Alexander Korda built a film empire from scratch - three times.
From his arrival in Britain in 1931 he set about building a British film
industry which had barely existed before. Alongside Michael Balcon and J. Arthur
Rank, he became one of the giants of British cinema from the 1930s until his
death in 1956.
Korda was a larger than life figure, an intelligent and well-educated man of
immense personal charm who loved the cinema. Unlike Balcon and Rank, he was a
director himself, and had strong views on how films should be made. His habit of
interfering often infuriated the directors he employed, but ensured that the
films which emerged from his London Films studios conformed to the Korda vision.
As a result the films tended to share both Korda's strengths - high production
standards, a lush visual style - and his faults - a focus on lavish set and
costume design, often at the expense of the details of character and plot, and a
rather superficial approach to storytelling.
A successful director and producer in his native
Hungary, Korda had already had one false start in Austria and had tried and
failed to make his name in Hollywood before arriving in Britain. He gambled his
credibility, and a great deal of money, on his own directorial project, The
Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). The gamble paid off, with the film
becoming Britain's greatest international hit to date. Its success confirmed
Korda's belief that the key to success was investing in comparatively few films
while keeping production standards high and guaranteeing glamour and
spectacle.
During the 1930s, London Films, with its Big Ben
logo, became associated with glossy but intelligent films, like the enjoyable
comedy The Ghost Goes West (d. René Clair, 1935), the H.G. Wells scripted
Things to Come (d. William Cameron Menzies, 1936), a spectacular
science-fiction story with a strong anti-war message, or the Russian Revolution
love story Knight Without Armour (d. Jacques Feyder, 1937), for which
Korda managed to lure Hollywood megastar Marlene Dietrich for her only British
role. His eye for talent led to him spotting the young Michael Powell and
bringing him to London Films, where he united him with Hungarian screenwriter
Emeric Pressburger for Spy in Black (1939), creating perhaps British
cinema's most illustrious partnership. He continued to direct himself, most
impressively in the biopic Rembrandt (1936), in which he elicited a
superb performance from Charles Laughton as the troubled, misunderstood Dutch
painter.
Korda had an outsider's passion for Britishness,
adopting the role of the classic English gentleman with his Saville Row suits
and cigars, and his studio's films reflected a celebratory view of the British.
In films like Sanders of the River (1935), and The Four Feathers
(1939) - both directed by his brother, Zoltan - he was an enthusiastic supporter
of British Empire, and the jingoism, even racism, of Sanders, in
particular, is hard to stomach today. But it was this same feel for his new home
that led him to dedicate his vast Denham studios to the war effort. The uneven
The Lion Has Wings (d. Michael Powell/Brian Desmond Hurst/Adrian Brunel,
1939) was the first propaganda release of the war, and more impressive efforts
followed, including Korda's own That Hamilton Woman (1941), which almost
got the Hungarian thrown out of America for undermining the country's neutrality
- before the attack on Pearl Harbour intervened.
From the late '40s, London Films benefited from
growing disillusion at arch-rival Rank, as figures like Powell and Pressburger,
David Lean and Carol Reed found Korda's fiery temperament preferable to Rank's
much-disliked lieutenant John Davis. London's late high point came with Reed's
classic The Third Man (1949), which Korda co-produced with the equally
gigantic David O. Selznick.
London Films was already in decline before
Korda's death in 1956, after his ill-fated involvement in British Lion, but the
studio is best remembered for a series of films which successfully combined
entertainment with high production values. At a time when all of Europe was
struggling to compete with Hollywood, Korda made sure that British cinema was
synonymous with sophistication, wit and the highest technical
standards.
Mark Duguid
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