Thorold Dickinson

Noted British cineaste whose reputation was established with the original screen version of the psychological thriller, "Gaslight" (1940). A skilled, intelligent director with a flair for fluid camerawork and a penchant for melodramas about men under great duress, Dickinson was also a keen documentarist, producing military training films for the British Army Kinematograph Service during WWII and serving as Chief of Film Services for the United Nations between 1956 and 1960. Dickinson made a handful of feature films on an intermittent basis during the 1940s and 50s, including a genuinely strange and haunting version of the Pushkin semi-fantasy, "The Queen of Spades" (1948) and one of the first important films in the history of Israeli cinema, "Hill 54 Does Not Answer" (1955).