Kings And Country Essay, Research Paper

Kings and countryKorda: Britain & # 8217 ; s Merely Movie MogulCharles DrazinSidgwick & A ; Jackson? 20, pp411Just over 70 old ages ago, the critic CA Lejeune, composing in this newspaper, said that Alexander Korda & # 8217 ; s new movie, The Private Life of Henry VIII, was & # 8216 ; more likely to convey prestigiousness to the British movie industry, both at place and abroad, than anything we have done in the whole history of filmmaking & # 8217 ; .That flourish of loyal exaggeration from Lejeune says every bit much about Korda & # 8217 ; s ability to project himself as it does about the movie or even Charles Laughton & # 8217 ; s expansive public presentation in it. The dramatis personae may hold been British, it may hold been made by London Films, a company that stamped its productions with a shooting of Big Ben, but, as Charles Drazin & # 8217 ; s assiduously researched life of Korda proves, the esthesia that delivered it was something wholly other. All the cardinal figures behind the camera were Gallic, American or, as with Korda, Hungarian.That is non to oppugn Korda & # 8217 ; s devotedness to, or belief in, his adoptive state. He surely felt more at easiness working in Britain than anyplace else, and he & # 8217 ; vitamin D had a spell at doing movies in most states where there was an industry. But it was his really distinctness that made him such a success. In the coffee-houses of Mittel Europe, the male child from the Magyar states found his aspirations to set magnificence and spectacle on the screen stifled by the intense life of the head ; in the Hollywood of the 1920s, he found the demands of commercialism numbing.Britain offered a halfway house, both literally and figuratively. It was a topographic point where a adult male with a gustatory sensation for concern and art could contrive both himself and a organic structure of work. Not that Korda ever found a balance between the two. He was merely as capable of doing shlock with no delivering characteristics as he was of excessively indulging the & # 8216 ; creatives & # 8217 ; .A urgently un-Hollywood strong belief that the success of a film ballad with the originative vision of the author led him in the thirtiess, for illustration, to give HG Wells about entire control over the sci-fi heroic poem The Shape of Things to Come ; the consequence was a boringly intellectual image that made for good rational statement, bad amusement and even worse box-office. It earned back hardly half its immense budget.Pe

rhaps the problem was simply that, in attempting to film a vision of the future, Korda had moved off safe territory, for it is striking how many of his great successes were historical epics. The man who was from everywhere and nowhere and who therefore was unburdened by attachments to particular myths and traditions had a peculiarly light touch when it came to putting the past on the screen: The Scarlet Pimpernel and That Hamilton Woman, An Ideal Husband and Richard III were matched by films like The Private Lives of Helen of Troy, Don Juan and Henry VIII. (In 1935, keen to exploit the marketability of the ‘Private Lives of…’ series, he even agreed to fund a documentary about the breeding habits of seabirds as long as it was called The Private Life of the Gannet.)Reading Drazin’s account, however, what becomes most obvious is Korda’s talent for the deal. Like all of his breed, he was a great filmmaker not simply because he knew how to put things on screen but because he kept managing to convince people to give him money to do so, even when he had just failed. The success of a movie man, he once said, lay in the ability to stare bankruptcy in the face and he did it more than most.Once Drazin gets over his bizarre need to place himself in the story early on – an account of his own visits to Hungary and to modern-day Los Angeles are irritating distractions – he tells this story well. His sources are clearly very good and he is not embarrassed to admit where a previous biography of Korda – and there have been a few – has already nailed the truth. Equally, he has enough weapons in his armoury to destroy a few myths. The result is an intriguing narrative.Indeed, it is pleasing to imagine that Korda, who was famed for splashing out cash on book rights, might even have seen some cinematic promise in the tale. The problem is that Korda liked his movies to have a clean narrative structure, of rise and fall, or progress and retreat. But the boy who was born Sandor Laszlo Kellner in Pusztaturpaszto, Hungary and who was buried as Sir Alexander Korda in Stoke Poges Garden of Remembrance in Buckinghamshire, managed to be all of these at the same time. Up on the big screen, that would never have worked.· Jay Rayner’s Star Dust Falling, is published by Doubleday