Churchill and the film-maker: sadly, their dream of England persists | Ian Jack

Churchill and the film-maker: sadly, their dream of England persists | Ian Jack: The war leader, with his friend Alexander Korda, helped to create a national self-image: defiant, yet always successful

My older brother took me to see the original, 1939 version of The Four Feathers when I was nine or 10. He had seen it several times already – had once sat through it twice when, thanks to the principle of continuous performance, it was possible to stay put in your seat and watch the programme all over again at no extra cost.

Films about war weren’t new to me. The Four Feathers stood out on two counts. Surprisingly, given its date, and in contrast to the usual British monochrome, it was in Technicolor; and the war it featured was older and more obscure than the familiar one, which had ended in 1945. In it, an army led by General Kitchener fought the Muslim revivalist leader, the Mahdi, and his followers in Sudan in the late 1890s.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2CRL81n
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