The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World by Kati Marton

Author:Kati Marton [Marton, Kati]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Biography, War, World War II, Holocaust, Hungary
ISBN: 9781416542452
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

ON SUNDAY MORNING, September 3, 1939, the shrill wail of the war’s first air raid warning pierced through London’s early morning sky, bringing the nightmare home to Alexander Korda. “We had all gathered in one of the big concrete coal bunkers [at Denham Studios],” director Michael Powell remembered, “to listen to [Neville Chamberlain’s] broadcast [admitting the failure of his policy of appeasement and announcing a state of war between Great Britain and Germany]…. Alex and his brothers were there, and Merle, who was holding Alex’s hand and crying. Alex was smoking one of his Coronas, as usual, and he took a deep breath and sent a perfect smoke ring into the air.” For Korda, like Curtiz, the war against the Nazis was personal—and it presented an opportunity.

Winston Churchill returned to office, as first lord of the admiralty in 1939, before becoming prime minister in May 1940. He was the man of the hour, and Korda called on him. The two shared a deep love of history, especially British history, a flair for showmanship, and a taste for cigars and brandy. Now they had a common enemy. The Hungarian offered Churchill all the resources at his command in waging a propaganda war against Hitler. Afterward, “Alex summoned a meeting of all his principal contract people,” Michael Powell recalled. “He explained his personal agreement with Churchill and how it affected us all. Britain was preparing for war. Denham was already a classified area. Now came our orders. When war was declared, filming on The Thief of Baghdad would stop. The next day everybody at Denham would start working on a feature propaganda film which Alex had promised Churchill would be ready in one month…. All he asked of us was that we would go with heart, mind and soul into making his new picture, and work with whomever we were assigned to.”

The Lion Has Wings was Korda’s first engagement in his personal war against the Nazis. His wartime sacrifice entailed returning to “bloody California.” Ten years after his spectacular Hollywood flameout, Korda was back as Winston Churchill’s personal emissary in the campaign to bring America into the war.

It was Churchill who suggested the story of Lord Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar as a subject for a Korda film. But it was Korda who persuaded Laurence Olivier, the world’s most admired actor, and Vivien Leigh, fresh from her blazing success as Scarlett O’Hara, to play Nelson and his mistress, Emma Hamilton.

“Propaganda,” Korda told Olivier, “can be a bitter medicine. It needs sugar coating—and That Hamilton Woman is a very thick sugar coating indeed.” There was nothing sugary, however, in the message beneath the frosting. In the opening scene, Captain Hardy, Nelson’s deputy, attacks those countries that are “neutral against England and so scared of Bonaparte they daren’t lift a finger for the people brave enough to fight him.”

When Laurence Olivier, as Nelson, addresses the Admiralty, he is speaking Churchill’s words, via Alexander Korda. Nelson is not referring, of course, to Bonaparte when

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