65th Street Construction On Sale Now Infernal Machines Met: Peter Grimes Thorold Dickinson Program Overview Arsenal Stadium Mystery Gaslight The High Command Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer Men of Two Worlds Next of Kin The Prime Minister The Queen of Spades Secret People Thorold Dickinson Shorts Met: Tristan und Isolde Gr. Scr.: Garbage... ND/NF Classics 2008 Met: La Bohème SE: On the Street SE: Dreams... NYAFF 2008 IN: Phyllis and Harold Romanian Cinema Gr. Scr.: Mountaintop... YFF: Le Boucher GS: The Kid Brother SE: Ned Rorem Met: La Fille du Régiment Ongoing Programs Film Comment Selects Young Friends of Film Green Screens Browse Calendar Past Programs Furman Gallery Theater Rental Theater Information Press Office Sign up for FSLC ReelNews

Secret People Series: Thorold Dickinson’s World of Cinema Director: Thorold Dickinson, Country: United Kingdom, Release: 1952, Runtime: 96 Dickinson’s most beloved project (the making of which was chronicled by Lindsay Anderson in his book Making a Film) was based on a true story about an attempted IRA assassination, transposed by the filmmaker into a story of continental Europe. Valentina Cortese and a very young, vibrant Audrey Hepburn are the daughters of a slain anti-fascist leader, living with their uncle in London. At the 1937 Paris Exposition, they cross paths with Cortese’s former lover (Serge Reggiani), who recruits her through the most deviously subtle means to take part in a plot to kill her father’s murderer. Dickinson’s attempt to make a truly pacifist film, in which both sides of a then-contemporary conflict are shown to be “wrong,” was roundly rejected at the time of its release, not least by the communist party, outraged over what they took to be Dickinson’s political equivocation. Seen outside the contemporary context of a bitterly polarized post-war Europe, Secret People is Dickinson’s most passionate film, and one of his most stirring. Seen in another light, the great British critic and Dickinson champion Raymond Durgnat wrote that the film’s “restatement of the human values and conscience was, in 1952, at the meanest epoch of the Cold War, rather more radical than may now appear.”

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