My father Denis Kavanagh, who had been a stunt flyer in Hollywood in the late Twenties, working on such films as William Wellman's Wings, returned to the UK to help edit I Claudius. As everyone knows the film was never made following a car crash in which Merle Oberon was injured. That's always been the official line anyway. Much has been made of Charles Laughton's inability to get into the part and at the time Korda was having trouble with Prudential Corporation who had invested heavily in London Films following the success of Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Luckily, I have seen some of the rushes from the film which were tacked together for a BBC documentary in 1965 entitled 'The Epic That Never Was' narrated by Dirk Bogarde. The rushes featured many tantrums on Laughton's part. Korda used to despair of Laughton's insecurities and the editors, so my father told me, had a very difficult time putting anything useable together. In many ways, my father told me, it was a good thing the movie never appeared because it was going nowhere and Merle Oberon's accident was the ideal excuse to cancel the picture. Obviously, Derek Jacobi didn't have so many problems when the BBC made a television series of the book many years later.
Review of I, Claudius
