by Stephen Vagg
The year that things turned sexy.
As discussed in our previous piece in this series, the year 1960 saw the film production and distribution division of Rank return to profitability due to a combination of hit films, a reduction in expensive productions, and a reversion to the studio’s mid-‘50s template of thrillers and comedies. Nineteen sixty-one would see a continuation of this trend, with one crucial change – Rank would also make some (gasp) sexy dramas.
British cinema of the 1950s was a notoriously unsexy time. You were far more likely to see plunging cleavage in, say, a Gainsborough melodrama of the 1940s than in the more uptight 1950s – especially from the Rank Organisation, run by the methodist J. Arthur Rank.
However, times were clearly changing and some of the most popular British films were more adult: Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (originally offered to Rank), Look Back in Anger (also originally offered to Rank), Hammer horrors, etc; there were even some sexy scenes in war movies like Ice Cold in Alex. Rank had dipped its toe in more serious waters with Sapphire and League of Gentlemen and would continue this trend in 1961.
In August 1960, Earl St John announced that Rank would make fifteen films that year. “About a third will be comedies,” he said. “The remainder will be dramas – some of them more frankly adult than we have ever attempted before. We must move with the times.”
He elaborated that Rank would make “films with contemporary subjects suitable for a world market. All these films will be made with good taste and there will be no sensationalism.”
This appeared to work, and Rank’s film production and distribution division recorded a profit of 529,000 pounds for the year ended October 1961.
What did they make, exactly?
Well, the British films that Rank released throughout the year of 1961 included:
– comedies (Very Important Person, No My Darling Daughter, In the Doghouse, Over the Odds);
– crime second features (Information Received, Pit of Darkness, Murder in Eden, The Long Shadow);
– sexy dramas (The Singer Not the Song, No Love for Johnnie, Flame in the Streets, Victim); and
– a child orientated drama (Whistle Down the Wind).
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To tackle the comedies first… For the first time since 1953, Rank didn’t have a new “doctor” or Norman Wisdom film to release, which would have been nerve wracking. However, they did have No My Darling Daughter from the team of Betty Box and Ralph Thomas, which introduced Juliette Mills to screen audiences as the nubile schoolgirl daughter of industrialist Michael Redgrave, who falls for Redgrave’s uncomfortably-older-than-her-but-those-were-the-times employee Michael Craig. Despite a Parent Trap-esque title song duet between Mills and Redgrave, the film did not seem to do that well (being in black and white probably hurt). However, Very Important Person, a war comedy from Ken Annakin and Independent Artists starring James Robertson Justice and Leslie Phillips, was a big hit. In the Doghouse, with Phillips and Peggy Cummins, also did quite nicely. (Sidebar: Cummins was an Irish actress best remembered for being fired off Forever Amber and appearing in drama classics like Gun Crazy and Night of the Demon but was in a lot of British comedies around this time.) Over the Odds was a cheap independent comedy that made little noise.
It is odd that there were no straight war films. Rank could have bought the rights to the stage hit The Long and the Short and the Tall but turned it down and watched as Michael Balcon turned it into one of the most popular movies of 1961, despite a bad studio set and Laurence Harvey’s terrible performance. We’re not sure why Rank steered away from straight war films in the 1960s as the studio had a very strong track record in them – maybe they were too expensive? One thing that definitely hurt the studio was John Davis punishing Kenneth More for heckling him at a dinner by refusing to put him in movies – we’ve covered that episode here – and it happened around this time.
Rank’s crime second features of 1961 were stock efforts from independent companies: the bottom was about to drop out of that market. Of more interest was Shadow of a Cat, a horror film made by Hammer but distributed by Rank. Horror was not Rank’s cup of tea, and the reason it distributed this film seemed to come about because of Rank’s association with Universal, who financed the movie. It’s not really a Rank movie, but we wanted to mention it because it had some connection to the organisation.
Whistle Down the Wind was a child focused drama, a genre that had given Rank some of its greatest successes (Hunted, The Little Kidnappers, The Spanish Gardener, Tiger Bay) but also lots of “received with a shrug” movies (Jacqueline, The Secret Place, Innocent Sinners, The Heart of a Child, Snowball). Whistle Down the Wind was a complete commercial and artistic triumph, helped by the star power of Hayley Mills and the directorial skill of Bryan Forbes (plus the X factor of newcomer Alan Barnes) – although, like many films from Forbes, it feels as though it needed an extra plot twist. The movie was another hit for Allied Film Makers the filmmaking co-op established in 1959.
Now, let’s get to the good stuff – the sex dramas. These were a remarkable quartet of movies:
– The Singer Not the Song – homoerotic Western with leather-clad Dirk Bogarde in love with priest John Mills;
– No Love for Johnnie – lazy Labor MP Peter Finch leaves his commie wife and shags young Mary Peach;
– Flame in the Streets – white Sylvia Syms loves black Johnny Sekka to the shock of Sym’s dad John Mills; and
– Victim – murder mystery around death of man in love with closeted gay lawyer Dirk Bogarde who is married to Syms.
Full on!
The Singer Not the Song rivals Ferry to Hong Kong as the most bizarre Rank in-house movie. It was not only an in-house production, but one with all the trimmings – a big budget, based on a popular novel, an international adventure tale, location filming overseas (Spain), big stars (Bogarde, Mills), foreign starlet (Mylène Demongeot), and distinguished director (Roy Ward Baker). The original novel was a hot property, optioned by various producers over the years – Ken Annakin desperately wanted to do it for some reason (maybe he dreamed of making a Western, many British directors do… instead, he made The Hellions around this time). The result is a weird camp concoction with a leather-clad Bogarde making eyes at John Mills at his most sexless. Everyone blamed the casting for the movie’s failure, and that didn’t help, but the other departments don’t shower themselves in glory. The film made a profit in 23 years according to Roy Baker. This was the last of the big Rank international adventure movies – at least until The Long Duel several years later.
Bogarde played a more outwardly gay character in Victim, a terrific procedural from Allied Filmmakers and the team of Basil Dearden, Michael Relph, and Janet Green, who had made Sapphire. The original choice for the lead was Jack Hawkins, who possibly would have killed the film – numerous other stars turned down the role before it was reconfigured for a younger actor and offered to Bogarde, who provided the performance of his life. The film was well done, a solid critical and commercial hit, and Allied Film Makers were now batting three out of four. The BBC even did a radio play about the Victim’s making, with actors playing Bogarde, Dearden, Relph, Green, censor John Trevelyan, critic Alexander Walker and so on… you can access it here.
Dearden/Relph and Rank had enjoyed two popular films that combined murder mysteries with racy subject matter in Sapphire and Victim. After this, they never did it again. Why not? One of the many mysteries of the Rank Organisation was that it milked some formulas to death (e.g. attempts to find new “doctor” movies or comics to match Norman Wisdom, generic thrillers, international adventure tales) but other, successful ones, it did not make nearly enough of (eg adaptations of literary classics, female-led war melodramas, war films, murder mysteries revolving around a racy subject matter).
Flame in the Streets could have done with a murder mystery plot. It was a racial drama based on a script by Ted Willis that had been done on television, and has the Willis virtues (tidy structure, a social point) and deficiencies (no one feels like a real person, the female roles are dire). Its heart is in the right place, some scenes retain their power, and the issues are still relevant. Good on Rank for making it, in colour and CinemaScope and at least it gives black actors something to play. The public didn’t like it much, though – mostly because it was dull.
The success of Doctor in Love saw Ralph Thomas and Betty Box given the chance to film No Love for Johnnie, based on an acclaimed novel. It’s extremely well made with superb work from Peter Finch but is also (surprisingly) dramatically underwhelming. The movie didn’t recover its cost at the box office; Ralph Thomas blamed politics, but we think the main reason is the lead has no drive, no passion – he’s bad at his job, slacks off, doesn’t care about anything, just sort of flounders around. If Finch’s character had ambition and drive like the leads of Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this film would’ve had more kick. Nonetheless, No Love for Johnnie remains a high point in the career of Finch, Box and Thomas.
Thus, the year 1961 demonstrated that the Rank Organisation could move in new directions… to a degree. The studio’s big hits were fresh takes on traditional genres: comedy (Very Important Persons), thrillers (Victim) and child-orientated dramas (Whistle Down the Wind). It still struggled to make international adventure tales (The Singer Not the Song) and broad-appeal contemporary dramas that didn’t focus around a murder (The Flame in the Streets, No Love for Johnnie). But the Organisation deserves points for rolling the dice a few times and it had been restored to profitability.
