The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s

by Charles Drazin

Charles Drazin's acclaimed book, now available in paperback with a new Preface, is the fresh and brilliant chronicle for general readers and scholars alike of the British cinema's seminal 1940s, when many bold and enduring classics of world cinema were made, including Brief Encounter, The Red Shoes and The Third Man . Drazin traces British cinema's fortunes through the characters and aspirations of some of its leading personalities, including Carol Reed, David Lean, Michael Balcon and Humphrey Jennings. He also introduces readers to some lesser known, equally significant figures, like Robert Hamer, the maverick director of Kind Hearts and Coronets , and Filippo Del Giudice, flamboyant Italian genius.

Genres: Film

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 1998

Reviews

[Jean-françois Baillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to. admit that knowing the author personally might well influence the way you rate a book. I can't remember the first time I met Charles Drazin, it was so long ago now. He has always struck me as a most unassuming type of film historian, hiding a very deep and reliable knowledge of the subjects he writes upon under an appearance of modesty and British tact. Some of the books he has written, this study of 1940s British cinema being one of them, rank among the best combinations of scholarship and subjectivity I have ever come across. Hugely readable, it contains a wealth of fact about one of the most miraculous outputs in film history wordlwide as well as a gallery of portraits of moguls, eccentrics and bureaucrats that is unmatched in the field. If you have to have only one book about the period this is definitely the one.

[Neil Alcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely readable and informative, well-researched and sprinkled with humour. Reflecting the industry and the era, this is sadly very male-centric; the final chapter on Olwen Vaughan ends up feeling a little tokenistic. There's no reason why Muriel Box and Jill Craigie, for example, couldn't have had their own chapters. And while Drazin bemoans the proliferation of writing on, for example, Hitchcock and Powell & Pressburger to justify the book (quite rightly, I should say), he only mentions Basil Dearden - Ealing's most prolific and most overlooked director - once, in passing, and Dearden's boundary-pushing work on "social problem" films with Michael Relph is ignored altogether, as it largely has been in British film criticism until fairly recently. Nevertheless, what's here is great, and this is a worthwhile read for fans of this remarkable period of British cinema history.