Despite the fact that he did nothing of real note after 1962, and had
many depressing failures in the following years, Thompson is still rightly
remembered as a teenage prodigy who had a good track record in the British
cinema from 1950 until 1961. It was perhaps his downfall that, fired
by the success of The Guns of Navarone (1961), he moved into the field
of international spectaculars, at which point his direction seemed to
lose its individuality and assume a sluggishness one hadn't noticed
before.
Thompson had two plays published and performed before he was 20, and
contributed a fistful of screenplays to British films, from Glamorous
Night (1937) to For Them That Trespass (1949), before tackling direction
on the film version of one of his own plays, the four-hander Murder
Without Crime (1950). In the next ten years, Thompson surged to the
forefront of pre-kitchen sink realism in the British cinema with a series
of gloomy dramas, often with downbeat endings: The
Yellow Balloon (1953), The
Weak and the Wicked (1953), Yield to the Night (1956), Woman
in a Dressing Gown (1957) and No Trees in the Street (1958). Thompson
got strong, sometimes even tortured performances from the principals
in these sombre films. In lighter vein, he made a happy little comedy
called For Better,
For Worse (1954), unhappily seldom revived today; it had a string
of good individual performances and a warm, real and human feel despite
its slapstick touches
As Long As They're
Happy (1955) and The
Good Companions (1957) were two semi-musicals with Janette Scott,
the teenage star who had shot into the public eye after appearing in
Thompson's screenplay No Place for Jennifer (1950); Companions especially
is full of youthful zest and carries a scintillating dance climax, as
well as one of Eric Portman's best performances and commendable use
of TechniColour: an unexpectedly enjoyable film. Thompson's easy way
with young stars carried over on to his best film, Tiger
Bay (1959), a moving and exciting thriller, with an unforgettable
performance by Hayley Mills on
her debut. The film was splendidly paced as, for the most part, were
Thompson's two big colour action films, Northwest
Frontier (1959) and The
Guns of Navarone (1961), the latter a major blockbuster at the box-office.
Mention should also be made of Cape Fear (1962), a violent, tense and
chilling black thriller with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum which,
for sheer intensity, outdoes the Martin Scorsese remake of 1991.
And so to the veil that must be drawn over most of what followed. Well,
perhaps not quite: a TV movie0, A Great American Tragedy (1972), was
a return to the more intimate dramas with which Thompson made his name.
It featured powerful performances by George Kennedy and Vera Miles as
the couple whose cosy and comfortable life falls apart when he unexpectedly
loses his job, and a perceptive, adult and believable script adroitly
handled by the director. There was a brief revival in the 1980s, with
a feisty, underrated variant on King Solomon's Mines (1985) and a sober,
well-acted political/action drama The Ambassador (1984). Thereafter,
the director's career subsided in a morass of slickly made but very
middling vehicles for action stars Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris.
