by Stephen Vagg
As mentioned in our previous piece in this series, the year of 1958 saw the Rank Organisation’s film department hit with severe financial losses, the sacking of over 300 people, and the cancellation of several high-profile projects including the Dirk Bogarde version of Lawrence of Arabia.
One would assume that Rank would enter 1959 with a mood of trepidation. Yet it remained bullish, at least publicly. An article by the Organisation’s head of distribution even said this would be the company’s biggest and most impressive year yet – and there certainly were, still, lots of films financed by them.
This piece will focus on the leading sixteen films released by Rank in 1959. Not all the movies were made through its own production arm, Rank Organisation Film Productions – as usual, there were some made by independent companies, with Rank offering finance. We’re grouping these together for ease of discussion.
Before we leap in, we should stress that these are not all the films Rank released that year. The organisation also distributed a whole bunch of low-budget “second features”, either in 1959 or shortly afterwards. The films were varied – thrillers (Hidden Homicide, Beyond the Curtain, Witness in the Dark), children’s films (Zoo Baby), comedies (Strictly Confidential, The Man who Liked Funerals), and women’s pictures (And Women Shall Weep, Conscience Bay). We’re not going to get into those in this piece but just note that they existed.
The sixteen films we want to discuss today comprised of:
– seven comedies (The Captain’s Table, Too Many Crooks, Upstairs and Downstairs, The Night We Dropped a Clanger, Desert Mice, Follow a Star, The Heart of a Man);
– one war movie (Operation Amsterdam);
– four thrillers (The 39 Steps, Sapphire, Blind Date, Tiger Bay); and
– four adventure tales (Ferry to Hong Kong, North West Frontier, Whirlpool, SOS Pacific)
It was a seemingly less diverse slate than in previous years – a little under half were comedies, the balance being in the action-y space (war, thrillers, etc) – although, as mentioned, Rank also released a varied collection of second features.
Comedy was, as ever, anchored by an annual Norman Wisdom vehicle – in 1959’s case, it was Follow a Star, which featured plenty of songs, so it could be called a musical. This was Wisdom’s first movie not directed by John Paddy Carstairs (the two men had fallen out) though, to be honest, we couldn’t ascertain that much difference. Wisdom returns to his poor-me persona, after having a bit more strength in The Square Peg, June Laverick is dull as the girl but Hattie Jacques is fun. If you like Wisdom, you’ll like this.
The Heart of a Man was also a kind of musical, and it showcased singer Frankie Vaughan, although it was probably more of a romantic comedy. The film was produced by the team of Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle, making their first movie at Pinewood in 23 years. For over two decades, Wilcox and Neagle had ruled the world of commercial filmmaking in Britain, off the back of Neagle’s star power; in the late 1950s, they were trying to stay relevant via a series of vehicles for Vaughan at Associated British (The Lady is a Square, Wonderful Things, These Dangerous Years), then the team shifted over to Rank for The Heart of a Man. The film had some Rank contract players (Anne Heywood, Tony Britton) and featured a song from Heywood, which Rank released as a single on its record label. The public must not have liked it – Wilcox announced several more Vaughan/Neagle films, but none resulted. Indeed, The Heart of a Man was Wilcox’s last film as director and second last as producer, although he went down swinging, trying to take over British Lion and make a film of Terence Rattigan’s Ross, fighting bankruptcy and… oh, anyway, Herbert Wilcox is a topic worthy of further study.
There were no “doctor” films for 1959, but there was The Captain’s Table, from a book by Richard Gordon, who authored the “doctor” novels. It featured Donald Sinden, who had been in Doctor in the House and Doctor at Large. The movie also starred John Gregson (after Dirk Bogarde turned it down), and is a pleasant, fun, breezy movie; it was a hit, too.
The Captain’s Table wasn’t made by the regular “doctor” team, Ralph Thomas and Betty Box – they were busy on Upstairs and Downstairs, a comedy about a smug middle class couple and their problems with servants. It was made with the typical Rank combination of contract stars (Michael Craig, Anne Heywood) and support players (James Robertson Justice, Sid James) plus imported European actresses (Claudia Cardinale, Mylene Demongeot). It’s cheery, amiable, glossy, self-satisfied, nicely shot, and dim.
Too Many Crooks was a black comedy from Mario Zampi, an unofficial follow-up to his Naked Truth, with Terry Thomas as a cad who won’t pay the ransom when his wife is kidnapped – an evident inspiration for 1986’s Ruthless People, which is actually a better movie. George Cole tries unsuccessfully to channel Peter Sellers, Zampi’s handling feels slack, but the film has its moments.
Desert Mice and The Night We Dropped a Clanger were both service comedies, a genre that had revived in popularity with the huge success of Carry On, Sergeant and Private’s Progress. Both movies came through Sydney Box, British producer who’d signed a deal to make low budget movies for Rank through his companies (the more we’re reading about Sydney Box, the more we are forming an opinion that he was a greedy cash grabber at heart, though we may be doing the man a disservice). Desert Mice, from the team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, has a great idea (a comic look at ENSA troops in the war) but no feel for its subject (Relph directed) and shoves all its plot into the last 20 minutes.
The Night We Dropped a Clanger was a spoof of I Was Monty’s Double, complete with a cameo from the guy who was actually Monty’s double in real life – it also may have been inspired by the success of Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg the year before. The lead was Brian Rix, a famous farce theatre actor who occasionally made movies; Clanger tries anything for a laugh in a way that’s endearing though it’s also tiresome in places. The film was a hit, and Rix tried to start a franchise along the lines of the Carry On films called “The Night We” series, starting with The Night We Got the Bird and The Night We Sprang a Leak. Interestingly, those two films were made at British Lion, not Rank – Sydney Box had a heart attack in September 1959, and Rix shifted over to British Lion, where his director, Darcy Conyers, made a point of praising British Lion’s hands-off approach – possibly, this was a rebuke to Rank interfering on Clanger? Anyway, The Night We Got the Bird flopped so The Night We Sprang a Leak was retitled Nothing Barred – and we are now officially spending far more time in this piece on Brian Rix comedies than we ever intended. These movies are fairly grim going – as were other cheap comedies Rank distributed like Strictly Confidential, Operation Cupid, and The Man Who Liked Funerals – but there was a market for them then.
Rank’s thrillers for 1959, on the other hand, were all very good. Tiger Bay, made through Independent Artists, was a terrific effort from director J Lee Thompson that launched Hayley Mills as a star: it was an excellent late example of the old British favourite, child-who-witnesses-a-murder. The locations are splendid, and Horst Buchholz (as the killer) is a dynamic male lead.
Also admirable was Blind Date, done through Sydney Box’s company by Joseph Losey, working a lot more effectively for Rank than on The Gentleman and The Gypsy, presumably because he was at more arms’ length from the studio.
Sapphire was a procedural from Relph and Dearden about the murder of a “coloured” girl – the movie has been completely overshadowed by that team’s later Victim, but it is an interesting tale and it was a big hit. You can’t beat a murder mystery as an effective, crowd-pleasing way to explore societal problems.
The 39 Steps was a remake of the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film from Ralph Thomas and Betty Box, with colour, Kenneth More and an imported Tania Elg. The film actually isn’t bad – it just would’ve been better had it been more reworked for More: too many scenes are too close to Hitchcock, which does not flatter the new version. And Tania Elg does not bring that much to the party – Rank may as well have used one of their own stars.
Incidentally, The 39 Steps, Sapphire, Tiger Bay and Bind Date were all hits. The studio had made so many thrillers throughout the 1950s without ever really hitting the mark, but the crop from 1959 did. The difference? Well, The 39 Steps had IP and the studio’s biggest star. The other three films were all made by independent companies outside of Rank – and they had more adult, sexy content. Pick strong directors, leave them alone, make films for adults… these were lessons that it took Rank some time to learn but they were getting there.
Oddly, Rank only released one straight World War Two movie in 1959: Operation Amsterdam, featuring an established Rank contract star (Peter Finch), one they were hoping would become a star (Tony Britton) and a European glamour gal (Eva Bartok). The movie had a terrific premise (Allies trying to retrieve diamonds from Amsterdam just prior to the fall of Holland) – but is done in by slack handling from director Michael McCarthy who died shortly after the movie was released, so we kind of feel bad criticising him, but it has been over sixty years now, so… Anyway, the Dutch should remake Operation Amsterdam, it’s a cracker of a yarn. Finch seems bored.
We have no idea why Rank released no other war films or female led war melodramas that year – the studio was traditionally so strong in those genres. It did, however, make four adventure tales which had war “elements”. North West Frontier was easily the best, a splendid train movie expertly directed by J Lee Thompson, starring Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall. In fact, this was one of the most entertaining Rank movies of the 1950s, showing what the studio could do when it gave a bit of money to a strong director. We wonder how profitable the film was though, as it would’ve cost a lot (American co-star, location filming in India), and we’re not sure how it did in the US. It’s interesting that in 1960, Rank announced that it would make a version of the John Masters novel, The Nightrunners of Bengal, set during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 to be made by Box and Thomas, but this was cancelled. (Other projects cancelled by Rank around this time include Gentleman’s Gentlemen with Gene Kelly.)
SOS Pacific was originally developed by Sydney Box for Joseph Losey, who left the project to do Blind Date. It was directed instead by Guy Green, who does a decent job, and indeed the film was a nice surprise: a sort of ‘40s Warner Bros melodrama with a great ticking clock (people stuck on an island where they’re about to set off a nuclear bomb). Frenchman Eddie Constantine – a big name across the Channel due to the Lemmy Constantine films – was imported to play the lead. Rank had given up on trying to create its own stars by now and was going all-in on foreign stars.
For instance, Whirlpool starred German OW Fischer and Frenchwoman Juliette Greco in this tale of the former helping the latter flee from a stalker on a tugboat on the Rhine. American Lewis Allen directed, from a story by American screenwriter Lawrence Bachman, and the whole movie is perhaps the least British film made by Rank (though Muriel Pavlow is in it). It is flat and dull, a real oddity.
But nothing quite matched Ferry to Hong Kong, perhaps Rank’s most notorious attempt to storm world markets. It was an adventure tale (from a novel by Max Catto) about an alcoholic who lives on a ferry that travels between Macau and Hong Kong; he squabbles with the ferry captain and the ferry is taken over by pirates. The film was going to star Peter Finch (as the alcoholic) and Curt Jurgens (as the ferry captain) but then John Davis got ambitious and punted Finch, put Jurgens in Finch’s part and subbed in Orson Welles as the ferry captain. We love Welles (who would’ve been ideal to play the hero a decade earlier) but he gives a truly horrendous hammy performance here, sending the whole film up and wrecking the story in the process – and Jurgens isn’t much better. A huge flop: the greatest failure in the career of director Lewis Gilbert and one of the greatest in the history of Rank.
In October 1959, Rank announced a loss from its film production and distribution division of 875,000 pounds. It shut down more cinemas, wound up its loss-making American distribution arm, Rank Distributors of America, and its record company, and presumably did a lot of hard thinking about what would come next.
The year of 1959 was an interesting one for Rank. The success of Follow a Star showed Norman Wisdom still had box office pull. The Captain’s Table demonstrated that the “doctor” formula was not reliant on Dirk Bogarde or Ralph Thomas. The well budgeted thrillers were generally entertaining and popular, and sometimes even touched on controversial issues (eg race in Sapphire, atomic bombs in SOS Pacific). The studio seemed to give up on trying to turn its contract players into stars. It had a weird fascination to the point of obsession with European leading men and women as if that was the answer to its problems – OW Fischer, Curt Jurgens, Eddie Constantine, Horst Buchholz, Hardy Kruger, Tania Elg, Eva Bartok, Mylene Demongeot, Michele Presle, Juliette Greco. Some of the films are – like Floods of Fear from the previous year – barely British (Whirlpool, Ferry to Hong Kong). The faith in international adventures led to the high of North West Frontier and low of Ferry to Hong Kong. Some films were lovely surprises (The Captain’s Table, Tiger Bay, Blind Date, SOS Pacific), others you can’t believe how they were stuffed up (Ferry to Hong Kong, Operation Amsterdam, Desert Mice), some better than you think they would be (The 39 Steps), others you wonder why they made it (Whirlpool) and one classic (North West Frontier).
How would the studio respond in the coming year? Stay tuned.
