by Stephen Vagg
Our series on British film moguls discusses perhaps the most hated of them all, John Davis.
It’s kind of cheating to include John Davis in this series because if you know something about 1950s British filmmaking you will probably have heard of him – but then again, one shouldn’t assume, Davis did exist a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Certainly, the general population are unlikely to remember the man, even though for a time there, he was the most influential person in the British movie industry.
Davis’ fame stems from his role with the Rank Organisation, which dominated British filmmaking from the 1940s until the 1960s – not just in terms of movies made, but in distribution and exhibition, and stars discovered and cultivated. We have already written a piece on Earl St John, who was the actual head of production at Rank, but the real power was with Davis, who was Managing Director, and later Chairman. And in his downtime, he wore women’s clothing and used a whip – that will not be the focus of this piece, we just threw that in to keep you reading.
Davis began his career, as people never tired of pointing out, as an accountant. Born in 1906, he originally did the books for a coal and steel company, then wound up working for Oscar Deutsch at Odeon Cinemas, a leading theatre chain in England. In the late 1930s, Odeon was bought out by the Rank Organisation, which was headed up by Methodist flour tycoon J Arthur Rank [pictured, right, with Davis, in 1958]; he took a shine to Davis, and promoted the accountant to various key positions within his group of companies.
Davis really came into his own in the late 1940s, when the Rank Organisation was on the verge of collapse due to cost overruns and over-expansion, which resulted in it owing sixteen million pounds to the bank. Davis – who had been appointed Managing Director in 1948 – helped the company survive via stringent cost-cutting measures, even though these led to their leading filmmakers (Launder and Gilliat, Carol Reed, Powell and Pressburger, David Lean) fleeing Rank for the warm embrace of Alex Korda – who, to be fair to John Davis, went into receivership soon afterwards. Rank held on, in part due to government support from the National Film Finance Corporation (which loaned money to producers) and the Eady Levy (a tax on movie tickets that would be reinvested in local production), and from then on, Davis had a vice-like grip of control over the company.
For the next decade, Rank was essentially run like a classical Hollywood film studio, with Davis as the main man in charge, although Earl St John was the official head of production. Rank not only had the largest cinema chain in the country, it produced 15-20 films a year, either as pure “Rank” productions, or in association with independent producers (the most notable of which was Ealing Films), and had hundreds of people on staff.
Davis soon became notorious within the British industry for a variety of things – his willingness to fire people and slash costs without compunction, his rudeness and lack of tact, his absence of enthusiasm for film as an art. Also – unlike say Nat Cohen, who was very conscious of budgets but generally left filmmakers alone – Davis was prone to interfere creatively, at least in terms of casting and story approval. The Rank Organisation was not a place for filmmakers who chafed against restrictions – thus, the leading moviemakers of the period, such as David Lean, Carol Reed, the Boulting Brothers, and Launder and Gilliat, avoided the place; Powell and Pressburger only returned there out of necessity. (To be fair, Rank did back the Allied Film Makers scheme in the late 1950s, a cooperative effort that produced some terrific movies before winding up at a loss.)
In 1949, Frank Launder suggested that the British film industry follow the policy of Ted Black (head of production at Gainsborough), “basing our programme upon a diversity of product, a properly planned economy, a star building system and a careful selection and preparation of story material, we might be able to produce a very consistent stream of product, which the public would welcome.” This was a very solid plan, and Davis seemed to try to do something like this at Rank. However, he ran into several problems which thwarted his time as a movie mogul. These are listed as follows:
Lack of a diversified program of movies
During the 1950s, Rank under John Davis was over-reliant on a few genres: comedies, war films, thrillers and dramas. The comedies and war films were generally popular, sometimes spectacularly so (Genevieve, the Doctor series, the Norman Wisdom films), but not the thrillers and dramas. One senses the reason that Davis made so many of these, despite lack of public enthusiasm for them, was because they did not cost too much, and would consume the studio’s overhead. This was, in hindsight, a mistake – paying off overhead is never a good reason to make a movie. If Rank was worried about providing “product” for its distribution and exhibition arms, it could have formed a “B” picture unit to make cheapie second features – this was done by companies such as Anglo Amalgamated and Renown – or invested in television (a natural crossover mysteriously ignored by Davis). But this was not done – and instead, the studio pumped out far too many middle-of-the-road low-ish budgeted movies that seemed to please no one.
In the late 1950s, Davis also over-invested in another genre: big budget adventure stories shot on location aimed at the international market. To be fair, some of these were quite good (Tale of Two Cities, Northwest Frontier, Night to Remember) but others are more iffy (Robbery Under Arms, Campbell’s Kingdom, Whirlpool, SOS Pacific, Nor the Moon by Night, Seven Thunders, Floods of Fear), especially the double whammy disaster that was Ferry to Hong Kong and The Singer Not the Song [below].
In hindsight, during the 1950s, Rank put too many of its eggs in the comedy/war/drama/adventure basket and avoided different kinds of audience-pleasing genres, which worked for other British producers at the time, such as sci-fi, horror, fantasy, animation, musicals, social comedies and sexy social realism dramas. We acknowledge that a conservative studio like Rank would have been uncomfortable going down the horror/sex route, but it could have had a crack at musicals, sci-fi, fantasy and family films. Rank definitely should have made more historical dramas like A Night to Remember – we get that these were expensive, but Rank usually did them well, in contrast to adventure stories, which it generally did poorly.
Diversity was one of the hallmarks of the Rank Organisation as a business under John Davis – films were just one arm of its operation, along with industry, leisure and education. Indeed, diversity saved Rank from going under a second time – Davis invested in Xerox in the mid-1950s, which proved hugely lucrative, and sustained the company through the next three decades. However, diversity was not reflected in Rank’s cinematic output. This was a mistake.
Too much overhead
For all Davis’ skill as an administrator, he had a tendency to initiate plans that gobbled up overhead. For instance, he wasted millions on a disastrous, and costly, attempt to launch Rank’s own distribution chain in the USA in the late 1950s (which only lasted three years before being wound up). He did something similar with a Rank record label.
An erratic record with stars
One of the hallmarks of the Rank Organisation was that it attempted to build up its own stars, putting a number of actors under long-term contract. Rank did have successes in this area, especially Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More, Norman Wisdom and Virgina McKenna, and we can excuse some of their less successful signings (Susan Beaumont, Betta St John, Tony Wright). These things happen.
What is less forgivable is the fact that Rank seemed to have a particular knack of identifying and signing actors with genuine star potential, only to put them in a series of underwhelming movies that threatened their standing as stars, then watch them become genuine stars at other studios (or on television) where their skills were properly utilised. This was the case for Diana Dors, Kay Kendall, Petula Clark, Diane Cilento, Peter Finch, Hayley Mills, Keith Michell, Ian Carmichael, Patrick McGoohan, Mary Ure, David McCallum, John Richardson, Belinda Lee and Barbara Steele. All were signed up by Rank and given early career breaks by the company; all were misused. (Rank launched Hayley Mills as a star in Tiger Bay, then she could not get a job for months – she only had a career because Disney offered her a contract.) That is a fairly consistent record of star mis-use.
Furthermore, several Hollywood actors with minimal box office appeal were imported to star in Rank movies for little impact: Howard Keel, Stephen Boyd, Orson Welles, Victor McLaglen, Rod Steiger, and Louis Jourdan (we stress, we are not talking about their talent as performers, but their box office appeal). Ditto a string of European male stars (Eddie Constantine, OW Fischer, Curt Jurgens) and female leading ladies: (Odile Versois, Melina Mercouri, Brigitte Bardot, Luciana Paluzzi, Taina Elg, Mylene Demongeot, Pier Angeli, Juliette Greco, Nadia Gray, Eva Bartok). Indeed, of all Rank’s imports of the 1950s, only Hardy Kruger (The One Who Got Away, Blind Date) could be counted as a success.
And on a personal level, John Davis vindictively blacklisted one of the studio’s few genuine box office draws, Kenneth More, because More heckled him at a dinner and forced one of its biggest female stars, Dinah Sheridan [below with Davis at their wedding], to retire when Davis married her.
Failure to carefully select and prepare story material
Rank had a story department, and some dependable producers who understood narrative, such as Betty Box, but overall, its choice of stories for films was not the best. In particular, Davis seems to have been overly reliant on formulas. Some of these made sense (“Dirk Bogarde in anything”, “another Doctor film”, “Norman Wisdom in a comedy”). Others smacked of more wishful thinking and weren’t really based on any hard evidence (“Foreign locations + adventure story”, “British star + Continental leading lady”, “imported Hollywood actor with no discernible box office appeal + foreign locations + adventure story”). There’s nothing wrong with a formula picture, but formulas should be based on things that have worked in the past, not things that might work, and you’ve got to make sure there’s a story there too.
A series of flops saw Rank cut back on its filmmaking activities during the ‘60s; this was a golden era of British filmmaking, but Rank contributed relatively little to it, aside from its backing of the short-lived Allied Filmmakers and the odd unicorn like The Ipcress File. A mid-‘60s attempt to revive production in conjunction with the NFFC produced interesting movies such as They’re a Weird Mob, but lost money. The company focused on other areas, such as cinemas, and bingo. (The Rank Group, as it is known today, is predominantly a gambling company so the fact that it survived is, uh… Yay?)
Davis became Chairman of the Rank Organisation in 1962, was knighted in 1971, got kicked upstairs to become president of Rank in 1977, and was finally booted from the company in 1983 and died in 1993. On his passing, his estate was only worth 6,801 pounds. (By way of contrast, the actress Ann Todd, who died around the same time, left an estate of 152,000 pounds.)
John Davis was the definitive accountant made good – a bald, chubby numbers man who became a huge power in the film industry, and enjoying a kinky private life (he had numerous wives and mistresses, would smack Dinah Sheridan around, and liked to wear women’s clothes and use a whip). He became the arch villain in the story of British cinema – a documentary on Davis was called The Man Who Ruined the British Film Industry. He didn’t have the passion for cinema of an Alex Korda, Sydney Box or Michael Balcon, talent-friendly studio heads with extensive filmmaking experience who all (coincidentally?) sent their studios broke.
Davis was skilled with boardroom politics and balance sheets, and a terrible manager of employees who was totally unsuited to running a creative industry. For all his supposed organisational genius, he owed a lot of his business success to patronage from a nepo baby (J Arthur Rank), luck (investing in Xerox, hiring Ralph Thomas and Betty Box) and government subsidy (the Eady Levy, the NFFC). Like a lot of CEOs, Davis ceased to have good ideas over time, stayed in his job for far too long, and had to be dragged from his office kicking and screaming. He helped forge Rank into a filmmaking powerhouse, while simultaneously ensuring that it would be a powerhouse of mediocrity.
John Davis was a fascinating figure – a too convenient catch-all villain for whiny filmmakers, but not for the employees he bullied and tormented. A figure worthy of further study who should not be forgotten.
Main Image: Norman Wisdom and John Davis
