KORDA: BRITAIN’S MOVIE MOGUL

by Charles Drazin (IB Taurus, £15.99)

Charles Drazin is among the better scholars of 1940s British cinema and this biography makes a good companion to The Finest Years and In Search of the Third Man. It starts shakily, with the author inserting himself into the story while tracing Sándor Kellner's roots in the remote Hungarian town of Pusztaturpaszto. But once the focus falls on the screen career of Alexander Korda, this becomes a fascinating profile of a showman who was more than capable of charlatanry once he realised that greater profits lay in being an opportunist rather than a poet.

One of the many myths about Korda is that he dragged British cinema into the sound era and gave it international respectability when Charles Laughton won the Oscar for Best Actor in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933).

Drazin never entirely dispels this, although he does pick his way admirably through the fallacies contained in earlier memoirs by ex-wife Maria Corda, nephew Michael Korda and first biographer Paul Tabori. Moreover, he shows that while it made astute use of homegrown stars, Korda’s empire relied heavily on continental talent and this made London Films feel like a UK version of Hollywood’s Paramount.

But Drazin proves most perceptive when exposing Korda’s dubious business practices and his lifelong pursuit of power. For a man who presided over so many box-office failures, Korda was fortunate in being a better judge of character than of screenplays. Indeed, he survived for more than 40 years by working with people he could coax into lending money. Even Hollywood moguls like Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick found him a tough nut to crack. Yet beautiful women could bewitch and manipulate him and Korda’s private life was strewn with ill-advised liaisons. More attention might have been paid here to the content and quality of the pictures that Korda produced. But this is a compelling account of an affable egotist, patriotic émigré and irrepressible dreamer, who never quite discovered the secret of British, let alone transatlantic taste.