Unless you happened to see the play - by Robert Ardrey - on which the Boulting Brothers based their film then the only selling point is Michael Redgrave. By 1942 he was a seasoned film actor having served a distinguished apprenticeship in the theatre and although it did no harm to feature the likes of James Mason, Finlay Currie, Barbara Mullen and Lily Palmer in support by this stage of his film career Redgrave was fully capable of carrying a picture by himself. It is, of course, also necessary to remember that the film was shot in 1942 and released the following year, in other words right in the heart of World War II so it would be foolish if not futile not to expect a large propaganda element which now seems irrelevant. Bearing that in mind and making allowances this remains a half decent effort with Redgrave delivering the goods.

A Boulting brothers film is always a stunning treat if you are interested in humanity. They always choose very special topics that touch the very core of humanity and bring out all kinds of fascinating insights focusing on the treasures of human experience. This film was made during the darkest hours of the war in 1942, when Singapore was lost and the darkness of dictatorship and its violence reached its farthest limits and leading intellectuals and writers of the world committed suicide, like Stefan Zweig, and somehow the writer of this story (Bernard Miles, a great actor himself,) gets to the very heart of darkness of humanity and history. It is therefore one of those very rare and extremely metaphysical films.Michael Redgrave has given up on the world and is looking forward to the end of humanity and civilization, he doesn't care any more about anything as he wasted his best years on a lonesome crusade against fascism in Europe with no response at all, since people allowed the war to come anyway, so he absconds into a remote lighthouse beyond everything, where he doesn't even read books. But he finds the log book of of a ship of immigrants that went down by this lighthouse in 1849 with 60 lives lost. He buries himself in this manifestation of a cruel and unjust fate killing 60 innocent people, and in trying to understand this destiny he brings them back alive. Are they ghosts or are they real? They are real enough to him, and he is not alone in having made the experience that ghosts can be more alive than live people.The film exploits this strange field of occult metaphysics and succeeds in realizing all their different fates, that is six of them, including the captain (Finlay Currie), a Viennese doctor and his wife and daughter (Lilli Palmer), a suffragette 70 years ahead of her time and another family with a Dickensian background of hardship. As their stories develop and get more real the deeper you get into them, the web of humanity grows constantly more touching and convincing in its realism and gripping honesty, ultimately leading to the conclusion that there is always something left to do, you can't get rid of your human and universal responsibility whatever your disillusionment with the world might be, and, of course, the whole thing leads to a release of serenity.Someone said it was one of the most impressive movies in her experience, and I tend to agree. Even the music is perfect, somewhat reminiscent of a violin romance by Sibelius. This is a film for all times with a universal message that never can lose its actuality.

Holy sh*t, was this a peculiar movie! Slow moving but oddly compelling look at a writer's psyche. A war correspondent desperately wants to awaken Britain's awareness of fascism and the inevitable war and dismally fails -- and this is all shown in flashback. The correspondent is shown as an isolated fellow in a lighthouse on the Great Lakes, post-war, who becomes obsessed with the story of drowned immigrants who never reach the lighthouse a hundred years before (get the connection?), dying at sea. And the story then becomes what he imagines their lives to have been, growing in complexity and realism as he comes to terms with his own defeats. I've never seen the writing process so accurately shown in a film as he talks to the characters in his mind and continues to revise their lives before our eyes. An ambitious film that doesn't entirely work, but that I found fascinating and moving. Michael Redgrave is terrific, too, and James Mason, who appears too briefly, has a really cute wave in his hair (ha).

I had always wanted to watch this in view of its fantasy elements; I knew of the bare-bones R2 DVD but, considering the variable quality of prints available for old (and rare) British films, I was on the fence about purchasing it - the favorable DVD Beaver review, then, proved the deciding factor.Given the little information there is about the film, I didn't quite know what to expect: as it turned out, the propagandist elements are as much to the fore but it's really the various human dramas contained within that are its most compelling aspect. Michael Redgrave (in one of his best roles) is the lone lighthouse keeper who was once a spokesman against the onslaught of Fascism (shown in a sequence of montages that clearly bear the influence of CITIZEN KANE [1941]), who has retired from the world when his warnings were dismissed. He's able to withstand his remote existence by imagining how the passengers of a ship who drowned 90 years earlier near the titular location lived!; these events are then enacted for us and, with the help of ship's captain Finlay Currie 'acting' as mediator, he's able to communicate with them!! This concept was not only very original but also rather cerebral (especially for the time) and is certainly its most intriguing trait; interestingly, all the passengers, like Redgrave himself, seem to be escaping from the intolerance of their own era! The life-stories of the individual passengers (though, for obvious reasons of time constraint, the writers opted to focus on only three) are all somewhat melodramatic but the one involving progressive doctor Frederick Valk and Lili Palmer (who even has feelings for Redgrave, i.e. he imagines she has!) is the most engaging.The plot and setting allowed the director and cameraman (Max Greene, who later shot Jules Dassin's British-made noir NIGHT AND THE CITY [1950]) to experiment with light and shadow which, along with the literary dialogue (it was adapted from a play by Robert Ardrey that was intended to urge America into World War II, which had already happened by the time the film came out!) and the marvelous ensemble acting, emerges as one of the film's most impressive qualities. As a matter of fact, the cast was made up of established, upcoming and (to me) unfamiliar names but, apart from the ones already mentioned, James Mason's all-too brief appearance as Redgrave's sparring pal - who has no qualms about doing his thing for the war effort - is especially notable.The climax, too, is terrific: first, we have the 'ghosts' realizing what has really happened to them (shades of "Outward Bound" but also looking forward to THE SIXTH SENSE [1999]) and, then, their refusal to 'leave' unless Redgrave goes back to civilization and do his duty (his being dominated by entities he's supposed to be controlling himself, interestingly enough, foreshadows his unforgettable turn as the Ventriloquist in the celebrated horror compendium DEAD OF NIGHT [1945] - which, incidentally, also featured Valk as a doomed doctor!).The Boulting Brothers - John produced the film while his twin brother Roy directed it, but they often exchanged roles! - always liked to tackle topical subjects and, though they later concentrated on satires, their sober earlier efforts were no less effective as clearly demonstrated by this neglected gem but also the noir about the British underworld BRIGHTON ROCK (1947) and the semi-documentary anti-Nuclear tale SEVEN DAYS TO NOON (1950).