Trivia / Carol Reed

• What Might Have Been: In the late 1930s, he was assigned to direct an adaptation of Henry De Vere Stacpoole's The Blue Lagoon as a coproduction between Gainsborough Pictures and 20th Century Fox with the intention of telling the story in Anachronic Order, a storytelling technique that was not fully realized until the French New Wave. Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood were to play the cousins as young adults, with Richard Greene and Linda Darnell playing the cousins as adolescents, and Shirley Temple and an unknown boy actor playing the cousins as children; Will Fyffe was to play Paddy Button. Gainsborough and Fox were to film the novel in the epic the way Gone with the Wind was made in Hollywood. Having this being made, it could have been a Genre Turning Point for filmmaking. Then came World War II, and the project was shelved until 1944 when Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder took over the rights, and the finished film, that had its plot radically changed before filming due to The Hays Code, only came out in 1949.