Background

Charles Drazin was born in 1960, in Hampshire, United Kingdom.

Education

Drazin received a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford University in 1984.

Career

Charles Drazin worked as an editor for Penguin Book for four years, then joined the hardback imprint, Hamish Hamilton, as assistant managing editor and also worked as a sponsoring editor for the hardback imprint Viking.

He taught courses on British film history, adaptation, stardom, and authorship in the cinema at the Queen Mary University of London from 2006 to 2019. Since 2011 he is an archival consultant at Film Finances Limited.

Charles Drazin has written several books about the heyday of movie productions in England during the first half of the twentieth century. Discovering that many people had forgotten that England's studios once rivaled Hollywood, Drazin decided to write The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s. Although the title implies the book is film history, it is actually a collection of short biographies on some of the important figures in the movie industry at the time, including Herbert Wilcox, Sydney Box, Olwen Vaughan, and Angus MacPhail. Drazin notes that many of the British film producers before the war were slick hucksters who could be unscrupulous in finding ways to finance their pictures, but he maintains that their contributions to cinema cannot be denied.

In Search of The Third Man is a study of how the 1949 movie The Third Man came about, while Korda: Britain's Only Movie Mogul is a biography of one of the most colorful figures in early English cinema, Sir Alexander Korda. The film The Third Man, whose now-famous soundtrack helped make zither music popular, is set in postwar Vienna. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is invited to visit his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in Vienna, but when he arrives, he learns that Lime has been killed. After talking to the police, he is told that Lime was involved in the black market. Martins does not believe this, though, and sets off to find out what really happened. This noire mystery, filmed in black and white, came to be considered a classic by film historians, and Drazin relates in detail its genesis and production.

Drazin discusses the personalities and egos behind the film, including author Graham Greene, producers Alexander Korda and David Selznick, and director Carol Reed. Selznick, an American, is portrayed as controlling; although he made numerous helpful contributions to the film, his interference risked ruining the movie at several points.

Having already touched on the subject of Korda in In Search of The Third Man, Drazin explored the rise and fall of one of England's most famous movie producers in his biography of Korda. Born Sandor Kellner in Hungary in 1893, Korda was a man of great ambition who, by the 1930s, was running a film studio in England. He worked in Hollywood for a time, learning about showmanship and attempting to spread propaganda in an effort to convince the United States to enter World War II; he returned to England with the intention of developing a postwar film empire, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Korda founded a film production company, London Films, and Denham Studios, only to lose them both, and suffered through two divorces before marrying for the third time. The success of films such as The Private Life of Henry VIII, Thief of Baghdad, and The Third Man was countered by the miserable failures of movies such as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and An Ideal Husband.

Achievements

• Charles Drazin is known as an author, who has written several books about the heyday of movie productions in England during the first half of the twentieth century. Many critics praised the high level of his works.

Works

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• book

  • The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s

    (Charles Drazin's acclaimed book is the fresh and brillian...)

    1998
  • The Faber Book of French Cinema

    (In The Faber Book of French Cinema, Charles Drazin explor...)

    2011
  • Korda: Britain's Movie Mogul

    (The producer behind such celebrated films as The Four Fea...)

    2011
  • In Search of The Third Man

    (Half a century after its opening, The Third Man remains a...)

    1999
  • Mapping the Past: A Search for Five Brothers at the Edge of Empire

    (Following his mother's death, Charles Drazin discovered a...)

    2016
  • The Man Who Outshone the Sun King: A Life of Gleaming Opulence and Wretched Reversal in the Reign of Louis XIV

    (In 1664, Nicolas Foucquet, the King's first minister, was...)

    2008
  • The Man Who Outshone the Sun King: The Rise and Fall of Nicolas Fouquet

    (The story of the rise and fall of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis ...)

    2008
  • Blue Velvet: Bloomsbury Pocket Movie Guide 3 2000

References

• Charles Drazin - Twitter