Forgotten British genius who beat Hollywood at its own game: Told in a major new book, the very unlikely story of J. Arthur Rank

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The retired major general was apoplectic, his handlebar moustache quivering. These American films with their slang and swagger were an abomination, Sir Alfred Knox snarled at his colleagues in the House of Commons, where he was a Tory MP.

It was time, he thundered, to limit the importation of ‘American talking films’ to ‘protect the English language as spoken by the people of this country’.

At the other end of the Thirties political spectrum, the writer George Orwell similarly bemoaned the growing influence of Hollywood on British culture.

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Movie man: J Arthur Rank - the man who took it upon himself to rebuild the British film industry

To the rescue came an unlikely figure — a man who is one of my heroes in the cultural history of these islands. J. Arthur Rank, a flour miller from Hull, took it upon himself to rebuild the British film industry, repel the transatlantic tide and turn popular culture into a gigantic advertisement for British virtues.

His muscled strongman bashing a gong would become one of the most instantly recognisable trademarks in the world. Yet everything about its inventor seemed wrong.

To his film business peers, Rank was a baffling figure, a Victorian relic unaccountably thrust into the modern world.

A man of deeply conservative opinions and with a religious passion, he believed he was being guided by God. Even at the height of his fame he taught his weekly Methodist Sunday school class, and in Hollywood he sometimes cut short meetings with studio executives to write postcards to his Sunday school pupils.

He knew virtually nothing about films and rarely went to the cinema. His greatest dream was not that one of his films might win an Oscar but that one of his dogs might win at Cruft’s.

Yet by the end of World War II, Rank was the most powerful man in the British film industry. He managed it by building his film empire on the principles of manufacturing, from the laws of supply and demand to the importance of presentation and packaging. The truth is that he was not really a film-maker at all. He was a miller. His family had been milling flour since 1825 and his father, Joe Rank, had built up the largest flour business in the country through hard work and self-discipline.

Big noise in movies: The iconic Rank strongman striking the gong - which would become one of the most instantly recognisable trademarks in the world

Like all good Victorian capitalists, Joe Rank had a strong sense of social obligation. The company had a pioneering pension scheme for its workers, while he himself donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to charities.

He was one of the richest men in the country by the time his son, Arthur, was born in 1888.

The youngest of seven, Arthur was not conspicuously bright. His father used to call him a ‘dunce’, a jibe that seems to have cut deep, since he often brought it up in later life.

In his youth, he was not allowed to go to the theatre or to public dances, which were seen as sinful — a strange background for a man who in later life would revolutionise entertainment.

After boarding school there was no question of university. Instead, he started in the mills, sweeping floors and carrying sacks. By the age of 21 he was in charge of his own mill.

At this stage nobody could possibly have predicted his impact on popular culture. Indeed, as late as 1930, when Rank turned 42, he seemed a deeply uninteresting figure, living quietly in Surrey, the soul of comfortable, middle-class respectability.

It was his religious faith that brought him into the film business. He owned a stake in the Methodist Times newspaper, which consistently attacked Hollywood for its ‘cynical pandering to depraved imaginations’.

Talking pictures, argued the paper’s film critic, had ‘stripped woman not only of clothing but of morals, decency, truth, fidelity and every civilised quality or virtue’.

Yet some evangelical Christians believed they could turn film to their advantage. One notable Methodist preacher, the Reverend Thomas Tiplady, saw films as an opportunity to attract younger audiences.

‘The cinema,’ he argued, ‘is the greatest invention since the printing press, and the Church must put aside all moral, intellectual and artistic snobbery and . . . bring this invention into the service of Christ.’

This was Arthur Rank’s kind of talk. For all his piety, he was a man of the world. He had already asked his secretary to find Christian films that he could show to his Sunday school class and been disappointed to hear that there were almost none.

In 1933, he helped to set up a new voluntary body, the Religious Film Society. He even came up with the idea for its first 20-minute film, The Mastership Of Christ (1934).

It was, as he admitted later, ‘lousy’. But he had got the bug. His later films would be rather better.

The secret of Rank’s success was that he saw films as a commodity. Like many evangelical preachers, he believed that spreading the word of God was akin to selling a product. Films, too, could be produced, marketed and sold like flour.

And very quickly the business of making films roused Rank’s competitive instincts. Within barely two years, not content with funding straightforwardly religious films, he decided to make mainstream films for a wider audience, gently introducing them to ‘moral’ and ‘wholesome’ values without subjecting them to a sermon.

Through films, he said, he would ‘help men and women make this world a better place to live in’.

So in 1935, in alliance with the Tory peer Viscount Portal, he set up the General Cinema Finance Corporation. And then, with dizzying speed, the rest of the business fell into his lap.

Royal companion: J. Arthur Rank with Queen Elizabeth II - then Princess Elizabeth at the Royal Film Performance in London in 1950

Year after year, he built up his empire: the Pinewood studio here; a distribution company there; a share of Universal; the Odeon cinema chain; the Gaumont cinema chain; Denham studios; Lime Grove studios. Nobody ever built a film empire so quickly or with such ruthless acumen.

To many people in the industry, Rank came not as a moral saviour but as a capitalist carpetbagger. Fancying themselves as civilised, creative types, far above the tawdry demands of commerce, they hated owing their living to a Victorian industrialist.

His shy manner did him no favours. In a business dominated by cigar-chewing, wisecrack-dispensing showmen, the Methodist miller cut a bizarrely reticent figure.

After seeing Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), one of the most prestigious films the Rank Organisation ever made, Rank said simply to the star: ‘Thank you very much, Sir Laurence’. This was not good enough for Olivier, who had been expecting a torrent of praise and never forgave him for such an outrageous slight.

To the Left in particular, Rank’s name was mud. The socialist paper Tribune regularly damned his ‘bad taste’, while the Association of Cinematograph Technicians regarded him as the modern equivalent of ‘a monopolistic Victorian factory-owner’.

The actor James Mason, who had made his name in Rank films during World War II, made a blistering attack on his patron after decamping to Hollywood in 1946. Rank, he said, was ‘the worst thing that has happened to the British film industry’.

This was horribly unfair. The Forties were the golden age of British cinema and much of that is down to Rank. He put up the money for classics such as David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), and for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943) and The Red Shoes (1948).

It was even Rank who paid for the Ealing comedies that have become synonymous with post-war Britain. Without him there would have been no Passport To Pimlico (1949), no Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), no The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), no The Ladykillers (1955).

Rank himself had nothing to do with writing or making these films. His great virtue was that he gave carte blanche to more talented people.

‘We can make any subject we wish,’ Lean said in 1947, ‘with as much money as we think that subject should have spent on it. We can cast whichever actors we choose, and we have no interference with the way the film is made.’

Time magazine claimed that ‘not since the Renaissance Popes have a group of artists found a patron so quick with his wallet, so slow with unsolicited directions and advice’.

Even Rank’s great rival Alexander Korda believed that had it not been for the Yorkshireman, the British film industry would probably have been dead before the end of World War II. ‘Any who deny what Arthur has done,’ Korda said, ‘know nothing.’

Rank’s empire reached its zenith in 1946. By then, he employed 31,000 people, turned over £45 million a year and controlled five studios, five newsreel firms, a host of production companies and almost 650 cinemas.

What’s more, his goal of rolling back the advance of Hollywood had been at least a partial success, for in 1946, for the first and only time, British films did better at the domestic box office than their American counterparts.

Yet for Rank that was only half the battle. The real challenge, as he saw it, was to take the fight to Hollywood — or ‘Fairyland’, as he called it — and break the American market itself.

The problem was that British films had a terrible reputation across the Atlantic. Americans liked fantasy. The realism of British films went down badly at U.S. box offices.

But, as Rank perceived, British history was a different matter. U.S. audiences would lap up serving wenches, the Tower of London — everything they associated with ‘olde England’.

So, leading his assault on the U.S. market was Henry V, one of the most influential British pictures ever made. Not only did it boast the talents of Britain’s most celebrated actor (Olivier) and its greatest playwright, but there is even an apocryphal story that it was commissioned by Winston Churchill himself, who supposedly asked Olivier to make it as a propaganda boost for British troops fighting the Nazis.

Shakespeare’s play was indeed perfect propaganda, not just because of the subject matter — a plucky band of English and Welshmen overcoming a horde of effeminate foreigners — but because it had become a well-established focus for patriotic sentiment, having been performed at the Old Vic every year during World War I.

As for Olivier, he was a natural choice to star and direct since he had not only played Shakespeare’s national hero at the Old Vic but had recited stirring passages on radio since the outbreak of World War II.

His Henry is the ideal English hero: brave, cheerful and effortlessly graceful. One American critic wrote that he incarnated ‘the public school virtues that were supposed to have built the British Empire’.

The film-makers explicitly drove home the parallel between Agincourt, with the English army alone against overwhelming odds, and the recent achievements of the RAF in the Battle of Britain.

But Henry V was far more than a wartime morale-booster. Its style and structure were sophisticated and the battle scenes as exciting as anything in the history of cinema to that point, the atmosphere heightened by William Walton’s tremendously stirring music.

Stylistic excellence, however, came at a cost. The budget was set at £325,000 but the final cost was nearer £475,000, the equivalent of perhaps £73 million today.

Man of the people: Child actors Mavis Sage and Lance Secretan meet Mr Rank in 1952

The story of the release and reception of Henry V speaks volumes about the enduring pressures on the British film industry, caught between the demands of making upmarket pictures and the need to make a profit.

Rank was worried about its commercial prospects and asked Olivier to cut it from 140 to around 100 minutes. Olivier refused.

Rank’s anxieties proved well grounded. It would be easy to mock him as a tight-fisted Philistine who knew nothing of the value of art, but he probably had a better idea than Olivier of what most people wanted. Reviewers raved about Henry V but cinemas outside the West End reported poor audiences and even some booing.

Olivier was spectacularly dismissive. His intention, he said, had always been to make an ‘artistically successful’ film, not a ‘financially successful one’ (which must have been news to Rank). ‘I have explained to Rank before,’ Olivier sighed, ‘that this film is for the good of his name, not his pocket.’

What turned Henry V into a money-spinner was the reaction in America. Rank’s men marketed it brilliantly. The film was shown in college towns for one night only, and in small venues, ensuring that they would be packed.

As word spread, the distributors booked bigger halls. After just 12 months, the film had already made a profit of £275,000. It turned out to be an early and enormously accomplished example of an enduring blueprint for British success.

The values that American critics associated with it (and with Olivier’s next Shakespeare venture, Hamlet) — history, tradition and high culture — are precisely the same as those projected by a string of later successful British pictures.

Think of Chariots Of Fire, Gandhi and A Room With A View in the Eighties, or The Remains Of The Day, The English Patient and Shakespeare In Love in the Nineties, or even Atonement, The Queen and The King’s Speech in the 2000s.

Rank had hit on an approach which has come to define British cinema, and perhaps Britain itself, in the eyes of the world.

For Rank, however, the appeal of the film industry was beginning to wane. Making ‘prestige’ films was inherently risky because they were so expensive. Worse still, audiences were turning away. The sight of Rank’s famous gong, one critic said, brought a ‘muffled yawn’ and the thought that ‘oh dear, now we are going to be educated’.

By the end of 1949, the Rank Organisation was making a loss. It switched to churning out cheaper films starring the likes of Norman Wisdom, Kenneth More and Dirk Bogarde, which were guaranteed a fair-sized domestic audience.

And as television ate into cinema attendances, the Rank empire began to do the unthinkable and shut cinemas. By 1962, when Rank retired as chairman, a quarter of his cinemas had closed their doors.

Meanwhile, the man himself had returned to his first love — the flour business. Milling’s gain was the film industry’s loss. Not only had Rank effectively saved it from extinction in the Thirties, he had come closer than anybody before or since to establishing a permanent foothold in the American market.

In this respect, he was one of the most important and influential British cultural figures of the century.

Adapted from The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook, published by Allen Lane at £25. © Dominic Sandbrook 2015. To order a copy for £20, visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808.