5/10
Watchable But Simplistic
20 April 2022
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.
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