by Stephen Vagg
Our exploration into the world of Britain’s Rank Organisation looks at its output from 1956.
This article is a sequel to our earlier pieces on the companies British Film-Makers and Group Film Productions, both of them the leading film making arms of the Rank Organisation in the 1950s.
British Film-Makers went from 1951 to 1953, then was succeeded by Group Film Productions from 1953 to 1955. Group Film Productions was, in turn, replaced by a new company, Rank Organisation Film Productions, which would be the main company through which Rank made movies until the late 1960s. We’ve got no idea why the organisation changed the name from “Group Film Productions” to “Rank Organisation Film Productions” – maybe it wanted to brand the films more obviously as “Rank”.
This particular article will look at the first twelve films made by Rank Organisation Film Productions. With one exception, they all came out in 1956.
These twelve films weren’t the only ones financed by Rank during 1956. It continued to make movies through other companies, mostly Ealing Studios, which had a nearly ten year relationship with the Rank Organisation.
It worked like this: Ealing was basically independent, with its own staff, head of production (Michael Balcon) and studio operations at Elstree, although Rank picked up the tab. The relationship had worked well for a long time, in part because Ealing made so many terrific movies. The studio consistently lost money, however, and in the mid-‘50s, Rank decided to sell off Elstree’s studio space to the BBC to make some money. Rank offered for Ealing to move into Pinewood Studios instead (where Rank was based) but Michael Balcon refused and resigned from the board of several Rank companies; Ealing then started making movies for MGM Britain.
Ealing’s last three films for Rank were all released in 1956. They comprised of a comedy (Who Done It? with Benny Hill), a “woman’s picture” about nurses (The Feminine Touch), which like most British films of the 1950s ended up being more about the men, and a crime movie (The Long Arm). None of these movies did well at the box office and are not remembered well today – however, a film that Ealing made for Rank, which was released at the end of 1955, The Ladykillers, was both a classic and solid hit.
Rank financed two significant movies made by other independent companies that came out in 1956. Both were war films based on true stories: the Douglas Bader biopic Reach for the Sky from Pinnacle Productions (producer Danny Angel and director Lewis Gilbert), and the navy picture The Battle of the River Plate, from Arcturus Production, the company of “the Archers”, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. These films were both among the most popular movies of the year and became instant classics of their kind. It’s interesting that Rank’s biggest successes in 1956 came from outside companies.
Okay, so, we should get back to the twelve movies made by Rank Organisation Films that were released in 1956 (with one exception):
– two war-themed dramas based on novels (A Town Like Alice, The Back Tent);
– three vehicles for comedy stars, all directed by John Paddy Carstairs (Jumping for Joy, Up in the World, The Big Money);
– two dramas about children based on novels (Jacqueline, The Spanish Gardener); and
– five thrillers (Lost, Eyewitness, House of Secrets, Tiger in the Smoke, Checkpoint).
The “exception” movie was The Big Money, not released until 1958, but it was meant to come out in 1956, so we’re discussing it here.
If you compare this output with that of Group Film Productions, Rank’s main production arm for the previous two years, you’ll notice that 1956 indicated a real change of policy for the Rank Organisation in three main ways.
First is the decline of comedies. Almost three quarters of the Group movies were comedies, but this percentage plunged to one quarter for 1956, the three John Paddy Carstairs movies.
These consisted of vehicles for Norman Wisdom (Up in the World) and two comics who Rank was hoping would become the new Norman Wisdom, Frankie Howerd (Jumping for Joy) and Ian Carmichael (The Big Money). (Ealing also tried with Benny Hill for Who Done It?)
This was not nothing, but it was still a drop – there were no adaptations of comic novels or stage plays like Group did. In fairness, we believe Rank would have made a “Doctor” movie had the makers been available (Doctor at Large came out in 1957); ditto an Alec Guinness film (we’re not sure about Ronald Shiner as he was busy for other studios).
We think that Rank simply went off comedy in 1956 – indeed, John Davis disliked The Big Money so much, he pulled it from release until 1958, which was a big deal for a penny pincher like him.
We admit that most Group Film Production comedies were pretty dire. And Jumping for Joy and The Big Money weren’t much chop – John Paddy Carstairs always keeps things bright and lively with plenty of movement (he’s got a style as recogniseable as any British auteur – we’re surprised more academics don’t discuss him) but the films don’t quite click. This is in contrast with Up in the World which is more cohesive… but then Wisdom is a far warmer, empathetic presence on screen than Howerd or Carmichael.
Still, comedy had proved so lucrative for Rank with the Doctors, Wisdoms and Genevieve, and were relatively cheap to make, it remains bizarre that the studio put such a hand break on the genre in 1956. Maybe it was a result of the increasing influence of John Davis, the managing director of Rank, over Earl St John, the actual head of production. Maybe it was a desire to make movies of greater appeal to the international market – comedies were seen not to “travel” outside Britain, especially in America. Another possible reason – comedies are very star dependent, and Davis may have gotten sick of dealing with the whims and neuroses of his comedy stars.
Still, in hindsight, Rank’s retreat from comedy seems to have hurt the company in the long run. While it kept making Doctor films and Wisdom comedies until the late ‘60s, Rank lost significant opportunities by cutting back on comedy around this time. For instance, producer Peter Rogers and writer Norman Hudis, who had worked at Rank in the mid ‘50s, wound up going over to Anglo Amalgamated and making the Carry On movies – they could have belonged to Rank. Ian Carmichael, who’d been signed to a three-picture deal with Rank that ended by mutual agreement after The Big Money, went on to become a leading box office star in movies for the Boulting Brothers. After Jumping for Joy, Frankie Howerd moved away from Rank and eventually flourished as a film star in the early ‘70s with the Up Pompeii franchise.
The second way that Rank’s output from 1956 differs from Group Film Productions was the return of thrillers. Five thrillers out of twelve movies overall is a big percentage – it goes back to the days of British Film-Makers (BFM), where thrillers were a leading genre. It’s kind of confusing, because none of the BFM thrillers were very successful (though some are excellent eg. The Long Memory, Hunted). What’s more, none of the five used top line stars, but rather, Rank contract players.
Lost – a gripping stolen baby drama – featured Julia Arnall and David Knight (from The Young Lovers) alongside David Farrar (who everyone thought was going to be a star after The Black Narcissus but didn’t become one). Eyewitness was a woman-witnesses-crime-and-is-in-peril thriller with Muriel Pavlow, Belinda Lee, Donald Sinden, Michael Craig and Knight. House of Secrets featured Craig, who would become Rank’s back up Dirk Bogarde, Julia Arnall and Barbara Bates. Tiger in the Smoke had Sinden, Pavlow and a new name, Tony Wright. Checkpoint, from the Doctor team of Thomas and Box, had Anthony Steel and Stanley Baker.
One assumes that this commitment to thrillers was prompted by a desire to appeal more to the international market without it costing too much – at least, not as much as costume pictures or classic literature adaptations might. Still, even though they were aimed globally, Rank did not follow the lead of other British companies of the time such as Hammer, Anglo Amalgamated and Warwick who produced scores of thrillers featuring second tier American names that would at least sell to American television. We’re not saying that the movies are bad, they are all competent and watchable; Donald Sinden wrote in his memoirs that Eyewitness was the film of his that always popped up on television. The films aren’t first rank thrillers though – they suffer from failure to develop story strands and go for the throat in the way movies by directors like, say, Val Guest and J Lee Thompson would.
The third way that Rank’s 1956 movies differed from Group Film Productions was the increase of the importance in women’s roles. Many of the new thrillers were from the point of view of women – Lost, Eyewitness, Tiger in the Smoke. Its war drama, A Town Like Alice, was a female story. Ealing’s Feminine Touch was about nurses. We wonder if this was due in any way to the influence of Dinah Sheridan, star of Genevieve who was forced to retire when she married John Davis. It’s always tricky to gauge the influence of a spouse, but it’s not hard to imagine Sheridan passing comments on Rank projects. All the aforementioned female stories had lead roles that would have been ideal for Sheridan; indeed, Belinda Lee and Virginia McKenna even looked a little like her.
Having said that, it should be noted that Rank couldn’t help itself and most of the aforementioned movies kept giving agency to the male lead rather than the female lead. For instance, the thrillers Lost, Tiger in the Smoke and Eyewitness would have both been far more enjoyable and exciting if they’d jettisoned the husband characters – the female leads would have had more to do, been placed in greater peril, had to get out of trouble themselves. (We do acknowledge that in Lost, female scribe Janet Green gives key roles in the investigation to two minor female characters.)
The big exception is A Town Like Alice, a splendid picture where the female characters have real agency, especially the lead, played by Virginia McKenna. It was a huge hit, demonstrating that there was still a large female audience out there waiting to be tapped by the right material. The Black Tent, its other war movie, might have done better commercially with more of a female presence.
In other aspects, Rank’s 1956 films continued the tradition of earlier years. The great success of The Little Kidnappers was presumably responsible for the two films about children, Jacqueline and The Spanish Gardner. Jacqueline was slightly like The Little Kidnappers, in that it told the story of a rough old man humanised by a cute kid – but John Gregson is too affable and the kid too annoying. The Spanish Gardener has the same star as Kidnappers, Jon Whitely, reunited with his Hunted co-star Dirk Bogarde; the movie was a big hit, due one imagines to the popularity of Bogarde. The movie has some fame today because its clear gay subtext (where Michael Hordern – who has the role of his life – has a crush on Bogarde).
Incidentally, The Spanish Gardener was shot on location in Spain and several of these Rank movies had overseas locations, like Italy (Checkpoint), France (Tiger in the Smoke, House of Secrets), and Libya (The Black Tent).
Another continuing Rank tradition was the studio’s continued inability to understand the notion of movie stardom. The studio upped its star building efforts that year, launching a series of names that it expected to be the next generation of stars: Julia Arnall, Barbara Bates, David Knight, Belinda Lee, Virginia McKenna, Maureen Swanson, Tony Wright. Of these, only McKenna became any sort of name, although Lee later became a star in Italy (we wrote about her here). (NB Barbara Bates, who didn’t last long at Rank, had a turbulent life and wound up committing suicide in the late 1960s.)
To be fair, the studio did provide ideal vehicles for Norman Wisdom, Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More, Anthony Steel and Peter Finch (who became a genuine star off Battle of the River Plate and Town Like Alice), and tried with Frankie Howerd. Against this, it continued to turn out movies starring Donald Sinden, Odile Versois, and Muriel Pavlow, although the public had never really responded to them (no reflection on their ability as performers, we are talking their appeal as stars).
Looking back, 1956 was a transitional year for Rank. Losing Ealing Studios, shifting away from comedies and into thrillers, increasing its use of colour and overseas locations. Despite some underwhelming films creatively, it was a decent year for the company, with the success of Reach for the Sky, Battle of the River Plate, A Town Like Alice, Up in the World and The Spanish Gardener, with the Doctor and Wisdom up its sleeve. In 1956, John Davis announced that Rank would launch Rank Film Distributors in the US, to help its product in the US.
The Rank Organisation, it seemed, was about to take over the world…
