NR | 1 h 46 min | Drama Fantasy | 1942
American playwright-screenwriter Robert Ardrey’s stage play “Thunder Rock” inspired the 1942 film of that name by producer-director duo, the Boulting brothers, Roy and John.
At the level of nation-states, the film argues against isolationism of institutions, persuading great democracies, whether Britain on screen or America off it, to get involved in an unfolding world war rather than stay aloof. At another fascinatingly intimate level, it explores war as a spectacular symbol of everyday resistance and resilience by individuals in the face of apathy and ignorance.
Idealistic Englishman, journalist David Charleston (Michael Redgrave), despairs that few in Britain or neighboring European countries realize how fatal it is to meekly allow the flourishing of German-Italian fascism without some kind of preemptive response, military or not. When his radio, speech, book, and newspaper activism to rouse action goes unheeded, he flees to America.
In America, Charleston ends up a reclusive lighthouse-keeper, conjuring fevered dreams of European immigrants whose ship sank near that lighthouse nearly a century ago: Ellen (Barbara Mullen), Melanie (Lilli Palmer), Capt. Joshua (Finlay Currie), Dr. Kurtz (Frederick Valk). When he stumbles upon that ship captain’s logbook, he obsesses over the names of the dead and their likely backstories.
He’s fleeing 20th century problems in the present, they’re fleeing 19th century problems from the past. Only, they’re fleeing Europe’s monarchism, conformism, medievalism, and inequality for America’s promise of modernity, equality, prosperity, and progress.
Dreams and Flashbacks
Identical twins, the Boulting brothers, deliberately follow a non-linear style that makes it hard to tell which sequences are flashbacks and which merely dreams. Of course, a flashback is a piece from a past that’s no longer real, and a dream’s a fragment of a future that’s not yet real. But some dreams are fragments from the past, too. In darkly comic fashion, Charleston’s dreams haul the past into the present in a way that’ll shape the future.The Boultings use clever framing, bottom-up lighting, camera angles and montages to bring the wispy figure of Charleston and his ghostly immigrants to life. Their long-forgotten fears and ambitions straddle several themes, including poverty and medicinal science.
Restoring Courage
Redgrave excels as a delusional recluse, haunted by his demons. Mullen shines as a woman ahead of her time. James Mason features briefly as Charleston’s friend Streeter.Ardrey’s message is about restoring courage with maturity, rather than with naivete. Through these immigrants’ doomed journey to America, and Charleston’s brooding journey into himself, Ardrey suggests that rediscovering courage is a struggle that one must sustain even when it doesn’t feel necessary or gratifying.
At one point Charleston says, “A human being is a problem in search of a solution,” but his and Kurtz’s monologues at the end hint that humans are part of the solution, too.
Hope in the Darkness
The Boulting twins are saying that hope and courage are twins too; you can’t have one without the other. The lighthouse here is a symbol of the individual, with power to be both guide and prophet to those sinking into fatalism. How? By illuminating life’s treacherous rocks and the coming of its falling tides, by dispelling falsehood, and by strengthening a man’s imagination and faith, not just his reason.But, as Charleston learns, sometimes life’s light arrives only at certain moments. It’s when it scours the sea, seemingly away from us, that we must nurture hope, so that when it does shine on us, we’re able to revive our courage and press forward. What a pity to give up just when that light is swinging toward you. Isn’t it better to trust, as all good seamen do, in the comforting, circular inevitability of that rotating beam?
If seafarers lose courage because a flash of distant light that they spy in a stormy night disappears in a haze, their eyes wouldn’t stay peeled to catch the next flash, let alone the one after it. Some distressed crew may seem farther from shore than others, but one boat catching that beam of brilliance and suddenly bathed in light must take courage, at the same time as another boat miles away, drifting in utter darkness, nurses hope even when there seems nothing to hope for.
