Thunder Rock

Best known for their limp late '50s comedies, the Boulting Brothers are often far more interesting for their more serious earlier work, like this propagandist drama adapted from Robert Ardrey's anti-isolationist play. Redgrave plays the surly, cynical keeper of the eponymous Lake Michigan lighthouse; a former British war correspondent disillusioned by his compatriots' complacency towards the rise of Fascism in Europe, he now peoples his ivory tower with the ghosts of immigrants drowned in a shipwreck almost a century before. As his conscience - in the form of the boat's dead captain - forces him to rethink his romantic ideas about the simplicity and optimism of times past, and thus to regain his sense of political commitment, the film effortlessly transcends its theatrical origins, merging dream and reality, past and present, propaganda and psychological insight, to complex and intelligent effect. Beautifully performed, closer in tone and style to Powell and Pressburger than to the British mainstream, it's weird and unusually gripping.