by Stephen Vagg
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten British movie moguls looks at the third part of Nat Cohen’s career
In early 1962, 50% of Anglo-Amalgamated was bought by the British film and television company, Associated British, which was part-owned by the American studio, Warner Bros. This made Anglo’s owners, Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, firmly part of the British filmmaking establishment.
They now had greater access to finance and cinemas in Britain and the US. It also meant that Cohen and Levy would be answerable to the Associated British board. Still, they were appointed to that board, and since Associated bought Anglo for its expertise, it was expected to be a happy marriage – and this proved to be the case.
Nonetheless, there were some dark clouds on the horizon. Cinema attendances continued to fall, television continued to grow, and the “second feature” market, which earned Anglo such a steady cash flow, was clearly not going to last forever (spoilers: it was effectively over by the mid-sixties). Nat Cohen, as ever ambitious and keen to keep up with the market, probably sensed this and was keen to further diversify.
So, he was receptive when producer Joseph Janni approached him seeking finance for two films with documentary filmmaker John Schlesinger: A Kind of Loving, a social realist look at a courtship between a young couple, and Billy Liar, a comedy about a fantasist. Neither were typical Anglo-Amalgamated productions, which, as discussed in earlier parts to this series, tended to be Carry On style comedies, horror, crime dramas or rock musicals. Both of Janni’s projects belonged to more the British new wave, a film movement that started in the late 1950s, coming out of British theatre and television, famed for its angry young men, working class heroes, kitchen sink realism and sex.
Cohen was intrigued. While several British new wave movies had flopped (Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer), others turned a tidy profit (A Tase of Honey) and some became blockbusters (Room at the Top, Saturday Night Sunday Morning). The common element for the ones that made money were, to be frank, sex – if a new wave film had hot people having sex, there was a market for it.
Cohen wanted to make Billy Liar first because it was based on a successful play. However, Janni pushed for A Kind of Loving, which turned out to be the right decision. Starring Alan Bates and June Ritchie, the film was superbly done and had just the right amount of sexual content to be a hit – it was one of the most successful films at the 1962 British box office, turning Bates into a star.
Billy Liar with Tom Courtenay made a big critical splash but it lost money. Maybe it was too depressing for a comedy, or it didn’t have enough sex. What it did have were positive reviews and an exciting new star: Julie Christie (a last minute replacement when the original actress fell ill during filming), whose charisma was superbly displayed, encouraging Cohen to put her under a multi-picture contract. Both movies launched John Schlesinger’s directing career and remain key British works of the sixties.
The success of A Kind of Loving encouraged Cohen to invest in two British new wave movies with the stars of that film, one with Alan Bates, the other with June Ritchie. The Bates one was Nothing but the Best, a Room at the Top-style black comedy about a social climber, directed by Clive Donner. Screenwriter Frederick Raphael later claimed Cohen and Levy disliked the rough cut, being unable to understand it, prompting Raphael to add a voice over where everything confusing was explained. Raphael also said Cohen and Levy suggested the title but “Nat and Stu left the rest to us: they preferred going to the races”. This was another example of the routine dismissal of Cohen and Levy’s talents by people who made films for them. Like Billy Liar, Nothing but the Best was a commercial flop but received excellent reviews – so positive that they briefly turned Clive Donner into one of the hottest directors in the world: he was promptly signed to make What’s Up Pussycat?
The June Ritchie film that Cohen financed was This is My Street, where Ritchie played a married woman having an affair with Ian Hendry, who then falls for her sister (superbly played by Australia’s own Annette Andre). The film, very kitchen sinky but well done, was made by some old Anglo-Amalgamated hands. The executive producer was Peter Rogers, the man behind the Carry On films and other comedies, finally allowed to make a drama; while the director was Sidney Hayers, who had made a bunch of crime and horror films for Cohen, notably Circus of Fear. The film is interesting and well-acted but was a box office flop (even though it had sex). For some reason, it didn’t make much of a critical impact, either – it’s not even mentioned in Rogers’ authorised biography. If you don’t think critics make a difference, just ask Sidney Hayers – Clive Donner is no better director than Hayers, but he got the reviews and was thus whisked off to Hollywood; Hayers toiled in B-land for the rest of his career (though he did eventually move to LA to get work, it was never A-list).
Despite Billy Liar’s lukewarm commercial performance, Janni and Schlesinger helped devise a vehicle for Julie Christie, written by Frederic Raphael – Darling – which no one but Cohen was willing to finance. This was a gamble as, once more, the film was a complete departure for Anglo-Amalgamated: at heart it was an old fashioned melodrama about a woman whose life is glamorous but empty down deep (there’s always a market for such tales if done right because you can vicariously enjoy the high life while being reassured about your own dull existence because the pretty people are unhappy). It had Christie’s charisma, lots of sex, and was given tremendous contemporary quality by Schlesinger’s handling – jump cuts, zooms, non-synchronous sound, first person voice over, tricky visuals, man-in-the-street interviews, pastiche commercials, etc. The British liked it, and the Yanks loved it. Christie and Raphael both won Oscars – Cohen later said this was one of the highlights of his career; he had backed talent, even after the flops of Billy Liar and Nothing but the Best, and been handsomely rewarded.
(Sidebar: two men who helped sell Darling in the US were Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, who represented Cohen and credited him with encouraging their producing aspirations. They became one of the major producing forces in Hollywood with movies such as Rocky and Raging Bull.)
Cohen invested in the next Janni-Schlesinger-Christie collaboration, Far from the Madding Crowd. This was really establishment stuff – a big budgeted co-production with MGM. The film was high quality but lost a lot of money – it cost far too much and never broke through in the way Darling had. Cohen was reminded of what happened when he strayed too far from his basic principles of keeping costs down. (MGM never operated by this tactic and as a result went broke by the end of the sixties.)
However, Janni continued to justify Cohen’s faith in him by encouraging the impresario to invest in another kitchen sink drama – Poor Cow, the feature debut of director Ken Loach. Loach had become a national sensation with his television plays Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home which both starred Carol White, who would be in Poor Cow. The film was full of social realism but did not cost too much, had an established star (Terence Stamp, who Loach says was suggested by Cohen), a new star (White), and a plenty of sex (the Carol White character was promiscuous). Loach struggled to reconcile his working methods with those of Janni/Anglo (he didn’t want stars or colour) but Poor Cow was a box office hit. Cohen had thus helped launch the career of another topflight British director.
This period saw Cohen revive his interest in rock musicals which had proved so lucrative for him with The Tommy Steele Story (he was possibly motivated by the box office success of Cliff Richard movies, which proved lucrative for Associated British). He invested in Play It Cool with Billy Fury, the first film directed by Michael Winner.
Winner was a rare director who paid tribute to Cohen in his memoirs, calling him “the greatest movie executive I ever encountered in England”. Cohen also put money into the musicals I’ve Gotta a Horse (another with Fury) and Three Hats for Lisa (starring Joe Brown, a name at the time) as well as Gonks Go Beat, a curio which featured 16 musical numbers performed by a variety of artists. Another kind of musical with Cohen money was Some People, starring Kenneth More as a man who helps gets kids out of crime and into music; a surprise hit, it was made to help the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme.
Cohen’s most notable rock musical of the sixties wound up not being much of a musical in the end, but was still a major work. Catch Us if You Can was an attempt to do for The Dave Clark Five what A Hard Day’s Night did for The Beatles. This was the first feature from TV documentarian John Boorman who, like so many filmmakers who owed their break to Cohen, made fun of him in his memoirs, calling Cohen “chronically inarticulate, particularly when he was angry or perplexed. He relied on David [Deutsch, a producer] to supply the missing words.”
Boorman decided to not have the Dave Clark Five perform in the film, although the songs were heard on the soundtrack. The film’s crew was stacked with talent: the script was written by Peter Nichols (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg), Deutch’s assistant was Alex Jacobs (who became a legendary screenwriter) and the dialogue director was Australian theatre man Michael Blakemore. The film was experimental, pessimistic, not that musical and with a glum lead. As a standard teen rock musical, it failed to fulfil expectations and was a box office disappointment. However, it was also a brilliantly made, fascinating, innovative, and even haunting movie, and a critical darling – as for Clive Donner in Nothing but the Best, its reviews helped launch Boorman’s career (his next film was MGM’s Point Blank, written by Jacobs, and produced by Chartoff and Winkler… so, that movie was full of Nat Cohen connections).
One final note on Cohen and musicals – in the mid-sixties he announced that he would finance a big budget version of the stage hit Lock Up Your Daughters! produced by Deutsch, but evidently changed his mind: the film was done at Columbia (and flopped).
Cohen never went all in on horror movies, but he was partial to the genre if the offer was right. In the 1960s, Anglo made a series of co-productions with AIP starring Vincent Price and using American scripts and directors: The Masque of the Red Death, The Tomb of Ligeia and War Gods of the Deep. The first two of these, Poe pictures directed by Roger Corman, were absolute classics, and if they’re really more AIP pictures than Anglo ones, they’re still a credit to the company (Ligeia was the first notable script credit for Robert Towne). War Gods was a lot sillier if fun; truth be told, it was more sci-fi fantasy than horror.
Incidentally, Anglo was prone to investing in the odd sci-fi effort, too, like Invasion and Unearthly Stranger.
In the crime area, Anglo continued to make Edgar Wallace Mysteries and Scales of Justice shorts, but television ate into its market too much and these wound up in 1965 and 1967 respectively.
One of Cohen’s “A” crime pictures was The Mind Benders, a thriller from the team of Michael Relph and Dearden, with Dirk Bogarde – the sort of group that typically worked for Rank, but Rank was, in hindsight, in terminal decline by this stage as a filmmaking outfit.
Cohen provided some money to producer Harry Alan Towers for a series of movies that would be filmed in various locations around the world. Towers’ movies for Cohen include adaptations of Sax Rohmer (the Fu Manchu franchise – The Face of Fu Manchu, The Brides of Fu Manchu, etc – and the Sumuru franchise), light thrillers (Our Man in Marrakesh, Five Golden Dragons), horror thrillers (Circus of Fear), a rip-off of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (Rocket to the Moon), a rip-off of One Million Years BC (Eve).
The quality of Towers’ overall output throughout his career was, er, variable, but his films with Anglo-Amalgamated easily rank among Towers’ finest, helped by the fact that many of them were directed by Australian Don Sharp. The Face of Fu Manchu is probably the best movie Towers ever made.
Anglo continued to make comedies, chiefly the Carry On series, which, unlike most franchises, got better as it went along. After Carry on Cruising, Norman Hudis was replaced as resident writer by Talbot Rothwell for Carry on Cabby, injecting new energy into the series: Carry on Jack, Carry on Spying, Carry On Cleo (often considered the best in the series), Carry on Cowboy and Carry on Screaming. Non-Carry On comedies included Crooks Anonymous, She’ll Have to Go, Twice Round the Daffodils, Nurse on Wheels, The Iron Maiden, and The Big Job.
Then, bizarrely, Nat Cohen decided not to make any more Carry On movies. According to Peter Rogers, Cohen took Rogers out to lunch and dumped him. Rogers was understandably stunned as the films kept making money. He went over to the Rank Organisation and set up shop there, resuming the series with Don’t Lose Your Head (there was some uncertainty about using the Carry On name for a while but this was eventually resolved and the Carry On franchise continued at Rank until the 1970s).
Rogers later claimed that he heard Cohen got rid of the Carry On movies because Cohen was suffering from “a touch of culture up the arse” and wanted to make more “significant” films. Rogers added, “I know that Nat’s daughter was often moaning that her father continued to distribute the films, and this seemed to offend her cultural susceptibilities.”
Rogers, like so many filmmakers, was prone to mocking Cohen: in his authorised biography Mr. Carry On: the Life and Work of Peter Rogers, he claims that during the making of Carry on Sergeant, Cohen would call up to complain that the rushes weren’t funny; he also says that Cohen was a little lecherous with the actresses in the Carry On series. These claims are believable – when Cohen made Carry On Sergeant he had nil experience of comedy, and the impresario was apparently a bit of a sleaze with an eye for a pretty girl (critic David Shipman said people would routinely run into Cohen escorting a range of young ladies usually introduced as ‘Have you met my niece?’).
Cohen junking a popular series feels bizarre and contrary to everything in his career – but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. After all, the period when Cohen sacked Rogers was a time when Darling had just won a bunch of Oscars, and Anglo-Amalgamated were investing in films like Far from the Madding Crowd. It was also when the B picture operations of Anglo were being phased out and Cohen may have dreamed of the company becoming a traditional major studio. Furthermore, Cohen’s judgement may have been off because of events in his personal life…
Cohen, whose wife had died in 1948, had two daughters, Jacqueline and Angela. In 1956, Jacqueline was diagnosed with Hodgkins’s disease and lived in great pain. A few years later, she found a drug that caused her condition to improve; however, in 1964 the drug started having negative effects and she had to go off it. On 3 February 1965 she died, aged 31, leaving behind a husband, a daughter, and her father Nat Cohen.
Then in June 1966, Cohen’s business partner for over twenty years, Stuart Levy (a fellow widower who’d lost his own daughter just four years earlier), died of a heart attack. Cohen was now in charge of Anglo-Amalgamated alone.
Within eighteen months, Cohen had lost his daughter and his business partner, someone who could keep an eye on operations in London while Cohen developed strong relationships in the US that were so crucial to his operation finance; someone he could bounce ideas off. Rogers said he wondered if Cohen would have ended the Carry On films “if Stuart Levy was still alive.”
(One upside: Levy had lived long enough to see his horse, Anglo, win the Grand National in March 1966 at odds of 50-1.)
It is to Cohen’s credit that he managed to keep going. After Levy’s death, Anglo invested in Poor Cow, the Harry Alan Towers movies, the Sean Connery Western Shalako, the comedy All Neat in Black Stockings (which launched Susan George). However, overall, Anglo’s output seemed to be in decline. For instance, he bought the screen rights to the play There’s a Girl in My Soup, but these were passed over to the Boulting brothers.
What revived Cohen’s career was a corporate restructure. In 1969, Associated British was taken over by EMI. Since Anglo was owned 50% by Associated British, it now meant that EMI was part owner of Associated British. This might have meant it was retirement time for Cohen, but the head of EMI, Bernard Delfont, admired Cohen (the two men went way back), appointing him to the EMI board and ensuring Cohen had his own filmmaking unit. As we will show in part four, the move was, eventually, to make Cohen the most powerful person in the British film industry.
Looking back, the period of 1962-68 was probably the artistic peak of Cohen’s career. During this period, he financed the first and/or breakthrough films of artists such as Michael Winner, John Schlesinger, Ken Loach, John Boorman, Alex Jacobs, Clive Donner, Frederic Raphael, Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay and Carol White. The Carry On films reached their creative peak under Cohen as did Harry Allan Towers, and Don Sharp. Roger Corman made two of his masterpieces. Many of the British production companies that helped form the British new wave ultimately found it too hard to keep going throughout the decade – Allied Filmmakers, Bryanston, Independent Artists. Many legendary British impresarios died (James Woolf, Earl St John, Stuart Levy) or were forced into unwilling retirement (Herbert Wilcox, Michael Balcon). But not Anglo-Amalgamated and Nat Cohen. They kept on going. And there was more to come.
This is the third part in Stephen Vagg’s series on British film mogul Nat Cohen. Part one went until 1957, covering the formation of Cohen’s partnership with Stuart Levy and the creation of Anglo-Amalgamated, a company that became a leading producer of “B” crime films. Part two covered the period until 1961 when Anglo evolved into the most prolific filmmaking company in Britain by branching out into low-budget comedies, rock musicals, and horror films, as well as keeping up a steady diet of crime.
