The Finest Years

"It’s a very handsome-looking book as well, featuring Olivier as Henry V on the cover. It came out in 1998 and is one of the most enjoyable books in British cinema. It combines masses of interesting information with total readability. I think it’s valuable both to scholars and laymen who just want to know more about how British cinema’s finest years came about. The subtitle is British cinema through the 1940s but this is not a critical plod through the decade. He’s tracked down a remarkable numbers of the prime movers and shakers of those years. There’s a chapter, for instance, on David Lean and Carol Reed, where he manages to have fresh things to say, for example, about Lean’s Brief Encounter or Reed’s great 40s trilogy, The Fallen Idol, Odd Man Out and The Third Man. You can’t think about the 40s without big names like Lean and Reed, but even more rewarding are the chapters on people like the Rank Organization’s notorious hatchetman John Davis, who was much dreaded by everybody. Drazin talks about the tragic figure of Robert Hamer, whose demons included alcoholism – he made Kind Hearts and Coronets and It Always Rains on Sunday. He writes about Gabriel Pascal, the somewhat mad Hungarian to whom George Bernard Shaw sold the rights to all his plays for a guinea. It’s a marvellous line-up of people that he’s got. It’s not critical writing, it’s evocative writing and I don’t know any other book that evokes the period as well as this does."