ABSTRACT
Costume drama has played a major role in British film culture. Will Barker, most ambitious of early showmen/film-makers, made films about Henry VIII and Jane Shore (the mistress of Edward IV), and after a long period of eclipse, the fortunes and reputation of the British film industry were revived by the international success of Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933.2 British film producers embarked on a spate of unwieldy epics, many of which flopped disastrously and helped create the slump which hit the industry in 1937. But Korda and another crafty entrepreneur, Herbert Wilcox, continued to exploit costume pictures to advantage. Wilcox cast his wife Anna Neagle as Nell Gwyn, as Peg of Old Drury, and then as Queen Victoria in Victoria the Great and Sixty Glorious Years. Korda’s Rembrandt, one of his most charming films, was a commercial failure, but his Technicolor celebrations of the great days of the British Empire, The Four Feathers and The Drum, were big box-office successes.
