by Stephen Vagg
When the sixties started to swing in England
The years of 1963 and 1964 were among the most exciting in British cinema history. These are just some of the movies that came out during that time: From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Tom Jones, Lawrence of Arabia, The VIPs, The Great Escape, A Hard Day’s Night, Summer Holiday, Zulu, Kiss of the Vampire, The Servant, Becket, Bill Liar, The Damned, The Haunting, Jason and the Argonauts, Dr Strangelove, The Leather Boys, The Masque of the Red Death, Lord of the Flies, The Pumpkin Eater. During these years Britain was a world leader in cinema – culturally, commercially, and critically.
By way of contrast, the films from the Rank Organisation during these years were a little tame, and few in number (only four British films from Rank were released in 1964). They comprised of the following:
– sexy dramas (This Sporting Life, Bitter Harvest, The Beauty Jungle);
– comedies (A Stitch in Time, Father Came Too, Hot Enough for June, Doctor in Distress, Strictly for the Birds);
– thrillers (Stronghold, 80,000 Suspects, The Informers, Farewell Performance, Seance on a Wet Afternoon); and
– a musical (Live It Up)
Financially, the years were solid. In October 1963, Rank’s film production and distribution division reported a healthy profit of 435,000 pounds, although that dropped to 174,000 pounds the following year.
The studio owed this strong performance chiefly to the comedies. Rank managed to persuade Dirk Bogarde, Betty Box and Ralph Thomas to reunite for one more “doctor” movie – this was Doctor in Distress (1963), which managed to be a hit, though Bogarde was getting too old to play someone luckless in love (Samantha Eggar was his co-star, although the film belongs to James Robertson Justice as much as Bogarde). The movie has some funny bits, but it lacks the soul of previous films – no one really grows or makes friends, or forms a relationship, like the earlier ones in the series.
The team of Box, Thomas and Bogarde also produced a light-hearted spy story, Hot Enough for June (1964), which is a lot of fun, with pleasing photography and European locations plus a superb support cast, although it’s not quite funny enough to be a spoof or exciting enough to constitute a thriller. The film did reasonably well at the box office. Bogarde got a lot more acclaim for The Servant (1963), made for Warner Bros during this time, but the actor was clearly still reluctant to leave the Rank nest.
Rank was lucky, from a financial point of view, to release another Norman Wisdom movie in 1963, A Stitch in Time. This was another commercial blockbuster – producer Hugh Stewart claimed that they did “James Bond business with it”. Wisdom had been a top-level box-office star for a decade now, which was astonishing and longer than any of his contemporaries.
Father Came Too (1964) was a cheerful sequel to The Fast Lady, discussed here, and it was an old school low-budget Rank effort that was profitable. Rank collaborated with the Bond producers, Eon, on a Bob Hope comedy, Call Me Bwana, but operated on that film mostly as a distributor.
The company also invested in a cheap comedy, Strictly for the Birds (1964), which unsuccessfully tried to make a star of someone called Tony Tanner, who we had to google – he was a stage star (who later became a top director and choreographer).
As discussed in previous essays in this series, Rank had dipped its toe in the water of some sexy dramas during the early sixties with films such as Victim and No Love for Johnnie. The organisation continued this trend in 1963 with two tales of working-class types who have lots of sex, both made through Independent Artists: This Sporting Life and Bitter Harvest.
The best known of the two was This Sporting Life, which launched Richard Harris as a star, and no wonder: he gets to glower and swagger, thump around on the rugby league field, kiss/roger/slap women, suffer unrequited love, have people lust after him, rail at the unfairness of life, be nice to kids, have tormented relationships with everyone. It’s extremely well directed (by Lindsay Anderson) and acted (by Rachel Roberts among others) but lost money; this was possibly due to the fact that the sexual content which helped earlier dramas become hits (Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) could now be found in the more escapist worlds of James Bond and Tom Jones. Furthermore, This Sporting Life was over two hours long and is really depressing, even for a kitchen sink drama.
Even less successful at the box office was Bitter Harvest, a cautionary tale of a wayward woman, played by Janet Munro in her only real star vehicle. The movie was done in by a hopelessly sexist, lecturing script, where Munro’s character is endlessly punished for daring to not want to settle with a controlling mediocre idiot (John Strine); it’s a film that is inherently sympathetic to its heroine but also hates her. (The director was replaced during filming.) This movie flopped and Independent Artists soon wound-up operations, with its producers going into television. It’s a shame as, notwithstanding the poor quality of Bitter Harvest, Independent Artists had been one of the most vibrant, skilled production companies in England, and provided the Rank Organisation with a number of excellent movies (Tiger Bay, Blind Date, Never Let Go, etc).
In September 1963, John Davis, chairman of the Rank Organisation, announced that Rank would not make any more X-rated films, declaring “I think many of the industry’s problems are caused by too many X films. The pictures are still family entertainment.”
If this comment was dumb, it also wasn’t surprising – Rank was always awkward with risque subject matter. However, 1964 did see the release of writer-director Val Guest’s The Beauty Jungle, a slightly racy expose of the beauty racket. Guest claimed that the film just did “alright” at the box office, blaming the lack of names in the cast (it starred Janette Scott and Ian Hendry).
Incidentally, one can’t help wondering why Rank didn’t make a war movie during this period, a genre where the studio had such a strong track record, and that was still popular (eg United Artists’ 633 Squadron and The Great Escape, Embassy’s Zulu). Maybe such movies were too expensive. (Rank did release the low budget The Bay of Saint Michel.)
Rank’s thrillers of 1963 and 1964 were pretty good. Val Guest, who’d made a series of terrific thrillers for Hammer, provided a not-bad virus movie, 80000 Suspects, one of what would be several attempts by the British film industry that decade to turn Richard Johnson into a movie star. Director Ken Annakin made The Informers, a solid crime movie. Stronghold and Farewell Performance were both “B”s. None of the films were particularly big hits though, or even critically acclaimed.
However, another thriller, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, made through Allied Film Makers, did make a splash. This was an evocative kidnapping story which offered a rare leading role for American Method acting icon Kim Stanley, who appeared alongside Richard Attenborough. It was written and directed with tremendous skill by Bryan Forbes. Unfortunately, commercial response was not strong (it did better in the US than Britain), leading to the end of Allied Film Makers. Still, the whole Allied Film makers story is very much in Rank’s credit column.
We should also add that in 1964, Rank released the very popular thriller The Chalk Garden , from a British play with British crew, director and stars (Hayley Mills, Deborah Kerr)… but it was from Universal, via producer Ross Hunter. (Universal had a close relationship with Rank). This was typical of British cinema in the 1960s, much of it was financed by Hollywood – in part, because companies like Rank were wary about going all-in.
Live It Up was a jukebox musical starring David Hemmings, featuring several acts such a Gene Vincent and Australia’s own Patsy Ann Noble. It’s sweet but was very late in the cycle. Like so many movies financed by Rank, it followed the trends rather than breaking them, but it is a lot of fun.
In June 1964, Earl St John announced his retirement as head of production at Rank (he would die on holiday in Spain four years later). That year, the Rank Organisation reported a huge increase in profits, due mainly to the success of Xerox machines, in which the company had made an opportune investment. However, it did restore Rank’s bravery when it came to financing films and the organisation was about to increase production again… with disastrous consequences. Stay tuned. (There’s only a few more of these to go, we swear.)
