I am going against the grain of many reviewers here, but I have to admit this is one of the dullest, most ponderous films I have seen. That half of the film dealt with the dead taking their pulses and breathing through their lungs and that this was all coming out of Michael Redgrave's static but worthy performance, plus his mind became for me increasingly tedious and unbelievable. I believe in the sentiment conveyed that we should not abandon our convictions and courage in times of adversity and war, and I see that as being blatantly obvious. But a film is a film is a film and this one on nearly all levels failed for me. The core of this failure lay in the lack of character development plus the stagey lighthouse and phoney crashing waves clearly shot in a studio. Redgrave's character may see the light of courage to struggle against barbarism, but the lack of any real life on his face was utterly boring. And because of this lack of any visible real struggle the dead who come to life because of him look not only dead but look as dull as he does. Lilli Palmer tried to bring life to her fate but the near love scene at one point showed just a pitiful loss on her face that appeared to me to refute the whole fantasy of her being part of his inner self. She showed herself as being utterly separate. The one scene I admired was in a cinema where the audience were indifferent to the impending WW2 on a newsreel and laughed when the comedy of another film began. That did show our apathy towards disasters and said more about the concrete reality of life than the rest of the film. This is my opinion, and my one optimistic hope is that some young viewers will see it and relate it to our own times in 2022. For them it may come to life, but sadly not for me. See Ingmar Bergman's ' The Silence ' for the real horror of loss of convictions, in a despairing world with tanks on the streets. That is the real thing, and real cinema.
Review of Thunder Rock
