It flopped on Broadway but, unsurprisingly, was a huge success in London in 1940 starring Michael Redgrave as David Charleston, an idealistic journalist who has withdrawn from a world that has allowed Fascism to thrive.
Between appearing in the play and film, Redgrave had joined the Navy but was invalided out after 16 months.
Boulting's expanding of the backstory slows the plot down but it eventually hits it's stride.
Charleston has become a lighthouse keeper on Lake Michigan, only seeing people during a monthly supplies drop.
Charleston has found the logbook from an 1849 shipwreck and nightly imagines it's victims: Captain Stuart, Doctor Kurtz, Mrs Kurtz and daughter Melanie, Miss Kirby a feminist, and Mr Briggs and his pregnant wife.
He cynically judges them but slowly discovers they were good people and realises life must be engaged with.
Shelf or charity shop? I think Mr Charleston can hide away from society in my DVD storage box but it's a film that always impresses in my rare viewings. Boulting takes a long time showing Charleston's growing dislike of the world but it does settle down into it's gently unsettling atmosphere of a man living in his mind with the dead, helped by the fine cinematography of German Mutz Greenbaum. By seeing the '49ers' initially through Charleston's misanthropic eyes then as they actually were, it allows the actors the chance to deliver clever shifts in their performances. Finlay Currie, Barbara Mullen, Frederick Valk (who co-starred with Redgrave in the Ealing horror film DEAD OF NIGHT two years later) all excel while Lili Palmer is a delight as the initially frivolous then subdued Melanie, also good is James Mason as Charleston's delivery pilot friend; Mason had actually registered as a Concientious Objector at the start of WWII. Michael Redgrave gives one of his finest screen performances as Charleston, unafraid to play a shut-down and disdainful character until he subtly shifts to show a man willing to face the world again. THUNDER ROCK is an under-rated gem.
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