Sensitive British director at his best with documentaries. Unfortunately,
he never seemed to get the chance to bring this distinctive touch to
his post-war work. As an editor and co-director with the trail-blazing
GPO Film Unit in the mid-1930s, Jackson had the opportunity to work
with John Grierson, Basil
Wright, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry
Watt and others. But his reputation was really made with the wartime
semi-documentary Western
Approaches (1944), which mixed genuine footage with clever mock-up
work in Pinewood Studios, photographed in luxurious TechniColour by
Jack Cardiff, to catch all the intensity
of war at its height for the merchant seaman. Alas, Jackson remained
promising for far too long.
There was an abortive period under contract to Alexander
Korda, and an almost equally abortive visit to MGM in Hollywood,
where he made just one film in two years, the moody melodrama Shadow
on the Wall (1950), which cast Ann Sothern against type as a vindictive
murderess, but was nothing special. From 1951, Jackson flittered about
the fringes of the British film industry, hopping from producer to producer,
studio to studio to independent. He kept fairly busy directing for television,
but there were sometimes considerable gaps between his films. From 1958,
Jackson hit his best patch. Virgin Island (1958) was a real life story
of considerable charm about a young couple starting out in life on an
uninhabited West Indian island. It was followed by a telling little
second-feature, Snowball (1960), with Gordon
Jackson; Seven Keys (1961), another good second-feature with Jeannie
Carson and Alan Dobie; What
a Carve-Up! (1962), a very lively comedy-thriller send-up of The
Old Dark House type of film, and the creepy, compelling Don't Talk to
Strange Men (1962). But they were small peaks, and did not lead to greater
things. Jackson returned to television.
