Hill 24 Doesn

Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955)

Some Notes on the Crew

Thorold Dickinson (Director/Producer) was born in Bristol, England, in 1903 and studied at Oxford. Working as a writer and editor throughout the 1930s, he directed his first feature, The High Command in 1936. He soon established himself as one of England’s premiere filmmakers. During World War II, he set up the Army Kinematograph Service and later served as Chief of Film Services at UNESCO. Following the war, Dickinson continued directing, with his final British film being Secret People (1952), starring Audrey Hepburn. The next year, he came to Israel to begin pre-production on Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, which was to be his final production. Though he only directed nine features and a handful of shorts, he is highly regarded as one of the most inventive of British directors. A few years after completion of Hill 24, he established a film studies department at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he would become professor of film. He died in Oxford in 1964.

Zvi Kolitz (Story, Screenplay, Executive Producer) was born in Alyta, Lithuania, in 1913. He studied at the Slobodka Yeshiva and then moved to Italy where he attended the University of Florence and the Naval Academy. Immigrating to Palestine before the 1948 Israeli war of independence, he became involved in the Zionist Revisionist movement and was jailed by the British for his activities. On a 1946 trip to Buenos Aires, he penned the well-known short story, “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” which, set in the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto, has a pious Jew challenge God. Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer was a story created by Mr. Kolitz, which he adapted for the screen with Peter Frye. He wrote numerous works of fiction and Jewish philosophy and co-produced several plays including “The Deputy” (1964) and “The Megilla of Itzik Manger” (1968). Until a few weeks before his death, he wrote a weekly column in the Yiddish newspaper Algemeiner Journal. He died in New York in 2002.

Peter Frye (Screenplay/Producer) was born in Canada in 1913 and studied theater in New York. He worked extensively in film and theater as a writer, producer, director and actor. After co-producing and co-writing Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, he adapted and directed I Like Mike (1961); directed The Hero’s Wife (1963), which he also co-produced. In Israel, he acted in such films as The Dybbuk (1968) and The Sell-Out (1976). After moving to London, he continued acting, appearing in several movies, including Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and King David (1985). He died in London in 1991.

Paul Ben-Haim (Music) was born Paul Frankenburger in Munich in 1897, where he studied composition, conducting and piano at the Munich Academy of Arts. He became assistant conductor at the Bavarian State Opera in 1920 and conductor of the Augsburg Opera from 1924 to 1931, a position from which he was abruptly terminated because of anti-Semitism. In 1933, he left Germany and upon his arrival in Palestine changed his name. In 1939, he wrote Variations on a Palestinian Tune for chamber trio. In 1953, the Koussevitzky Foundation commissioned him to write The Sweet Psalmist of Israel, which fused Western and Eastern styles of music and was later conducted and recorded by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Two years after the release of Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, Ben-Haim was awarded the Israel Prize for Music. Ben-Haim was a prolific composer, with over 250 works. He died in Tel Aviv 1984.