Alex Korda’s Battleground: The Ghost Goes West: Authorship, Jewishness, and Émigré Filmmakers in mid-1930s Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In this article, I am looking at some of the mechanisms of how émigré filmmakers worked in Britain in the 1930s, and how power politics informed in particular Alexander Korda’s London Films Studio, using a relatively little-known, and under-researched film within the Korda oeuvre: The Ghost Goes West (1935). Through investigating some of the production practices of the film, and through looking at Alexander Korda’s figure, as mediated through his biographies and other academic literature on the Korda brothers, I am examining the ambiguous relationships émigré filmmakers in Britain had with their roots, their new cultural contexts, and with Hollywood hegemony. The piece brings together diverse existing literature on the Korda brothers to filter them through this particular lens and argue that The Ghost Goes West was a site of clashes in authorial voices, as well as an attempt to emanate and criticize Hollywood and American values at the same time; with strong extra-textual connotations linked to both Alexander Korda, the film’s producer, as well as Robert Donat, the film’s male star.