In 1954 the British film-maker Thorold Dickinson was up in a helicopter, hovering over the Israeli landscape in search of a soaring final shot for his film Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. The helicopter’s tail smashed against a rock, sending it into a spin and an emergency landing. The director, who was roped in behind the camera, later recalled that the helicopter came to rest a few feet from the edge of a precipice. “We had to rewrite the ending,” he said, with archetypal English sangfroid.

This may not have been the finale of Dickinson’s long and adventurous life (he was 80 when he died, in 1984) , but it was his last feature film. He went on to a post in charge of film production at the United Nations in the late 1950s and in the 1960s set up Britain’s first university course in cinema. But he is best-known for his nine feature-length films, above all his great collaborations with the actor Anton Walbrook on Gaslight (1940) and The Queen of Spades (1948).

He served a long apprenticeship before he started directing. He left Oxford to assist George Pearson making silent films in Paris in the mid1920s. Then, after a stint in New York researching the new sound technology, he became a virtuoso editor in British silent cinema and the early talkies. He became the vice-president of the Association of Cine-Technicians in 1936 and it was as an ACT delegate that he went to the USSR in 1937 to report on the Soviet film system. The next year he went to Spain to make two short films for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

This was enough to put him under suspicion as “a premature antifascist” by the powers that were, but Dickinson's antitotalitarianism was always strong, and he was eventually given official clearance to become a central figure in the wartime flourishing of British cinema. His films from that era include powerful moments of outrage and shock: the uncut version of The Next of Kin (1942), for instance, had so much impact that the military cinema manager had to indent for a case of brandy for shaken viewers.

Gaslight, too, with its conception of a man cold-heartedly setting out to destroy another human being for money, is intensely disturbing, and its opening scenes, with their detailing of marital cruelty carried to an extraordinary extreme, can still have the power to shock.

Dickinson has sometimes been thought of in terms of his nationality – he has been called “a quintessentially British figure” and “an English moralist” but he filmed far and wide, from Spain to Russia to West and East Africa. Some are concerned with governance and the affairs of state of other states: the documentary short Spanish ABC (1938), for instance, is a sober advocacy of the educational policy of Republican Spain, while Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer dramatises the founding of the state of Israel as a triumph of international cooperation.

When the stories do have an English setting, they show a country looking outward, not turning inward. The wartime biopic The Prime Minister (1941) gives us a Benjamin Disraeli preoccupied, in Churchillian style, with international conflicts involving Europe and Asia. Two other films show London dealing with the incursions of foreign violence, pathological in Gaslight, ideological in Secret People (1952).

For all that he is relatively unsung, Dickinson has an impressive lineup of admirers. Martin Scorsese calls him “a uniquely intelligent and passionate artist” belonging “in the first rank of British film-makers”. John Boorman says that Dickinson “had Michael Powell’s daring, David Lean’s taut editing and Carol Reed’s emotional tension”.

Philip Horne and I are Dickinson fans and our new book Thorold Dickinson: a World of Film is a collection of essays, memoirs and interviews concerning him, as well as a 100-page dossier of his own articulate and interesting writings on cinema. We hope the book and the season of his films at the Barbican next month will go some way towards reviving the reputation of this great but neglected figure.

Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film will be published on Sept 24 by Manchester University Press. The Queen of Spades, Secret People, Gaslight and The Arsenal Stadium Mystery will be screened at the Barbican (020-7638 8891) on Oct 5, 6 2008

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