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." The retrospective shares its title with a new book of essays and interviews, edited by Philip Horne and Peter Swaab.
LOS ANGELES: The American Cinematheque dips into the long and varied career of George Stevens between March 20 and March 23. The program includes several of the giant '50s chin-pullers (A Place in the Sun, Shane, and, well, Giant) that kept Stevens in Oscar nominations, though its real charmer may be the opening selection, the modest 1933 comedy Alice Adams, with a barn-burner of a performance by the young Katherine Hepburn. On Easter Sunday, celebrate by getting messed up pre-show time and settling in for the umpteen-hour Biblical film The Greatest Story Ever Told, starring a bemused Max Von Sydow as J.C. Yes, that really is John Wayne in a special cameo appearance as the hungover-looking centurian who looks at Max hanging there and mutters, "Truly this man was the son of God" before wandering off somewhere to tap a kidney. Ed Wynn, Robert Blake, and the professor from Gilligan's Island are supposed to be in in too, but it's a very long movie, and their appearances must be timed to coincide with the little naps I always take at strategic intervals to restoreth my soul.
