Churchill and the Movie Mogul

Mogul (noun) informal an important or powerful person, especially in the motion picture or media industry.

The IMDb calls this documentary about how Churchill and Alexander Korda worked hand in glove to create propaganda movies "How Britain's wartime leader and its only ever movie mogul changed the course of history."

Really? Only ever mogul? What then are we to make of people like Michael Balcon, or Cecil Hepworth or Charles Urban? Korda -- eventually, it is admitted, an emigrant -- lands in Britain and immediately starts making very English movies? As if he hadn't been a film maker in his native Hungary, hadn't worked in Britain since the 1920s, with an earlier sojourn in Hollywood?

Mind you, I am not disputing the position of the documentarians here; with all the claims about Nazi propaganda, there's little doubt that the British were great movie advocates for themselves, starting in the First World War, when the had Rudyard Kipling in charge, and imported D. W. Griffith to shoot films. I just wish people wouldn't make supposedly serious films that play so dismissively with the facts that do not suit their main narrative.

Didn't think there were any fresh slants left on Churchill, but this doc found one - and a fascinating untold tale it is too. Who knew our Winston was a wannabe screenwriter? Well worth a watch.

This well considered, crisp documentary shows the nexus between Winston Churchill's screenwriting efforts for Alexander Korda and his more prominent political career. It illustrates how the development of nationalism is a necessary precursor to war. Of course, today, television is a more ubiquitous and unremitting propaganda, but this is a valuable glance at the more arty forms circa1940. Clips, interviews and photographs are well chosen.

Interesting look at war monger Winston Churchill's use of media to get as many of Empire's farmboys pointlessly killed fighting somebody (turned out to be the Hun).

Churchill was, I dunno, bored after being disgraced by his blunders at the Dardanelles (aka Gallipoli) in The Great War. He hadn't seen enough of his soldiers slaughtered, I guess. So he was boning for sequel with Germany from the back benches of the English Parliament in the 1930s.

He hooked up with Hungarian movie-making refugee Alexander Korda, who had reinvented himself as a proper English gentleman. Korda was responsible for a few barely disguised propaganda films that helped to whip the LImeys into a fighting frenzy. I guess it worked. Churchill got his war to get more of his - and more regrettably - the British Empire's farmboys pointlessly killed on European soil.

Meanwhile, Americans mostly hated Britain and didn't want any part of Churchill's war lust. The catchphrase was ''America First." Ring any bells? Sadly, the Korda/Churchill tagteam - if we are to believe this documentary - made Lady Hamilton starring fake husband/wife Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

Apparently it worked. Many dead American farmboys ensued.

Cross-dressing civil-rights abuser J. Edgar Hoover had his FBI investigate Hollywood propaganda in general, and Korda in particular. Probably what today we call ''controlled opposition" since it didn't hold back America's authoritarian war-monger Franklin Roosevelt from maneuvering the U. S. into the killing fields in Europe or Asia.

None of this surprised me. I mean, who doesn't watch The Scarlet Pimpernel, That Hamilton Women, Fire Over England or The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, etc., and fail to realize that they are pro-war propaganda? Nevertheless, the valuable lesson is that media in general and Hollywood in particular have a lot to answer for. Keep that in mind when Tom Hanks, Stephen Spielberg, CNN, MSNBC, the NY Times or Washington Post are beating the war drum against (2022 enemy du jour is Russia but it's always gonna be somebody) or cranking out yet another film celebrating American soldiers' heroism in battle.

We are dupes.

I much enjoyed the premise of this movie: that Churchill used his relationship with the great English film producer and director, Alexander Korda, to get Korda, already an English patriot, to make particularly patriotic films during World War II, especially here in the U.S. to help FDR overcome Lindbergh's isolationism and bring the U.S. into the war to help England. (Sorry about the length of that sentence.)

What I particularly liked here was the use of Lindbergh's speeches urging isolationism/neutrality. He is remembered today for his heroic flight across the Atlantic in 1927, but his anti-semitic isolationism should not be forgotten.

What I liked less was the cursory examination of the films Korda made during the war. The movie is only 60 minutes long, so there would have been plenty of time to look at his war movies in greater depth. Even if Churchill's request only applied to *That Hamilton Woman*, more time looking at it in detail would have been appreciated.

For what it's worth....