Word: alex
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Once the characters have been established, the screenwriters ease up. Alex falls in love with his married teacher-a closet Americophile amusingly played by Marie-France Pisier- only to become the butt of silly sex gags. Laura veers into a nervous breakdown that gratuitously breaks the movie's antic mood. Joel's romance with a snippy French girl (Val erie Quennessen) is a hotbed of cliches; it moves us only because Chapin's likable innocence contrasts so well with Quennessen's robust, Moreau-like sexuality...
Ultimately, however, Alex Korda became a figure to be reckoned with there too, as a major stockholder in United Artists and, in the years after World War II, as a pioneer of international coproduction, with such distinguished directors as David Lean and Carol Reed. Korda's knighthood-obtained in part for secret services to the British during the war-did not hurt him socially on the West Coast either. They were used to tinny titles out there, but as Sam Goldwyn said, Korda's was ''100% kosher...
...bewildered porter), but was a first-class action-film director (The Jungle Book, Sahara). Vincent, Author Michael Korda's father, was an art director who could do the spectacular on a shoestring but never abandoned his bohemian ways. At the height of his career he sometimes wore Alex's hand-me-down suits without bothering to get them altered...
...neither his father nor Uncle Zoli exerted the claim on Author Korda's youthful imagination that the Imperial Alex did. Hence, Charmed Lives is both informal biography and personal memoir, taking on emotional urgency as Nephew Korda recounts his efforts not to imitate his inimitable uncle. Eventually Michael did find his own style and substance as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and writer of the bestselling pop studies Power! and Success...
Like almost everyone else who came into contact with Alex, his nephew found the power of his legend and his charm irresistible. How could it be otherwise with a man who had begun his career directing short films in a disused trolley barn in Budapest and ended up occupying the penthouse floor of Claridge's in London, where Churchill and Beaverbrook lingered over brandy and where a supply of fresh toothbrushes, still in their cellophane wrappers, was kept to accommodate women who decided to spend the night. Some of them, it was said, were seduced...