User:J579513/sandbox

Jeb

Jeb was a play by Robert Ardrey that opened on Broadway in April 1946 tackling the issue of race in post-WWII America. The play deals with a disabled black veteran who returns to his home in the rural South after serving overseas.

Despite excellent reviews and an extremely positive critical reception, the play closed after a very short run, leading several commentators to assert that it was ahead of its time.

Synopsis

Robert Ardrey, in his unpublished autobiography, gives the following synopsis of Jeb:

The story had been haunting me. It concerned a black soldier whom I named Jeb, who returned from the Pacific war with an aluminum leg. The loss of the leg disturbed him not at all, for to his pride he had acquired a skill in the army: he could run an adding machine. And the story takes place when he returns to his family, to his girl, and to the small Southern town where an adding machine is a white man's job. He pursues his passionate ambition against relentless opposition, and in the end we find him in northern Harlem, physically beaten yet undefeated, prepared to return to the South in a larger cause. It was the story of the making of a militant.

Production

The playwright, Robert Ardrey, was by the time of Jeb already an acclaimed screenwriter. He had also had several plays produced on Broadway. His most famous, and his first contribution to what he described as the théâtre engagé, or a "theater engaged with its times", was Thunder Rock, which also ran into difficulties because of its pioneering social theme. Ardrey would go on to be an eminent paleoantropologist.

Jeb was produced and directed by Herman Shumlin. It was one of the only Broadway plays of its time to offer major opportunities to African American actors, and had a majority-black cast. It starred Ossie Davis (who would go on to be one of the most acclaimed African American actors of his generation and a favorite of Spike Lee), along with his eventual wife, Ruby Dee (who went on to co-star in A Raisin in the Sun), as well as, in the role of the child, Reri Grist.

Reception

Due in part to high production costs and relatively low revenue the play closed after only seven performaces. However, Jeb garnered widespread critical praise. The reviewer for Billboard wrote, “Robert Ardrey has scripted a drama that has the guts and the power to make you angry… Jeb is absorbing from curtain to curtain.”

The play's Broadway failure despite its acknowledged merit led several commentators to opine that it was ahead of its time. Albert Wertheim, in his 2004 study, wrote:

Indeed, Jeb shows how the participation of African Americans in World War II and the occupational training they received in the armed forces prepare them in the postwar period to dress for battle in a new war to end racial discrimination and oppression at home. This is heady and unsettling stuff in 1946 for Broadway audiences and for society trying to return to prewar 'normalcy' and to put returning white soldiers back into the work force. It is no small wonder that Jeb, with its incisive unveiling of racism’s economic underpinnings and with its militant ending, closed after six performances.

Ardrey himself came to share this opinion. In his autobiography he writes, "I had done it again. In 1939 I opened Thunder Rock six months too soon. In 1946 I had opened Jeb twenty years ahead of its time."

Robert Ardrey

Robert Ardrey (October 16, 1908, Chicago, Illinois – January 14, 1980, South Africa) was an American playwright and screenwriter who returned to his academic training in anthropology and the behavioral sciences in the 1950s.

African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966), two of Robert Ardrey's most widely read works, as well as Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape (1967), were key elements in the public discourse of the 1960s that challenged earlier anthropological assumptions. Ardrey's ideas notably influenced Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the development of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as Sam Peckinpah, to whom Strother Martin gave copies of two of Ardrey's books.

Life

Robert Ardrey was born on October 16, 1908 to Robert Leslie Ardrey and Marie Haswell. His father died in 1919 from pneumonia during the influenza epidemic and he was raised by his mother. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended the nearby University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. While in attendance, he studied creative writing with Thornton Wilder, who would become his lifelong mentor.

His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935 and lasted only a few days, but resulted in the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The award granted Ardrey the financial independence to focus on writing plays. Several of his subsequent plays, including Casey Jones, How to Get Tough About It, and his most famous play, Thunder Rock, were subsequently produced on Broadway.

In 1938 he moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. There he wrote many screenplays, including those for adaptations such as The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), Madame Bovary (1949),The Secret Garden (1949), and The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum). He also wrote original screenplays, including the screenplay for Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay.

During the 1950s Ardrey became increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood and what he saw as the growing role money had started to play in creative decisions. At the same time and largely by accident, he renewed his interest in human origins and human behavior, which he had studied at the University of Chicago. In the summer of 1956 he moved with his wife and two sons to Geneva. He spent the following years traveling in Southern and Eastern Africa, conducting research for what was to become his first book on the subject, African Genesis (1961), ultimately an international bestseller. Subsequently, he went on to write a total of four books in his widely read Nature of Man series, including his best known book The Territorial Imperative (1966).

In October of 1960 he moved with his second wife to Trastevere, Rome, where they lived for 17 years. In 1977 they moved to a small town named Kalk Bay just outside Cape Town, South Africa. He continued to publish influential works until his death on January 14, 1980. His ashes, along with those of his wife, are interred in the Holy Trinity Church overlooking False Bay.

Theater and Film Career

After graduating from the University of Chicago, under the continuing mentorship of Thornton Wilder, Ardrey wrote a novel, several plays, and many short stories, all of which remained unpublished. It was Wilder's rule that "A young author should not write for market until his style [has] 'crystalized'" They agreed that this moment came with the writing of the play Star Spangled.

Star Spangled opened on Broadway in 1935. It was a comedy that brought to life the classic struggles of an immigrant family living on the South Side of Chicago. It received largely negative reviews and lasted only a few days. However it did catch the attention of notable playwright Sidney Howard, whom Ardrey claims was instrumental in the resulting award of a Guggenheim fellowship for promise as a young playwright. The award allowed Ardrey the financial independence to remain in Chicago and focus on writing plays.

While in Chicago Ardrey wrote two more plays. The first, Casey Jones, was a play about railroad men and their love for their machines. The second, How to Get Tough About It, Ardrey describes as "A proletarian love story of pleasant dimensions." In 1938 Guthrie McClintic presented How to Get Tough About It and Elia Kazan directed Casey Jones. The plays opened ten days apart and were massive failures. In his preface to Plays of Three Decades Ardrey writes:

No author in Broadway memory had attained two such failures on a scale quite so grand on evenings quite so close together. Had they opened six months apart, none would have noticed. Coming as they did, I became a kind of upside-down white-headed boy, a figure thundering toward literary glory in reverse gear. Hollywood, incapable of resisting the colossal, bid lavishly for my services. And Samuel Goldwyn, buyer of none but the best, bought me.

Ardrey signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and moved for the first time to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. He worked on several projects, including Samuel Goldwyn's notorious boondoggle remake of Graustark, which was cancelled, and a western called The Cowboy and the Lady, from which he was dropped, (though he later used most of the plot for his smash success Lady Takes A Chance). While in Los Angeles he would meet and work with Samuel Goldwyn, Clarence Brown, Pandro Berman, Garson Kanin, Gene Fowler, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Howard, and S.N. Behrman.

In 1938, however, he received word that his Broadway agent, Harold Freedman, had sold the film rights to his play How to Get Tough About It. Ardrey decided to use the opportunity to take time off to write a play. He travelled to Tucson where he married Helen Johnson with famed Hollywood director Garson Kanin as his best man. Following his wedding, he sent a note to Samuel Goldwyn which read: "Dear Mr. Goldwyn. I fear that I am wasting your money, and I'm sure you are wasting my time." He moved with his new wife back to the east coast and set to work, first on a minor project which he would abandon, and then on the play that would become Thunder Rock.

Thunder Rock

Main article: Thunder Rock (play)

format TK Robert Ardrey wrote Thunder Rock during the period of escalation in Europe which would lead to World War II. Despairing of the growing isolationism among Americans, Ardrey became convinced that American involvement in the war was a moral necessity. However he did not intend to write a play about the conflict until he was struck by a moment of inspiration during a performance of Swan Lake, in which he conceived of "the play from beginning to end, complete with first, second, and third act curtains." Ardrey ca. 1980, p. 63 (quoted)</ref> In his autobiography, Ardrey gives the following summary of the play:

My story was that of a renowned journalist who having experienced the disillusionments of the 1930's had given up all hope of influencing man toward a better world. In his depths, he takes a job as keeper of a lonely lighthouse on a rock in Lake Michigan. On that rock, a century earlier, had been wrecked a ship carrying immigrants to the New World. It was a time of legitimate hope – he thought. And there – within this lighthouse, symbolically the shape of his mind – he recreated a little world populated by the hopeful immigrants to the New World. The play consists of the journalist-lightkeeper and the long-dead people of his own resurrection, his relations with characters existing only in his own mind. Yet in the probing of his own creations, his integrity catches up with him. They were as much escaping problems of their world as he was of his. In the end he returns to reality.

Thunder Rock, an anti-isolationist play, opened on Broadway in November, 1939 to an isolationist public. It received largely negative reviews and a poor reception. In the introduction to Plays of Three Decades, Ardrey writes that it opened "to the worst reviews I have ever received. Our most eminent critic deplored a play containing so much thunder and so little rock." Template:Closed in how long? - TK expand? During the summer of 1940 Ardrey discovered, when he read a syndicated column from Britain, that unbeknownst to him Thunder Rock had been having a massively successful run in London. In the column Vincent Sheehan wrote Quote TK The British rights had been sold to Herbert Marshall, who had launched a production, starring Michael Redgrave. The play had been so successful that the British Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, arranged to have the Treasury department fund a production at the Globe Theatre in London's West End. The play deeply resonated with a British public under siege. Eminent theater critic Harold Hobson wrote of Thunder Rock:

"The theatre… did a great deal to keep the morale of the British people high. One intellectual play had an enormous effect in keeping alight a spirit of hope at a time when it was nearer to extinction than it had ever been, either before or after. This was Thunder Rock, by Robert Ardrey. What he accomplished for the British people at a moment of supreme despair… merits their lasting gratitude. … He, more quietly but equally effectively as Churchill, urged us never to surrender."

In 1942, Thunder Rock was turned into a film, directed by the Boulting Brothers, also starring Michael Redgrave. (See Thunder Rock (film))

Shortly following the war, productions of Thunder Rock were quickly launched in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and, most famously, in Allied-occupied Berlin where it was the first modern play to go up in the American zone. Template:Mention legacy - also can we add more of the expansion effects. It later went on to play in 40 german towns (or whatever the number was, 41?) and throughout eastern europe - also as far away as Nairobi Template:TK - Sidney Howard Memorial Award - Education 74

Hollywood

After Thunder Rock quickly closed on Broadway, Ardrey returned to Hollywood. His first official credit was the screenplay for the adaptation of Sidney Howard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play They Knew What They Wanted (1939). It was directed by Garson Kanin, starred Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton, and was shot on location in Napa Valley. In 1946, after a series of talks with RKO, Ardrey and his new agent Harold Norling Swanson negotiated the first-ever independent contract with a major Hollywood studio for him to write the screen adaptation of the A. J. Cronin novel The Green Years. The contract stipulated that Ardrey could work at his home in Brentwood - an unprecedented studio concession - and he was not to be bothered until he completed the screenplay in around six weeks. The Green Years debuted to record profits and went on to be one of the highest grossing films of 1946.<refTK>

Following these successes in Hollywood, Ardrey returned to New York to reengage the theater. There he wrote Jeb.

Jeb

Main article: Jeb (play)

Jeb opened in New York to largely positive reviews (famed American theatre critic George Jean Nathan called it the best play on the topic of civil rights) and enthusiastic audiences. However, due to factors including high production costs, the play had to close after a run of only one week.

Hollywood

Following the short run of Jeb Ardrey moved back to Hollywood and signed a two picture deal with MGM. In 1946 and '47 he wrote The Secret Garden. In 1947 he wrote the screenplay for The Three Musketeers (film), (which would become the second-highest grossing film of 1948.) starring Lanna Turner and Gene Kelly. This became Gene Kelly's favorite non-musical role. In 1949, Ardrey wrote the screenplay for Gustave Flaubert's classic novel Madame Bovary, starring Jennifer Jones with James Mason playing the role of Flaubert. The novel was originally tried for obscenity in France and Ardrey used this as a device to frame the story and allow for a commentator.

In 1947, Ardrey was elected to the board of the Screen Writers Guild and made chairman of the Political Advisory Committee, amid growing persecution of Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Following the foundation of the Committee for the First Amendment, Ardrey flew to Washington, along with Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye, and John Huston to defend The Hollywood Ten. Template:TK format Later, on behalf of the Guild, Ardrey worked with Thurman Arnold to lodge a suit against the blacklist with the Supreme Court. (The suit came up for review four years later, but the Guild dropped it.)

In the early '50s, partly due to its enforcement of the blacklists and partly due to the increasing role banks were playing in creative decisions, Ardrey began to feel a growing dissatisfaction with Hollywood Template:TK - Could expand and started to travel abroad. He travelled to Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, the Riviera, Venice, Yugoslavia, where he spent a month living in Belgrade, Greece, Istanbul, and Munich. He later described these travels as "necessary exercises" for his book African Genesis.

In 1952 Ardrey joined the Adlai Stevenson campaign against Richard Nixon as a part of the group "Hollywood for Stevenson". The group sponsored an investigator to go to Nixon's hometown for research. While there he discovered, in the high school newspaper archives, that Richard Nixon had been known as Tricky Dick.

In 1954 Ardrey wrote the adaptation of John Master's novel Bhowani Junction. Due in part to the intervention of the banks financing the film, Ardrey entered into contested negotiations over rewrites. Eventually he quit and took his name off the film.

Ardrey turned his attention toward Africa.

Africa

In 1955, when Ardrey was considering a trip to Africa, Template:TK? Max Ascoli, publisher of The Reporter, offered to buy anything that Ardrey would write there. At the same time Ardrey renewed an acquaintance with prominent geologist Richard Foster Flint. Because of Ardrey's background in geology and paleontology, Flint arranged for Ardrey to investigate claims made by Raymond Dart about a specimin of Australopithecus africanus.

This trip would serve as the beginning of Ardrey's renewed interest in the human sciences and the initiation of his groundbreaking work in Paleoanthropology.

Paleoanthropology

As a science writer for the informed non-specialist reader in paleoanthropology, which encompasses anthropology, ethology, paleontology, zoology and human evolution, Robert Ardrey was among the proponents of the hunting hypothesis and the killer ape theory.

Ardrey postulated that precursors of Australopithecus survived millions of years of drought in the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, as the savannah spread and the forests shrank, by adapting the hunting ways of carnivorous species. Changes in survival techniques and social organisation gradually differentiated pre-humans from other primates. Concomitant changes in diet potentiated unique developments in the human brain.

The killer ape theory posits that aggression, a vital factor in hunting prey for food, was a fundamental characteristic which distinguished prehuman ancestors from other primates.

These themes have also been investigated in academia by, among others:

• Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (1966)
• University of Chicago "Man the Hunter" symposium (1966): Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter: Symposium on Man the Hunter, University of Chicago. Chicago: Aldine Publishing.
• Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster: Man the Hunter (1968). (Washburn's students Lee and DeVore organised the 1966 Chicago conference.)
• Craig Stanford: The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior, Princeton University Press (2001).
• Erich Fromm: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)
• Matt Cartmill: A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (1996)

Researchers

Some of the scientists whose research particularly informed Robert Ardrey's scientific investigations, and with several of whom Ardrey consulted at length while developing his four major works in Africa from the 1940s through the 1970s, include:

• Warder Clyde Allee
• Charles Kimberlin Brain
• Robert Broom
• Helmut Karl Buechner
• Clarence Ray Carpenter
• Raymond Dart
• George Schaller
• Eliot Howard
• James Kitching
• Louis Leakey
• Eugene Marais
• Kenneth Oakley

Books

Fiction

• World's Beginning (1944) (Cited in Everett F. Bleiler's The Checklist of Fantastic Literature, 1948.)
• The Brotherhood of Fear (1952)

Nonfiction

• African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man. New York: Atheneum, 1961. OCLC 252499
• The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966)
• The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder (1970)
• The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man (1976)
• Aggression and Violence in Man: A Dialogue Between Dr. L.S.B. Leakey and Robert Ardrey (1971) OCLC 631758464 Online version

Plays

• Star Spangled (1936)
• Casey Jones (1938)
• God and Texas (1938)
• How To Get Tough About It (1938)
• Thunder Rock (1939) (Thunder Rock filmed in 1942 in the UK, released 1944 in the US)
• Jeb (1946)
• Sing Me No Lullaby (1954)
• Shadow Of Heroes (1958) (produced in London as Stone and Star)

Screenplays

• They Knew What They Wanted (1940)
• A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)
• The Green Years (1946)
• Song of Love (1947)
• The Three Musketeers (1948)
• Madame Bovary (1949)
• The Secret Garden (1949)
• The Schumann Story (1950) short film adaptation of Song of Love
• The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955)
• The Power and the Prize (1956)
• The Wonderful Country (1959)
• Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)
• Khartoum (1966) Nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay
• The Animal Within (1975) documentary

Honors

• 1935: Sergel Drama Award.
• 1937: Guggenheim Fellowship.
• 1940: Sidney Howard Memorial Award.
• 1961: Theresa Helburn Memorial Award.
• 1963: Willkie Brothers Grant for Anthropology.
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Personal

Robert Ardrey was the son of Robert Leslie Ardrey, an editor and publisher, and the former Marie Haswell. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago, where his mentor was Thornton Wilder. Ardrey was married to Helen Johnson, whom he met at the University, from 1938 until they divorced in 1960. They had two sons, Ross and Daniel. In 1960 Ardrey married the South African stage actress Berdine Grunewald, who later illustrated his books.

There are a number of university libraries that house Robert Ardrey's papers. The primary archive for the Robert Ardrey Collection is at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. There are also additional collections of Robert Ardrey's works held at UCLA, Rutgers, and the University of Chicago.

External links

General

• NYTimes / All Movie Guide biography of Robert Ardrey
• Official site of The Robert Ardrey Estate
• Answers.com on Robert Ardrey

Plays and screenplays

• Synopses of Thunder Rock and Sing Me No Lullaby.
• Robert Ardrey at IMDb.

Paleoanthropology

• "The First Runner's High: Jogging Separated Humans From Apes." Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience, November 2004 (aspects of Miocene/Pliocene transition - from forest to savannah - central to Ardrey's theses)
• Robert Ardrey, The Scourge of Territorialism (1967)
• Robert Ardrey, Territorialism and War (1967)
• "Exploring Our Basic Human Nature: Are Humans Inherently Violent?" Robert W. Sussman, Anthro Notes: National Museum of Natural History Bulletin for Teachers, Vol. 19 No. 3, Fall 1997.
• Excerpts from African Genesis.

Thunder Rock (play)

Synopsis

The Dramatists Play Service gives the following synopsis of Thunder Rock:

The action passes in a lighthouse on Lake Michigan. Charleston, the keeper, has taken a job there to flee from a detestable world. Opposing Charleston's pessimism, Streeter, his friend, says he is giving up his job to become an active member of society again. Streeter believes our world can be brought out of its chaos if people do something about it. Filled with this determination, he leaves to become an aviator. Charleston retreats further into a fantastic world of his own building. The people of this world are half a dozen of the sixty who were shipwrecked ninety years ago. Believing that "Mankind's got one future—in the past," Charleston breathes life into these creatures of his imagination. They live again on the stage. As he talks to them we see passengers as they really were, each seeking sanctuary from a disturbed Europe, running away from life, yet needing the same hope and strength as Charleston himself. Charleston's sincerity convinces these creatures that he really has the courage to lead his fellowmen into a better world, and in this faith they are content to die again. Inspired by their confidence, the lighthouse-keeper returns to useful work, determined to create a new order out of the chaos of the old.

Conception

The initial inspiration for Thunder Rock came in 1938 while the playwright, Robert Ardrey, on an extended honeymoon on Nantucket, was working on a different play. He writes in his autobiography of being taken by the image of the lighthouse as Siansconset and by the drama of the frequent nor'easters. At the same time, the conflict in Europe was escalating, and Ardrey took the signing of the Munich Agreement to be a certain harbinger of war. Ardrey did not have the idea for the play, however, until he returned to New York. He writes in his autobiography of the moment of inspiration during a performance of Swan Lake:

That afternoon, eyes closed, enjoying the music with moderation, I descended into a world between the Tigris and the Styx. And within the course of the performance I had beheld Thunder Rock. I had the play from beginning to end, complete with the first, second, and third act curtains. I never had the experience again, and I must wonder how many authors have gone through a similar spell.

Ardrey moved with his wife, Helen, to New Orleans, where he wrote the first draft.

New York Production

Having finished the first draft Ardrey showed it to his agent, Harold Freedman, and to his friend, the influential Broadway director and producer Elia Kazan, who had directed Casey Jones. Kazan engaged Harold Clurman to direct members of the theater collective The Group Theater, including Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, and Frances Farmer. Rehearsals were begun amidst growing tension in Europe, and the company, convinced that war would break out within weeks, resolved to open as quickly as they could. However, after the Invasion of Poland there was a period of relative quiet in Europe, leading to a belief in America that the threat had been overblown. Senator William Borah during this period famously dubbed the conflict "The Phoney War." The play, which called for American involvement in a crisis in Europe, debuted to an increasingly isolationist audience amid a growing conception that there would be no war.

Reception

Template:Copy, including as many citations as possible to "RA New York Articles" In 1940 Thunder Rock received the first ever Sidney Howard Memorial Award for young playwrights. {{TK: flesh out; probably collapse section into main body}}

London Productions

During the winter of 1939 Harold Freedman sold the British rights of Thunder Rock to the London theater director Herbert Marshall. He sent the script to then rising star Michael Redgrave, wo later wrote, "I thought it one of the most exciting plays I had ever read." He agreed to star, and they launched a production in London, also with Bernard Miles, Fredda Brilliant, and Frederik Falk, at the Neighbourhood Theatre. After the Battle of Dunkirk most London Theaters voluntarily closed, and when Thunder Rock went up, two nights before the Fall of France, it was one of only two productions in London. (For more on reception, see below) When Winston Churchill read of the play, he sent his Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, his scientific advisor, Lord Lindeman, and his wife, Clementine. Duff Cooper reported back to Churchill, who is said to have told his cabinet that "This play is the greatest contribution to British Morale there has yet been." He had Cooper arrange to have the treasury department fund it. Cooper coordinated with Michael Redgrave to launch a major production at the Globe Theatre in London's West End. The role of the government in funding the arrangement was kept secret until after the war. The production at the Globe ran during the worsening Blitz. During air-raids the play would be paused and Michael Redgrave would lead the audience in songs. The production was a massive critical and popular success. The production ran until September when the neighboring Queen's Theater was hit by a German bomb, at which point Thunder Rock was taken on the road.

Reception

Template:TK incorporate. Just collecting for now: Both the initial run at the Neighborhood Theater and the government-funded run at the Globe were major successes. Of Thunder Rock at the Neighbourhood critic James Agate wrote it was "a play infinitely superior in craftsmanship, intellectual interest, pure theater and entertainment value to anything the commercial theater can offer in these heartsearching days." The News and Chronicle described it as "A tonic to the mind, and a bath to the spirit."

Eminent theater critic Harold Hobson later reflected on the significance of Thunder Rock:

"The theatre… did a great deal to keep the morale of the British people high. One intellectual play had an enormous effect in keeping alight a spirit of hope at a time when it was nearer to extinction than it had ever been, either before or after. This was Thunder Rock, by Robert Ardrey. What he accomplished for the British people at a moment of supreme dispair… merits their lasting grattitude. … He, more quietly but equally effectively as Churchill, urged us never to surrender."

"In any case it shook its audiences with the realization of enormous, fundamental crisis, and it sent them away with the feeling that somehow the better parts of their own culture could and would survive." [{cite sources from "RA London Articles"}} -TK Cabinet ministers quote;

Subsequent Productions

When the London production closed, Thunder Rock was taken taken on the road. The cast was the same except that Alec Guiness took over for Michael Regrave. It played in British cities including Manchester and Birmingham. Withing six weeks after V-E day a production of Thunder Rock had been launched in Vienna. By the fall of 1945 the play was up in Budapest and Prague. Thunder Rock was the first play to go up in Allied-occupied Germany, except for a failed Russian production of Our Town, when the American forces staged a production in American-occupied Berlin. The American production starred Ernst Busch, a german singer and actor who had fled Germany in 1933, joined the International Brigades to fight against the Nationalists, risen to fame for his Spanish war songs, been taken prisoner in Belgium, and who had just been liberated from a P.O.W. camp at the end of the war.

Thunder Rock (film)

Thunder Rock is a 1942 British drama film with supernatural elements, directed by Roy Boulting and starring Michael Redgrave and Barbara Mullen, with James Mason and Lilli Palmer in supporting roles.

Background

The film is based on the 1939 play Thunder Rock by Robert Ardrey, which had originally been a notable stage flop in New York, but proved to be considerably more successful in London where it ran for months in the West End. The film version was opened out considerably from its source by the addition of a montage sequence to illustrate the protagonist Charleston's back-story, and flashback sequences detailing the histories of the various characters in Charleston's imagination, in the process serving to give a heightened propagandist tone to the material.

Critical opinion of the time in Britain was divided as to whether the additional material brought new depths to the story, or made too explicit things which Ardrey had preferred to leave to the audience's imagination and intelligence. The film was however almost universally admired by North American critics and became a huge popular success. Ironically, it ran to packed houses in New York for over three months, where the play had folded in less than three weeks.

Plot

During the late 1930s, David Charleston (Redgrave) is an ambitious campaigning newspaper journalist, a fierce opponent of fascism and the British policy of appeasement. He wishes to alert his readers to the dangers of German rearmament and the folly of ignoring what is going on in Europe, but the reports he submits are censored by the editor of his newspaper. He subsequently quits his job and sets off on a speaking tour around the country under the slogan "Britain, Awake!" The lack of interest and response indicates that Britain is happy to keep slumbering. The final straw comes when Charleston is at the cinema, and the newsreel feature comes on the screen detailing the German occupation of the Sudetenland. The audience show themselves completely uninterested in the newsreel, taking the opportunity to chat among themselves or go in search of refreshments. In despair at the way his countrymen seem totally oblivious to the ever-more impending doom which is about to engulf them, and appear to be content to go about their daily business as normal while all the time sleepwalking towards disaster, he decides to turn his back on Britain and find a far-flung location where he can withdraw from the world and all its contemporary woes.

He crosses the Atlantic, and finds exactly what he is looking for when he successfully lands a job as a lone lighthouse-keeper on Lake Michigan, which will provide him with the solitude he craves. The lighthouse rock carries a commemorative tablet, listing the names of a group of immigrants from Europe who perished 90 years earlier when the ship carrying them to a new life in America foundered off-shore in a violent storm. As weeks turn into months in his self-imposed isolation, Charleston becomes fixated on the names on the tablet, and begins to conjure up ghostly visions of the lost souls, who start to relate to him their sad stories of sorrow, escape and unfulfilled dreams, in what seems an uncanny parallel to Charleston's own situation. The ship's captain Stuart (Finlay Currie), who appears to be the only ghost aware that he is dead and that it is no longer 1850, acts as mediator between Charleston and the other spirits as they tell their tales. Charleston discovers the story of proto-feminist Ellen (Mullen), repeatedly persecuted and imprisoned for her progressive views, and becomes particularly emotionally involved with the Kurtz family, progressive medical man Stefan (Frederick Valk) and his sad daughter Melanie (Palmer), who seems to harbour a strange ghostly attraction towards Charleston, which he reciprocates.

Charleston's lonely existence is broken by the arrival of an old colleague Streeter (Mason), who is worried about him after finding out from Charleston's employers that his pay cheques have not been cashed for many months. Streeter is nonplussed and not a little concerned as he starts to realise Charleston's mental state. Stuart meanwhile becomes exasperated by the way in which Charleston's imagination is forcing the others into unrealistic behaviour. Charleston agrees to let them have more freedom of action, but then finds them all starting to question where they are and what time they are in. He finally allows Melanie to read the tablet describing their deaths, and tells them all that the civilisation they knew is coming to an imminent end, and he has withdrawn to avoid being witness to its demise. He adds that now he has told them the truth, as figments of his imagination they no longer need to appear to him.

To his consternation, they do not disappear. Stefan confronts him sternly, pointing out that running away is cowardly and that it is always better to stand up and fight for what is good and right, regardless of the consequences. Moreover none of the spirits have any intention of leaving him until he faces up to what he has to do. Finally convinced, Charleston realises he must return to Europe and carry on his fight for truth and justice against the evil which threatens the continent.

Production

In 1941 the Boulting Brothers signed a contract whereby their production company, Charter Films, would produce the film for MGM, who would fund the production in entirety. Roy Boulting was to direct and John Boulting produce. Jeffrey Dell and Bernard Miles (himself a member of the original cast) adapted the screenplay. Several of the stage actors reprised their roles, including Michael Redgrave as Charleston, Frederick Valk as Dr. Kurtz, and Barbara Mullen (a later addition to the cast) as Miss Kirby. Two Hollywood stars—James Mason and Lilli Palmer—signed on to play the parts of Streeter and Melanie.

The Boulting brothers, both of whom were then engaged in the armed services, were given a special release to carry on with production. The British government arranged to have Michael Redgrave flown back from an aircraft carrier in the Far East for filming. The company spent ten weeks shooting in the Denham Film Studios. Thunder Rock was premiered in London in December of 1942 and went into more general release in February 1943. The film was given a reissue in 1947.

Reception

On its British release in 1942, Thunder Rock received mostly positive but mixed reviews. Some critics were eager to compare the screen version to the stage play, not always to the former's advantage. In this regard the Glasgow Herald review was typical, almost appearing to damn the film with faint praise by stating: "Though scarcely so good as the play, the film is by no means ineffective or undistinguished. Michael Redgrave, Barbara Mullen and others do well." The reviewer for The Manchester Guardian had also seen both, though not to the detriment of his regard for the film: "Robert Ardrey's 'Thunder Rock', still the best new play of the war, has been faithfully translated to the screen. ... The result is a really intelligent film, more moving in parts than anything this country's studios have produced before and more interesting technically than anything since Citizen Kane." Of the reviews that examined the film in its own right, C. A. Lejeune's long enthusiastic review for The Observer was notable. "I like the unselfconscious courage of a film that knows what it should do and goes ahead and does it. I like a piece that doesn't give a hang whether it's popular or unpopular. I like its frank speech, so distinct from that mumbo jumbo of the average refined, pie-faced British picture."

When released in North America almost two years later the film was lavished with enthusiastic praise from influential sources. In his syndicated column, Walter Winchell called the film "a glowing fantasy that lights up the dark corners of many current issues...it manages to be high-class without being highbrow". Dorothy Kilgallen, writing in her Voice of Broadway column, urged any of her out-of-town readers planning a visit to New York to "drop in at the World Theatre...and see the film Thunder Rock...you'll remember it a long time, and it may not play your town." Herbert Whittaker, film critic for the Montreal Gazette, chose the film as one of the ten best of 1944, observing "it translate(s) Robert Ardrey's deep and philosophical drama to the screen with brilliance". The Los Angeles Times described it as "highly imaginative", "noteworthy" and "outstanding".

Modern critical assessments of Thunder Rock tend to be equally assertive of the film's lasting merit. A BBC reviewer comments that the film "succeeds in creating an atmosphere that is at once haunting, mournful and inspiring. As the writer disillusioned by the world's complacent response to fascism, Michael Redgrave gives one of his most complex and tormented performances, as he regains the crusading spirit from his encounters with the victims of a shipwreck that occurred years before on the rocks near the lighthouse he now tends. With a bullish contribution from James Mason and truly touching support from ghostly emigrée Lilli Palmer, this is one of the Boulting Brothers' finest achievements." The Time Out Film Guide says: "The film effortlessly transcends its theatrical origins, merging drama 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."

DVD

The film was released on a Region 2 DVD (now out-of-print) in Europe, but has, as of 2013, not been made available on a Region 1 DVD in the United States.

Cast

• Michael Redgrave as David Charleston
• James Mason as Streeter
• Lilli Palmer as Melanie Kurtz
• Barbara Mullen as Ellen Kirby
• Finlay Currie as Capt. Joshua Stuart
• Frederick Valk as Dr. Stefan Kurtz
• Sybille Binder as Anne-Marie Kurtz
• Barry Morse as Robert
• George Carney as Harry
• Frederick Cooper as Ted Briggs
• Jean Shepherd as Millie Briggs

• Miles Malleson as Chairman of Directors
• A. E. Matthews as Mr. Kirby
• James Pirrie as Jim Sales
• Olive Sloane as Woman Director
• Tommy Duggan as Office Clerk
• Tony Quinn as Office Clerk
• Harold Anstruther as British Consul
• Alfred Sangster as Director
• Victor Beaumont as Hans (uncredited)
• Gerard Heinz as Hans Harma (uncredited)
• Milo Sperber as Hirohiti (uncredited)