Ah, joyful tidings.

The lost masterpiece of post-war British cinema, 1949’s The Queen of Spades, has been rediscovered and restored and is being re-released on Boxing Day, just a few days before the end of its 60th anniversary year.

Adapted from a story by Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades is a lavish period piece with supernatural overtones that’s set in the St Petersburg of imperial Russia in 1806. It stars Anton Walbrook, the Austrian actor and favourite player of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, (recently seen in the reissue of P&P’s The Red Shoes). He appears alongside two great British stage actresses, Dame Edith Evans and Yvonne Mitchell, both making their film debuts.

As directed from a script co-written by Arthur Boys and Rodney Ackland by the brilliant filmmaker Thorold Dickinson, it’s a gloriously baroque affair that boasts extravagant sets and costumes, atmospheric lighting and camerawork and a richly evocative soundtrack.

The re-release of Queen of Spades in cinemas and its subsequent DVD debut in January are accompanied by an introduction by filmmaker and fan Martin Scorsese. “Thorold Dickinson,” he says, “was one of the most adventurous figures in early British cinema and his films deserved to be better known today. This stunning film is one of the few true classics of supernatural cinema.”

The Queen of Spades tells the chilling tale of a soldier named Captain Herman Suvorin (Walbrook), a lowly engineer from a working class background who’s kept at arm’s length by his fellow officers, all hailing from moneyed families. During the freezing winter of 1806, St Petersburg sweats in the grip of gambling fever and Suvorin is obsessed with making his fortune playing the card game of the moment, the high-stakes, high-risk Faro. Learning through soldier’s gossip of the legend of an elderly countess (Evans) who supposedly sold her soul to the devil in return for the secret of success at playing Faro, Suvorin devises a wicked plan to extract the secret of the cards from the old noblewoman that involves seducing her lonely young ward (Mitchell).

Snow-smothered St Petersburg was recreated at great expense on the sound stage of Welwyn Studio in Hertfordshire by art director William Kellner, a perfectionist who honed his craft in the theatre. Shortly after the gorgeous but perhaps unnecessarily ornate sets were constructed, ill health forced the original director of the film to drop out.

In order to avoid closing the production permanently, producer Anatole de Grunwald (himself a White Russian) had to find a replacement. That was Dickinson, who was offered the job on Tuesday, read the Pushkin story and the screenplay by Friday, met the cast and crew over the weekend and began filming on Monday, re-writing what he considered a solid but not quite good enough script on a daily basis.

That messy, stop-start production schedule raised the budget of what was at the time an expensive film. Dickinson got the film in the can with no further delay or expenditure.

Ahead of its release in the UK, The Queen of Spades secured a BAFTA nomination for Best Film. Its gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival, however, was met with a mixed reaction by an audience newly turned on to the latest filmmaking movements in mainland Europe, Italian neo-realism and the emerging French New Wave. Back in Blighty, film-goers who were attuned to the dominant mode of realism in post-war cinema also had a mixed reaction to the excesses of the film. All of that goes some way to explaining how it is that The Queen of Spades became a lost masterpiece.

Thorold Dickinson was a phenomenally talented filmmaker, and he enjoyed a career that took him all over the world. Nevertheless, he was rather luckless in the later stage of his professional life. He learned his trade in France and England, working throughout the 1920s and 1930s as variously production assistant and then manager, editor, writer, second unit director and finally as a fully-fledged director.

His first film of note was 1940’s The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, a football-theme thriller that still stands up to scrutiny today. That same year he directed an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight with Walbrook in the leading role. It’s a very fine adaptation and a stylish melodrama and it was to be Dickinson’s calling card to Hollywood.

Unfortunately, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer had in 1944 produced its own version of the play, directed by George Cukor and starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, and so the ruthless studio bosses attempted to have all prints of Dickinson’s film destroyed. They

failed (because the director had struck his own print), but their efforts suppressed Dickinson’s version of Gaslight in the US, which put pay to his Hollywood ambitions.

He continued to work in the UK, but the film he made after The Queen of Spades, 1952’s Secret People (also released on DVD in January), failed to make money on either side of the Atlantic and its financial failure pretty much ended Dickinson’s career.

“Dickinson only made nine films in his 19-year career as a director of feature films,” notes historian Philip Horne. “He didn’t have the best of luck on the whole – there were often three-year gaps between films. He had had a troubled few years before making The Queen of Spades [the nadir of which was being bitten by a rabid dog while in India researching a film that never came to be], which offered him the first opportunity to make a proper film for some considerable time.”

The Queen of Spades is in cinemas from Boxing Day and released on DVD on January 18.