort to his patients with morphine. Charleston tries persuading them that they have run away too soon when just around the corner are the likes of Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln and Louis Pasteur. But in vain: they are literally all doomed and instead turn the tables on him – what right does Charleston have to absent himself from humanity, when he is still alive to fight the good fight?
Given its stage origins Thunder Rock is not short of sonorous lines like ‘A human being is a problem in search of a solution’ and ‘We with large hopes found the world full of small people’. But as a film full of ideas it can stand tall and lighthouse-like among drearier British war efforts, well designed, directed and acted, the character of Charleston admirably suiting the haunted look into the middle distance Michael Redgrave was to perfect as the tormented ventriloquist in Dead of Night.