by Stephen Vagg
Our series on forgotten British film executives looks at the American head of production at the Rank Organisation.
Most of us who grew up on Rank movies of the 1950s and 1960s (A Night to Remember, Robbery Under Arms, etc) will be familiar with the name “Earl St John”, whose credit was plastered on many of them as executive producer. Ironically, St John isn’t a particularly well-remembered mogul, even for buffs who know a bit about the Rank Organisation. This is because St John’s fame has been completely overshadowed by his two superiors at Rank, whose personalities have dominated accounts of 1950s British filmmaking.
Firstly, there was company chairman J Arthur Rank, the Sunday school-teaching nepo baby whose passion for Britain and God led him to blow (or, rather, dent) his father’s mill owning-fortune on a film empire that aimed, and failed, to beat Hollywood at its own game. Secondly, there was John Davis, Rank’s notoriously rude, economically honest, sadistic, organisationally brilliant, wife-beating accountant turned Managing Director, famed for saving the company financially through cost-cutting measures and opportunistically investing in the Xerox machine. Davis especially is such a colourful character that the achievements (and otherwise) of St John – who was Rank’s actual head of production – are routinely overlooked. Indeed, a number of filmmakers who worked with both men, such as Betty E. Box, dismissed St John as a front man for Davis. And maybe he was; we were not there at the time.
But possibly, Earl St John made a greater contribution to Rank (and British cinema) than is commonly realised. Because that’s the tricky thing about examining the impact of film executives – if you haven’t done extensive research (and we’ve done some, but not a deep, deep dive), you are never quite sure what they did. Just because an executive is famous/notorious does not mean that they actually did that much. Still, St John had a long career and deserves to be treated with some respect.
The man who became so synonymous with British filmmaking was actually American, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1892. St John came to Britain as a soldier in World War One and decided to stay afterwards. He managed various cinemas, eventually going to work for Paramount theatres, then the Odeon chain, and eventually the Rank Organisation (which bought out Odeon). In 1946, the Rank Organisation appointed St John its chief production adviser and the following year St John became managing director of Two Cities, the production company which had been bought by Rank, and whose output included Olivier’s Hamlet.
In December 1948, by which time the British film industry and Rank had been brought to the point of ruin following cost blow outs and a trade war, St John was appointed head of production at Rank; he basically kept that position until his retirement in 1964. (He died on holiday in Spain in 1968.)
Under St John, Rank was a main, if not the main, producer of British films, turning out 15-20 year. It (roughly) operated along Hollywood major studio lines, with a vertically integrated system of production, distribution and exhibition, key personnel under long-term contract, and a home studio base (Pinewood). Davis was the real power at Rank, but his attention was spread out over various businesses, while St John focused on film production; even if the American was fond of a tipple and not a particularly hard worker (as numerous accounts attest), he still would have inevitably wielded considerable influence.
The 1950s is generally considered an unexciting time in British cinema, outshone by the movies made in the decades on either side, and marked by consistent failed attempts to break into the American market. Against this, it must be noted that British film producers during this time were often in tune with what the public wanted: the biggest hits of the year were routinely local movies, the biggest stars were locals, and many of both came from Rank under Earl St John.
The best remembered were comedies, such as the Doctor series with Dirk Bogarde, Genevieve, and Norman Wisdom comedies, all of which were hugely lucrative. According to accounts of filmmakers – and we are inclined to believe them – St John was reluctant to make Genevieve and the first “Doctor”, Doctor in the House, but he can claim to be the great champion of Wisdom – the mogul spotted the comic on television and fully backed him in a proper vehicle, Trouble in Store, and was rewarded with a series of hit movies.
Speculating from what we know of this period – and we stress, this is educated guess work – St John may not have been comfortable with truly indigenous British comedy: for instance, he spotted the talent of screenwriter Norman Hudis, and put him under contract, but didn’t use him well, and Hudis went on to create the Carry On movies for Rank’s rivals at Anglo Amalgamated – discussed here. However, St John seemed to respond to the more universal Chaplin-esque appeal of Wisdom. And of course, he was happy to green light sequels/rip offs to any of Rank’s hits.
St John seemed more at home with war stories, of which Rank made many: principally about World War Two (They Were Not Divided, Malta Story, Above Us the Waves, Reach for the Sky, Ill Met By Moonlight, Battle of the River Plate, The One That Got Away) but also on colonial frontiers (The Planter’s Wife, Simba, Northwest Frontier). These cost more than the comedies but were generally successful, sometimes spectacularly so.
Under St John, Rank also made a large number of thrillers and dramas, even though none of them seemed to do that well commercially (Hunted, The Net, Forbidden Cargo, House of Secrets, Passage Home, Jacqueline, Lost, Eyewitness, Floods of Fear) – this was perhaps to do with the fact that they were relatively inexpensive, could chew up studio overhead and use contracted talent. This was a mistake – just because a genre is cheap to produce, doesn’t mean you should work in that sphere. In hindsight, Rank would have been better off making less movies overall and spending a little more on classy literary adaptations, and historical dramas, where the studio had a pretty good track record (The Importance of Being Earnest, The Browning Version, Trio, Tale of Two Cities, Night to Remember).
St John also had little luck with female-skewed stories. He did try but usually came a cropper at the box office (Young Lovers, Romeo and Juliet, Passionate Summer), unless Dirk Bogarde was in them (The Wind Cannot Read, The Spanish Gardener). St John had a definite eye for female talent, putting actresses with genuine star potential under long term contract, such as Kay Kendall, Diana Dors, Petula Clark, and Virginia McKenna. However, he lacked the knack to really develop them. Even when he put a female star in a good movie (eg. Kendall in Genevieve, McKenna in A Town Like Alice and Carve Her Name with Pride) he couldn’t follow it up – Dors, Clark and Kendall all did far better work at other studios.
This flowed over to his male stars. St John gets credit for signing Peter Finch to a long-term contract but for every decent movie that the Australian made for Rank (A Town Like Alice, No Love for Johnnie) there would be a string of duds (Windom’s Way, Operation Amsterdam, Simon and Laura) and Finch’s career didn’t thrive until he got away from Rank.
Having said that, St John did very well by some of his male stars such as John Gregson, Anthony Steel, Kenneth More and especially Dirk Bogarde, who was probably Rank’s jewel in the crown. Bogarde mocked St John in his memoirs, but the American (and John Davis) gave Bogarde plenty of opportunities to vary his range, even allowing him to appear as a gay man in the career-changing Victim. (Contrasting this, St John also had Tony Wright.)
Speaking of Victim, Rank’s films under St John were famously timid in their story angles, especially compared to rivals such as Woodfall, Bryanston, Hammer and Romulus (the studio turned down chances to make Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Look Back in Anger, and cancelled the Dirk Bogarde Lawrence of Arabia at the last minute). However, the odd gutsy movie did sneak through, such as Hell Drivers, No Love for Johnnie and Sapphire. And Rank backed Allied Filmmakers, the filmmaking consortium that produced a series of terrific movies such as Victim and Whistle on the Wind (directed by Bryan Forbes, a rare filmmaker who wrote warmly of St John).
Based on accounts of filmmakers, it seems that St John wasn’t very helpful creatively if a movie got in trouble, in the way, say Daryl Zanuck, James Woolf, Ted Black, or Alex Korda could be. On the other hand, we have not read too many accounts of him shoving his nose in and causing drama, which apparently John Davis was prone to doing. (We haven’t gone into John Davis in depth here because that’s worth its own article.) Earl St John seems to have been universally liked, though not necessarily respected.
St John was an unusual mogul. It can’t have been easy running Rank with John Davis lurking about: especially after 1956 when Davis seemed to take a more active interest in movie making and television started really decimating cinema audiences. Still, under St John, Rank managed to turn out some popular comedies and war films, did try to expand its range, and some of its films were very good. St John’s record is… okay. He was not the executive that Rank really needed – which was someone like Ted Black, and who was better on script than St John (Rank’s screenplays were consistently poor). But then it was unlikely that Ted Black would have survived at Rank under Davis. And St John had a far better strike rate than the heads of production at Rank who followed him such as Freddie Thomas and Tony Williams.
If Earl St John wasn’t quite the cinematic “giant” that Bryan Forbes once called him, he was a survivor who did some fine work and better than his reputation suggests.
Main Image: St John with his wife Beatrice at a function in the 1960s.
