Thunder Rock
Tags: allegory, philosophical, flashback

Plot synopsis:
The Dramatists Play Service gives the following synopsis of Thunder Rock:
The action passes in a lighthouse on Lake Michigan. Charleston, the keeper, has taken a job there to flee from a detestable world. Opposing Charleston's pessimism, Streeter, his friend, says he is giving up his job to become an active member of society again. Streeter believes our world can be brought out of its chaos if people do something about it. Filled with this determination, he leaves to become an aviator. Charleston retreats further into a fantastic world of his own building. The people of this world are half a dozen of the sixty who were shipwrecked ninety years ago. Believing that "Mankind's got one future—in the past," Charleston breathes life into these creatures of his imagination. They live again on the stage. As he talks to them we see passengers as they really were, each seeking sanctuary from a disturbed Europe, running away from life, yet needing the same hope and strength as Charleston himself. Charleston's sincerity convinces these creatures that he really has the courage to lead his fellow men into a better world, and in this faith they are content to die again. Inspired by their confidence, the lighthouse-keeper returns to useful work, determined to create a new order out of the chaos of the old.

Review: Based on a play, "Thunder Rock" is a 1942 film that follows the fascination with ghosts that seems prevalent at the time, just as it is prevalent in ours.
The war caused people to think about death and the afterlife a great deal."Thunder Rock" is about a newspaperman David Charleston, (Michael Redgrave) who saw the rise of Fascism and Nazism and tried to warn people to wake up and take action.
There's a doctor driven out of Vienna for using an early form of anesthesia (Frederick Valk), an early feminist (Beverly Mullen) jailed repeatedly for her views, a man and his wife en route to America to try for a better life for their family.There are several themes present in this film - the themes of keeping hope, not giving up one's quest, and affirming life, certainly important ideas in a time of war.
In the beginning of the film, there is the communication of information from one person to another to another to another, as knowledge is passed through generations.Redgrave is excellent, as are Finlay Currie, Beverly Mullen, James Mason (as David's friend) and a young Lili Palmer as the doctor's daughter.
The pre-war setting is a morale boosting tale of sticking at it - for we never know what tomorrow will bring; it delivers a reasonable tale but I found it hard to get into the stories of the various passengers as they were not characters I was given a lot of time to get into and care about.
The support cast of passengers is less assured and really never get close to being real people - instead their dialogue and stories are too heavily laden with meaning.Overall this is a reasonably good propaganda.
Like knowledge that is transmitted from one life to another.David (Michael Redgrave) who is living completely on his own in a secluded lighthouse, finds a logbook with an old passenger list.
Early film from Britain's Boulting brothers (producer John and director Roy) shows an uncanny grasp of technical assurance, yet their combined talents, and those of the sterling cast, cannot eradicate the stultified air of theatricality which comes via this material, taken from the play by Robert Ardrey.
Seems the ghosts of a one hundred-year-old shipwreck reenact their lives for the lighthouse keeper, all in an attempt to bring him back to civilization.
You may as well have had a Donald Duck Cartoon instead and started the film where James Mason lands at the lighthouse.It achieves some great moments both in and out of it's lighthouse setting, Michael Redgrave is very good but everything just goes on that little bit too long for it's own good.James Mason stardom puts him near the top of the billing, but he's really only a bit player in this and doesn't make any significant contribution to the overall film..
All the reviewers who wished they could see this film again (some of whom saw it originally in 1942!), can now see it again if they are resident British and subscribe to Freeview tv on Channel 81 It is shown regularly on this wonderful channel which I constantly watch if you can put up with the adverts which finances it, as it saves paying for numerous dvds which I used to do before I discovered this tv station.For example, every Sunday @ 9.p.m. GMT they are repeating the wonderful mid 60s episodes of "The Human Jungle" starring Herbert Lom which I originally saw when it was transmitted (I am now 72).Some reviewers thought Thunder Rock was too stagey.Does it matter?
I saw the classic R.C.Sherriff's "Journey's End" on Youtube the other day which of course is based on his play.What if Michael Redgrave is a bit declamatory at times, he was an accomplished stage actor first.In 1942 Britain was in a precarious position so of course the Government sought propaganda films to help morale & the war effort.See this film on the aforesaid channel, the tv station is bound to repeat it occasionally..
It's a shame, because the Boulting brothers are good film-makers, and the likes of Michael Redgrave and James Mason are strong actors.
Charleston (Redgrave) lives in self-inflicted isolation as a lighthouse keeper, having become completely disenchanted with the outside world, most of which is complacent in the face of rising evil and looming war.
In this film adaptation the story is broadened and filled in; it played to packed houses in 1943 America and did well in the UK.Here the Boulting brothers -perhaps better known for their later comedies- have made an excellent film that is both absorbing and intriguing.Of course it was made in wartime and the message is played for all it is worth as propaganda.
It is a little less overtly metaphysical than some other films from around this time and that is no bad thing; one foot is kept grounded at all times, more or less.Someone once said "the greatest journeys we go on are those in our own minds" -or words to that effect- and this play/film is testimony to that.The message that came through most strongly for me was that we owe the past a heavy debt; it is, in the present, always our obligation not to turn away, not to give up or hide away in the face of adversity.Despite its flaws this film rates a 9/10 from me..
This film was made during the darkest hours of the war in 1942, when Singapore was lost and the darkness of dictatorship and its violence reached its farthest limits and leading intellectuals and writers of the world committed suicide, like Stefan Zweig, and somehow the writer of this story (Bernard Miles, a great actor himself,) gets to the very heart of darkness of humanity and history.
It is therefore one of those very rare and extremely metaphysical films.Michael Redgrave has given up on the world and is looking forward to the end of humanity and civilization, he doesn't care any more about anything as he wasted his best years on a lonesome crusade against fascism in Europe with no response at all, since people allowed the war to come anyway, so he absconds into a remote lighthouse beyond everything, where he doesn't even read books.
They are real enough to him, and he is not alone in having made the experience that ghosts can be more alive than live people.The film exploits this strange field of occult metaphysics and succeeds in realizing all their different fates, that is six of them, including the captain (Finlay Currie), a Viennese doctor and his wife and daughter (Lilli Palmer), a suffragette 70 years ahead of her time and another family with a Dickensian background of hardship.
His friend James Mason (Streeter) tells him that he thinks he is a coward and the two fall out, leaving Redgrave alone on the lighthouse island.
In England, Michael Powell's "49th Parallel" and Leslie Howard's "Pimpernel Smith" are effective statements about the fight against Nazism...In "Thunder Rock," adapted from a play by Robert Audrey, an anti-fascist journalist in Canada (Michael Redgrave) fails in his political movement because of the greed and avarice of his Fleet Street fellow workers and the self-satisfaction of the public...He retires to an isolated lighthouse on lake Michigan, in disgust with the world of the thirties...The lighthouse rock sustains a commemorative tablet to a group of European immigrants whose ship sank off-shore during a storm a century before...As the weeks turn into months, the professional writer begins to imagine the ghosts of the dead names appearing before him, each telling their tale of sorrow, of escaping, of seeking a new life...In the end he decides he has no cause to complain, and that it is his duty to keep on fighting, even if only for the sake of the dead he has conjured up...The film (photographed in black and white) is intriguing, strongly imaginative, very well acted and presented....
Michael Redgrave (in one of his best roles) is the lone lighthouse keeper who was once a spokesman against the onslaught of Fascism (shown in a sequence of montages that clearly bear the influence of CITIZEN KANE [1941]), who has retired from the world when his warnings were dismissed.
The life-stories of the individual passengers (though, for obvious reasons of time constraint, the writers opted to focus on only three) are all somewhat melodramatic but the one involving progressive doctor Frederick Valk and Lili Palmer (who even has feelings for Redgrave, i.e. he imagines she has!) is the most engaging.The plot and setting allowed the director and cameraman (Max Greene, who later shot Jules Dassin's British-made noir NIGHT AND THE CITY [1950]) to experiment with light and shadow which, along with the literary dialogue (it was adapted from a play by Robert Ardrey that was intended to urge America into World War II, which had already happened by the time the film came out!) and the marvelous ensemble acting, emerges as one of the film's most impressive qualities.
As a matter of fact, the cast was made up of established, upcoming and (to me) unfamiliar names but, apart from the ones already mentioned, James Mason's all-too brief appearance as Redgrave's sparring pal - who has no qualms about doing his thing for the war effort - is especially notable.The climax, too, is terrific: first, we have the 'ghosts' realizing what has really happened to them (shades of "Outward Bound" but also looking forward to THE SIXTH SENSE [1999]) and, then, their refusal to 'leave' unless Redgrave goes back to civilization and do his duty (his being dominated by entities he's supposed to be controlling himself, interestingly enough, foreshadows his unforgettable turn as the Ventriloquist in the celebrated horror compendium DEAD OF NIGHT [1945] - which, incidentally, also featured Valk as a doomed doctor!).The Boulting Brothers - John produced the film while his twin brother Roy directed it, but they often exchanged roles!
It concerns an anti-fascist journalist named David Charleston, (Michael Redgrave) who is a reporter for a newspaper in Canada and he has traveled in Europe and has discovered that Hitler is starting trouble in Germany and there is reason to believe that Japan is also starting problems in China.
David writes many books trying to tell the world that they are in big trouble and then decides to retire to a lighthouse in Michigan on the Great Lakes.
Streeter gets upset with the way that David is acting and finds out that he is communicating with dead people that had a shipwreck ninety years ago in the great lakes and in his own mind they are alive and talking to him.
Michael Redgrave plays a writer who tries to reveal what is happening in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but is not allowed to do so by the papers for whom he writes.
David Charleston (Michael Redgrave) is an anti-Fascist who spent the entire 1930s warning the Western World of the threat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan.
But all of these ghosts (except the ship's Captain, Finlay Currie) are unaware that it is no longer 1850, and that they are all dead.The crisis of the film is when Currie (who has assisted in this mental game with Redgrave) gets tired about it because Redgrave has turned the characters into caricatures and not real people.
Here, it's the supernatural that takes center stage.THUNDER ROCK has an intriguing premise and deals more with the supernatural and the effect that the ghostly inhabitants of a lighthouse have on the mind of a disillusioned war correspondent during the WWII era.
MICHAEL REDGRAVE is the writer who retreats to a lighthouse in Lake Michigan when he wearies of a world drifting toward fascism and loss of freedom as the Nazi menace increases.
The inhabitants of the lighthouse (from an 1849 shipwreck) inspire him to have courage and go on with his life and fight for his beliefs.Unfortunately, the allegorical fable of a man visited by the spirits of dead passengers who lost their lives at sea doesn't ring true.
In short, the story never reaches the kind of potential it had--and despite good acting by the entire cast, especially by a young MICHAEL REDGRAVE and JAMES MASON.
You just don't see these any more.As others have noted, it is "stagy" as in it is pretty much a theatrical stage play in film form...but the script and the premise is excellent.The ghosts were all believable to me, hailing from 1845, when traveling from London to California was quite a bit more difficult than it is today.It is the first time I experienced a Redgrave performance and was genuinely surprised.
World-weary, embittered newspaper writer, excellently played by fine, cerebral actor Michael Redgrave, has retreated to a lonely lighthouse on Lake Michigan (!), "Thunder Rock", to isolate himself from oncoming perils of 1930s Europe.
(What an emigration ship from Europe to America is doing on Lake Michigan isn't made clear.)Redgrave creates in his mind a scenario imagining the characters on that ship, exemplaries of their fields, but who are rejected, harassed, punished for trying to achieve noble ends before their time, and so they decide to flee to the New World where they would be free to pursue their goals.
Redgrave wrestles with his imagined characters and ultimately comes to realize that these potentially great achievers decided (allegorically) to abandon their work by running away, just as Europe and the world would fail to rise against fascism until WWII forced them to confront reality.
He then realizes that he must end his isolation and get back to the fight!Interesting to see British actors in lake maritime office not too successfully playing Americans; standout performances by Barbara Muller, whose character anticipates the woman's movement, and Frederick Volk as Pasteur-like doctor..
Sold as a ghost story, this was really forerunner of the two-act psychodramas which permeated Anglo-American theater for the fifty years after WW2.After establishing the setting of the loner in the light-house, we find that British leftist writer David Charleston took the lighthouse job on Lake Michigan only to get away from a world headed for war and which, co-incidentally, had little use for his earnest genius (the poor fellow!) For companionship he imagines six people from a log of passengers lost in a wreck from 1849.
So, when the war finally arrived, Redgrave left the UK and moved to the most isolated place he could find--a lonely lighthouse on a tiny island in the Great Lakes.
By the end of the film, Currie (who was imaginary) convinced Redgrave to stop being a hermit and do his part for the war effort against Fascism--a not especially subtle but very rousing ending indeed!
Thunder Rock is directed by Roy Boulting, is based on the play by Robert Ardrey, has a screenplay by Jeffrey Dell and Bernard Miles and stars Michel Redgrave, Finally Currie, James Mason, Lilli Palmer and Barbara Mullen.Thunder Rock is set during the Second World War. David Charleston(Michael Redgrave)is an embittered writer, who despairing of the awful things humans do to one another, becomes a lighthouse keeper.
David brings to life in his mind the ghosts of some passengers from a ship which sank with all hands near the lighthouse in the 1800's.
He believes the past to have been uncomplicated and not as dark and terrifying as his present, he soon finds that view is far from true.Redgrave is superb in the lead role and I liked the fantasy element to the film where the ghosts appear to him.
The film also does a good job of showing those of us in the present that our times may be terrible but each period in history has had it share of good and bad people and events.The entire cast are superb with special praise going to Redgrave and Barbara Mullen as the spinster who wanted to live her own life, not the life men told her she would live..
Redgrave plays a journalist lively in isolation, managing a lighthouse on Lake Michigan in despair at his inability to persuade people about the dangers of the rise in fascism.
Unless you happened to see the play - by Robert Ardrey - on which the Boulting Brothers based their film then the only selling point is Michael Redgrave.
By 1942 he was a seasoned film actor having served a distinguished apprenticeship in the theatre and although it did no harm to feature the likes of James Mason, Finlay Currie, Barbara Mullen and Lily Palmer in support by this stage of his film career Redgrave was fully capable of carrying a picture by himself.
Thunder Rock is the place where a jaded idealist played by Michael Redgrave has assigned himself in the true keepers of the lighthouse tradition.
Only the ship's captain Finlay Currie knows he's dead, the others just think they're stranded on his island waiting for a storm to clear.Redgrave's come to a personal crisis of sorts, the supervisors want him to take some overdue leave.
And there's the real crisis of the oncoming World War which Redgrave tried to tell an uncaring public and its leaders about and now he's withdrawn into being the ultimate isolationist.On the night that the action of this play takes place, Redgrave's imaginary friends start giving some unexpected answers to questions and not something that his own mind creations would give out with.
The film added quite a bit to get it out of the living room of the lighthouse where all the action takes place on stage.
James Mason is also in this film playing a real friend of Redgrave's who starts wondering about his sanity when Redgrave tells him about his imaginary group of dead friends off the Land of Lakes.
The characters are deeply etched to make up for a rather static lack of plot.A British film set in Lake Michigan, who'd have believed it and also believed it was good.