Macnab - J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry

CINEMA AND SOCIETY
General Editor
Jeffrey Richards
Department of History, University of Lancaster

Also available in this series:

SWORDSMEN OF THE SCREEN
From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York
Jeffrey Richards

HOLLYWOOD GOES TO WAR
Film and American Society 193952
Colin Shindler

SPAGHETTI WESTERNS
Cowboys and Europeans: From Karl May to Sergio Leone
Christopher Frayling

THE AGE OF THE DREAM PALACE
Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-39
Jeffrey Richards

THE EPIC FILM
Myth and History
Derek Elley

THE BRITISH LABOUR MOVEMENT AND FILM 1918-1939
Stephen G. Jones

HOLLYWOOD DESTINIES
European Directors in America, 1922-1931
Graham Petrie

THE HIDDEN CINEMA
British Film Censorship in Action, 1913-1972
James C. Robertson

REALISM AND TINSEL
Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-1948
Robert Murphy

FILM AND THE WORKING CLASS
The Feature Film in British and American Society
Peter Stead

FILM AND REFORM
John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement
Ian Aitken

First published 1993
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

1993 Geoffrey Macnab

Typeset in 10/12 pt Times by Florencetype Limited, Kewstoke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Macnab, Geoffrey
J. Arthur Rank and the British Film
Industry. (Cinema & Society Series)
I. Title II. Series
791.43092

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Macnab, Geoffrey
J. Arthur Rank and the British film industry / Geoffrey
Macnab.
p. cm.
1. Rank OrganisationHistory. 2. Rank, J. Arthur, 18881972.
3. Motion picture industry Great Britain History. I. Title.
PN1999.R37M33 1993
384' .8'0941-dc20 92-24832

Front Cover illustration: J. Arthur Rank flanked by several of his 'starlets'

Front Cover design: Twenty Twenty

ISBN 0-415-07272-7

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality
of this reprint but points out that some imperfections
in the original may be apparent

5 RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
From kids and cartoons to the Charm School

6 THE BOGART OR BACON DEBATE
British cinema and society, 1946-50

7 ET
The entertainment tax

8 RETRENCHMENT AND ECONOMY
Davis prunes

9 RANK AND THE 1950s
The Xerox years

The vicissitudes of the British feature film industry arouse a wider and deeper public interest today than any but the most outstanding of its products. To some, its achievements, disappointments and betrayals have the Wolseyan quality of Shakespearian tragedy; to others, it is a Chaplinesque figure of comedy, reeling drunkenly from crisis to crisis, elaborately supported, in mock solitude, by its constant companion, the Government, which is in nothing so competent as picking its pocket... there has been no dearth of doctors, students and temperature charts in the sick bay, and the patients themselves have diagnosed and prescribed for each other and the doctors.

(Professor Arnold Plant, writing in The Times, 22 May 1952)

It is a commonplace to say that, since its very earliest days, the British film industry has been enmeshed in crisis. There was a crisis in 1926, shortly prior to the first Cinematograph Films Act, when the British awoke to the fact that over 90 per cent of pictures shown in their cinemas were reckoned to be American. There was a fresh crisis in the late 1930s, when investors suddenly developed icily cold feet, and the whole fragile edifice of British film production came tumbling down. There was a crisis in the Second World War just as there had been in the First: briefly, it looked as if the government would close the industry for the duration. There was a new crisis in the late 1940s, when dollar shortages persuaded the Attlee administration to introduce swingeing taxes on Hollywood imports, thereby provoking a Hollywood embargo which, in turn, helped set off Rank's crisis of 1949, when his ambitious programme of films conceived to counterbalance the embargo saw the Rank Organization's overdraft escalating to in excess of 16 million. There were crises throughout the mid- to late 1950s, when television started to drain away cinema audiences. There was the crisis of the late 1960s, when the Hollywood investors who had pumped money into 'runaway' productions in London packed their bags and left. There was a crisis in the 1970s, as the rate of British production plummeted, and another crisis in the 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher abolished the Eady Fund, a levy on box-office receipts which had helped buttress British filmmakers for nearly forty years. In the 1990s, for all the bold talk of Britain as the 'Hollywood of Europe', there is still a crisis.

Despite the well-nigh permanent state of siege in which it exists, the industry wobbles on. British exhibitors and distributors have traditionally managed to inoculate themselves against the bugs which affect their colleagues in production: the UK, in the late 1980s, after the efforts of British Film Year (1985) and the rise of the multiplex, was the one country in Europe where attendances were on the rise. Any talk of 'crisis' in the industry must, therefore, be tempered: it is the producers who have faced crisis after crisis, and production is only one part of the film process. It is hardly surprising that Hollywood hegemony has remained largely unchallenged for the last sixty years. The British industry is severely hampered by its own will-to-destruction, and by its never-ending capacity to generate internal feuds, fissure and division. Hollywood has helped divide and rule the industry, has ensured that renters and 'showmen' are always at logger-heads with producers, mainly because they have no great desire to handle British movies when they know they can make more money for less effort with transatlantic imports.

Just as in Preston Sturges' film Hail the Conquering Hero! the conquering hero in question turns out to have been a coward with hay fever, the British industry's putative saviours, who emerge at the rate of about two a decade, make a lot of fuss and noise before leaving British cinema in the same mess that it was in when they started. The pages of the film journals abound in panaceas for the tottering business today, and have done so since the journals began. One thing seems clear. However downtrodden, battered and bruised it might be, the British film will never quite become extinct. And, as Professor Plant's words quoted above suggest, there is a large measure of tragedy, pathos and comedy in the industry's ongoing struggle for survival there is almost richer drama in the anxious battles being fought behind the screen than there is in the 'British Film' itself.