Word: lloyds
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Lloyd's of London (Twentieth Century-Fox). In The House of Rothschild (1934), Producer Darryl Zanuck imparted to a waiting world the news that the Battle of Waterloo was won by George Arliss and a flock of pigeons. In this picture, the same Wahoo, Neb. authority on the Napoleonic Wars reveals the inside story of Trafalgar. England's victory in this case, it appears, sprang from a childish pact between Admiral Horatio Nelson and Jonathan Blake, the moving spirit of Lloyd's, London's famed insurance company...
...nephew of a Yarmouth ginshop hostess, and young Nelson (Douglas Scott) swear to take any dare proposed by the other. When they overhear a captain plotting to scuttle his ship after removing its cargo of gold, they agree to run away from home together to carry the news to Lloyd's. Nelson breaks the pact to go to sea as a midshipman on his uncle's man-o'-war. Blake goes alone to London, where a chimney sweep (D'Arcy Corrigan) directs him to Lloyd's coffee house. The news he brings gets...
...semaphore to flash messages across the English channel. While operating his system, Blake meets a mysterious young English girl (Madeleine Carroll ) at Calais. When she turns out to be Lady Elizabeth Stacy, wife of a foppish young peer (George Sanders), frustrated Blake puts all his energies into Lloyd's. He has made himself head of its most powerful syndicate when his semaphore brings the news that the French have sunk 63 British merchant ships off the Azores. All of Lloyd's insurance men are on the brink of ruin...
Rallying under Angerstein, the older brokers at Lloyd's propose to ask the British admiralty for naval convoys for merchant ships. Sure that this plan, which requires weakening Nelson's fighting fleet, means ultimate defeat for England, Blake holds out against it. When a letter from the admiral reminds him of their boyhood promise, Blake takes the desperate chance of using his semaphore to flash news of a naval victory which has not happened. The ruse delays the admiralty's plan until Nelson, with his full fleet at his command, has won gloriously and died at Trafalgar...
That the theme of news-pigeons in Rothschild, the semaphore in Lloyd's-recurs in Producer Darryl Zanuck's major works is not entirely accidental. Famed for his knack of translating headlines into cinema, Zanuck sees history as a collection of front-page stories. Making insurance seem glamorous might sound like a superhuman tour de force. Lloyd's of London, rich in the atmospheric detail of all good period pieces, warm with the honest adulation which English heroes alone seem capable of inspiring in Hollywood producers, is an insurance drummer's daydream. It makes the business...