A Modern Dubarry

The first motion picture producer ever to receive a knighthood from the British Crown, Alexander Korda was a guiding force behind the British film industry throughout the 1930s as a studio chief, producer, and sometime director, and continued as a major film producer until his death in early 1956. Indeed, he was the single most important movie producer ever to work in England following the advent of sound, and the closest that the British film industry ever got to having a Hollywood-style mogul in its midst. Ironically, although he became synonymous to the world with British films, Korda was Hungarian-born, and had made movies in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood without finding any sustained success before setting up shop in London in 1932. He was a crafty businessman as well as a flamboyant personality; he favored bold, ambitious, opulent productions that challenged not only the financial resources of his studio at any given moment, but also the technical and creative abilities of the people working for him — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger modeled Boris Lermontov, the egotistical ballet impresario of The Red Shoes, partly on Alexander Korda. And toward that end, by 1933 Korda had founded a major studio in London Films, and managed to pull off a seemingly impossible feat by directing and producing The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). The film succeeded as no British picture since the advent of the talkies had, becoming a major hit in America, as well as earning an Oscar nomination as Best Picture and turning its lead, Charles Laughton (who won the Best Actor Oscar), into an international star.

Alexander Korda was born Sándor Laszlo Kellner in Pusztatúrpásztó, Austria-Hungary (now Túrkeve, Hungary), in 1893, the oldest of three sons of a Jewish Hungarian family. The death of Korda’s father left the family impoverished when Alex was scarcely into his teens. While his mother and his two younger brothers — Zoltan (born 1895) and Vincent (born 1897) — went to live with their paternal grandfather, a cruel and ignorant man, Alex was sent to Budapest to study, and by age 15 he was making the beginnings of a living as a journalist, surviving by his wits as he helped to support his mother and brothers. Alex soon established himself as a writer using the last name Korda, which later became the official family name. He also became interested in movies, and then in filmmaking, in his mid-teens, and began writing for film journals and studying moviemaking technique.

By age 20, Korda was writing screenplays, and in his early twenties he started directing movies in Budapest. Because of damage to his sight in one eye, caused by an improperly treated infection during childhood, Korda was exempt from military service in the First World War, which left him free to pursue his interests and career as he wished. By the end of the teens, he had established himself as a serious young filmmaker in Budapest, and there seemed to be a bright future ahead of him when the Hungarian government collapsed, amid the turmoil surrounding the end of the First World War. A coalition government was established, and Korda was chosen as one of the leaders of the new democratic government’s cultural arm. This flash of official recognition later had near-disastrous consequences as he got caught up in the struggle between the Communist and anti-Communist forces vying for power in post-WWI Hungary, and was jailed by the anti-Communist regime that eventually assumed power. It was only through the efforts of Korda’s wife, a popular young actress working under the name María Corda, that he was freed and allowed to leave the country.

Korda’s next stop was Vienna — he arrived a Hungarian expatriate without a penny to his name but with a contract to direct movies at Sascha Film, the studio established by the Austrian film mogul Count Sascha Kolowrat. This new beginning also put Korda into collaboration for the first time with Lajos Biró, the Hungarian playwright and author who had also been left high and dry by the counter-revolution. Biró was, like Korda, a writer with a deep interest in film, but he was also older by several years and had seen more than a decade’s worth of success in various writing venues. Their first film together was an adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, in 1921. Korda’s relationship with Kolowrat soon soured, however, and by 1923 Korda was without a contract again. He then established his first independent production company in Vienna, in preparation for shooting a movie called Samson and Delilah. A silent epic — and one that was far more daring and inventive than its plot would lead one to expect — worthy of D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille, and starring María, it cost a fortune to make, and it was a complete and utter failure. Korda was forced to leave Vienna in a state of near-bankruptcy and, with María, went to Berlin, where he spent the next few years marking time, contributing to lackluster movies.

In 1927, he and María went to Hollywood. They arrived just in time for the last major wave of silent productions, and it was there that he found belated success with a film entitled The Private Life of Helen of Troy. An account of Helen as a historical figure, it took a lively and slightly irreverent, even racy, tone in telling of her exploits and the court intrigue surrounding her, and it was a major critical and commercial success. But its arrival coincided with the changeover from the silent to the sound era in Hollywood, in the course of which Korda found it difficult to repeat his success, and María — with her Hungarian accent — saw her career onscreen come to a halt. Their marriage ended soon after, as did his stay in Hollywood.

Korda next headed to Paris, where he was able to mount a new production that started him on the path to success once again. He directed Marius (1931), based on the work of author Marcel Pagnol, which became a major hit for Paramount’s French division, and this, in turn, paved the way for Korda to head to London, first for Paramount’s British division, and then to establish his own studio. It was christened London Films, although, along with Korda, the chief creative hand was another Hungarian, his now good friend Biró, who became head of the story department and even sat on the company’s board of directors in the early days. And after a couple of dry runs with low-budget productions — some of them, such as Counsel’s Opinion and Cash (both 1933) notable in their own right — the company burst on the scene in early 1933 with The Private Life of Henry VIII. That picture not only earned American-level grosses in England, but did it in America as well, and rescued the British film industry from the financial and creative doldrums into which it had sunk after the coming of sound.

From that first great flash of success, London Films went on to occupy a unique niche in the firmament of the British cinematic world. Indeed, the studio was a study in brilliance and contradictions. For starters, there was its name — it may have been “London” Films, but it was built on Alex Korda’s production genius, and also the work of his brothers, Zoltan Korda (who became a great director in his own right) and Vincent Korda (a world-renowned art director), along with Biró and their assembled staffs of writers, artists, costumers, etc., almost all of them expatriate Hungarians. Despite the national origins of its founder and most of its employees, however, the studio seemed bent on “selling” the British Empire all over the world, a fact not lost on the British bankers who financed the film industry or government officials whose financial and regulatory policies had profound impact on the motion-picture business.

And that was just what the public saw. As we now know, there was a whole hidden side to Korda’s activities in the 1930s and ‘40s where business was concerned, which transcended business but had a profound effect on his studio. Alex Korda was, at heart, an adventurer; he was in practice a storyteller, which is how he came to be a filmmaker, but going back to childhood, his heart lay with great adventure stories, by authors such as Mark Twain and Jules Verne, amongst others. Korda’s poor vision prevented him from living the life of a man of action in any respect except as a storyteller — but in England in the 1930s he found a way of taking a hand in the great struggles around him. Documents declassified in the 1990s revealed that starting in the early to mid-‘30s, Korda had cultivated a friendship with one Robert Vansitart, a career member of the British government’s foreign office, who — as we now know — had organized his own secret intelligence unit outside of the official government intelligence service (which had been penetrated by Germany after Hitler’s rise to power). Vansitart, who later did some writing for Korda’s studio (most notably the lyrics to some of the songs in The Thief of Bagdad 1940), used Korda as an agent from 1933 onward. He still had many social and business contacts in Hungary and, even more importantly, Austria and Germany, and he used his periodic trips to Europe for purposes of intelligence gathering, as much as dealmaking. In return, Vansitart was able to use his secret network of agents to secure the loans — most notably from Prudential — that provided the seed money for London Films and, later, a vital refinancing in 1936, when the movie business suffered a critical downturn. Korda’s work as a secret agent of sorts had long been rumored, especially after he received his knighthood in the early ’40s, but it was only in the 1990s that the extent of his activities on behalf of the British government began to become clear. In particular, when the Second World War started in 1939, and for that critical 27-month period when England was in the war and the United States was neutral, his frequent trips across the Atlantic played a vital role in covering the activities of the British secret service in their counterespionage work against the Germans.

Korda saw success with a handful of subsequent movies, including The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), The Ghost Goes West (1935), and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), but in point of fact, most of the movies produced by Korda after The Private Life of Henry VIII failed financially, or did little better than break even, at least on their initial releases. Some of these were critical successes at the time, and others were glorious failures — brilliantly, boldly executed movies that simply had no audience in their own time — and all of those have gone on to “classic” status today. Rembrandt (1936), starring Laughton, is still considered by many to be the best drama ever made on the life of a painter (not a surprise, since Korda himself was a devoted art lover, and loved painting more than he loved movies); Things to Come (1936) is a multi-generational science fiction epic that expanded the boundaries of cinematic storytelling and also of special-effects sequences to a range that neither had exhibited since the heyday of the silents; and Knight Without Armor (1937), with Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich, is one of the finest action-adventure movies of the period. Fire Over England (1937) is an account of Elizabeth I and England’s successful defense against the Spanish Armada, which was not only a fine historical drama but also the storyboard for Warner Bros.’ subsequent production of The Sea Hawk; Clouds over Europe (1939), starring Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson with Valerie Hobson, is an espionage comedy that anticipated the 1960s series The Avengers (as well as the plot of one James Bond movie) in spirit and content; and The Four Feathers (1939) is the finest action-adventure film of the 1930s, and one of the greatest films ever shot in Technicolor. The Spy in Black (1939), starring Valerie Hobson and Conrad Veidt, is one of the most adult and romantic espionage thrillers ever made (and the movie that introduced the future filmmaking partners of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to each other); and The Thief of Bagdad (1940), starring Sabu and Conrad Veidt, remains one of the finest fantasy films ever made.

By the end of 1939, Korda was in the midst of the extended production of The Thief of Bagdad, but had literally run out of money and credit in England. The outbreak of the Second World War in September of that year was the tipping point, forcing Korda to move his operations to America in the spring of the following year. He was able to finish the film in Hollywood, in the process bringing over his two brothers as well as composer Miklos Rozsa, all of the film’s stars, and a brace of other production notables who would make their careers in America, some for the duration of the war and some permanently. The Thief of Bagdad was successful enough to wipe out most of his debts and allow the producer to set up Alexander Korda Productions — using the same Big Ben logo that had opened all of the London Films releases — in Hollywood.

The most important production to come out of Korda’s Hollywood period was That Hamilton Woman (1941, aka Lady Hamilton), an account of the illicit romance between British naval hero Lord Nelson (Laurence Olivier) and Lady Emma Hamilton (Vivien Leigh) at the turn of the 18th century into the 19th century. It was the only movie that Olivier and Leigh did as husband and wife, and proved so compelling as veiled anti-German propaganda that it led to Korda being investigated by the isolationist-minded United States Congress. He made several enjoyable though less distinguished movies as well, including Lydia (1941), a handsome dramatic vehicle for leading lady Merle Oberon (who was also Korda’s wife by then), and The Jungle Book (1942), with Sabu. Korda also played a key role in the production of Ernst Lubitsch’s topical comedy To Be or Not to Be (1942). Additionally, it was during this period that Korda received his knighthood, an honor accorded him by the crown at the behest of the government of Winston Churchill.

Korda resumed production in England after World War II, reactivating London Films in the process. His initial postwar activities, however, were conducted somewhat in the shadow of J. Arthur Rank, a rival British film mogul whose vast network of theaters, coupled with his acquisition of various studios and their facilities, had turned him into the reigning giant of the British movie industry in Korda’s absence. But the departure from Rank’s company of such talented filmmakers as Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, David Lean, and Carol Reed in the second half of the 1940s gave London Films new opportunities. Among its successes were The Small Back Room (1949), The Fallen Idol (1948), The Third Man (1949), The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), The Sound Barrier (1952), Summertime (1955), and Richard III (1955).

The financial underpinnings of Korda’s studio were as shaky as ever, and with his death in early 1956, London Films was closed down. Ironically, it was just as the studio ceased to exist that its worldwide profile rose to a level it hadn’t enjoyed since the 1930s, thanks to the fact that Korda had sold his library to television in the mid-‘50s, long before any American studios had made their films available for broadcast. His movies were among the best that could be seen on television for most of the second half of the 1950s and right into the ’60s, by which time the company and its Big Ben logo were associated once again in the minds of film fans with movies of the highest quality. That logo remains among the most familiar in motion pictures; and among Korda’s productions, The Thief of Bagdad has proved the most enduring across the decades. Even in the 21st century, with the movie long since available on VHS tape and DVD, it still fills theaters in periodic theatrical revivals. Known for moviemaking on a grand scale, Korda was probably the most articulate producer/showman in the history of motion pictures. —allmovie guide