King Arthur & Co.

[See Cover)

Down the Queen Elizabeth's gangplank and on to Manhattan's Pier 90 one day last week the British movie industry stepped. Waiting on the dock, like a stack of plump pillows at the end of a laundry chute, stood a half-dozen U.S. movie executives. As Cinemogul Joseph Arthur Rank saw them, he blinked and turned up his coat collar against the chill May morning. But then Arthur Rank's face broke into a smile. He strode forward. As the expectant executive smiles faded, he walked over and wrung the hand of Judge Lewis L. Fawcett, the brisk, vigorous executive of the World's Sunday School Association. Cinemogul Rank, a Yorkshireman and a conscientious Sunday-school teacher, was about the Lord's business as well as his own.

At a luncheon in the Commodore Hotel that day he attended to the Lord's business exclusively. He addressed a meeting of the Sunday School Association, and it awarded him a certificate for his religious work. Said Mr. Rank: "I believe that the best way we can spread the gospel of Christ is through movies." Then Mr. Rank went about his own--and the Empire's--business, which is to spread British movies all over the globe. In a swirl of breakfasts, luncheons, teas, cocktail parties and after-theater snacks, he confabbed with RKO Production Boss Dore Schary, 20th Century-Fox Boss Spyros Skouras, who is an old friend, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Railroader & Picturemaker Robert R. Young, who will show Rank around the U.S. in his private car. They all listened to Mr. Rank with respect. As one shrewd U.S. movieman said: "Rank is one of the seven or eight key men they are counting on over there to pull them out of the mud."

Great Expectations. Trade, which once followed the flag, now follows the films. And Rank is, in effect, Britain's chosen instrument to build an industry able to compete with Hollywood in the world market--and so get Britain some of the dollars she desperately needs. He has made an amazing start. In ten years he has changed the British movie industry, once compounded of "concupiscence, chicanery and confusion," into a powerful monopolistic instrument, and fashioned a new economic empire. As powerful as any film enterprise in the world, his empire comprises over 60% of Britain's theaters and 50% of its moviemaking. It holds in fee tributary production, distribution and exhibition companies in Canada, South Africa, Australia and the U.S. The sun never sets on the emblem of his pictures: a gilded muscleman (ex-Boxer "Bombardier" Wells) swatting an eight-foot gong.

Last year the gong rang in some impressive film achievements. Two British films (Henry V and Brief Encounter) were voted among the year's best movies by Manhattan critics. Last week nine other Rank pictures (Odd Man Out, Stairway to Heaven, etc.) were holding down Manhattan cinemansions. And next week Rank's Great Expectations is scheduled to open in Manhattan's massive Radio City Music Hall--the movie world's equivalent of a White House reception for an immigrant.

Solid Reality. Joseph Arthur Rank is a burly grandfather's-clock of a man, at 59 tick-tock solemn and sure, and rather bumblingly humorous when wound up. He stands 6 ft. 1 in. with his limp brown hair stuck down flat, and bulks a solid 15 stone (210 lbs.). He resembles General de Gaulle, except that he does not share the look of a supercilious camel. His great tired nose droops even lower than De Gaulle's. It curls under just in time to disclose an uncertain mustachelet which changes position with each shave.

"Arthur," says a man who knows him well, "has spent millions for his movie business just to get an emotional outlet." Arthur himself has defined that emotion: "I want nothing of this for myself. . . . I am doing this work for my God and for my country." No one who has seen artless Arthur struggle to assemble these words, like a man worrying boulders to a wall, can doubt that he means them.

Like many a Yorkshireman, he is a Methodist and pledged to temperance. But he is not stuffy about others' drinking, and has even been known to wax convivial on lime juice and ginger ale.

Only once in his life, when he was 42 and seriously ill, have his lips touched hard liquor. The doctor pried his teeth apart and forced some brandy down his throat to stimulate his heart. Arthur immediately revived, sat up and spat. "If I had been a drinker," he now says, "the brandy would have had no effect on me. By never drinking, my life was saved by drinking. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

In spite of what one associate calls his "appalling virtues," almost everyone likes him. He has some manly vices. He chainsmokes cigarets and munches his way through a good 100 pounds of expensive chocolates a year. He even gambles (for small stakes) at bridge and golf. He plays golf in the low 80s, and is one of the best bird shots in Britain.

He usually golfs on the private approach course on his 300-acre estate at Reigate, Surrey. There, beside the golf course, stands an imposing establishment: a 35-room Georgian house, 20 cottages, swimming pool, tennis courts, a stable, and kennels housing 200 of the best Labradors and pointers in England.

Boy Gets Girl. This is the home of Arthur Rank, his wife, Nell, and one daughter, Ursula, 27. (The other daughter, Mrs. Fred Packard, lives in Hollywood.) "The Rank love story," sigh friends, "is one of the most beautiful ever told." The Ranks are, in fact, two exceedingly happy multimillionaires. They are inseparable. Nell, who has contributed her millions and her shrewd advice to her husband's moviemaking, accompanied him to the U.S.

On Sundays in the country Rank drives five miles to the Reigate Methodist Church (in wartime he cycled to save petrol) to teach his Sunday-school class. The Reverend J. Eric Dixon does not consider Arthur an unmixed blessing. "The press," he snorts, "is always down here badgering us. That's why it's such a bad Sunday school." But the children climb all over the teacher. Chirped little Peter Robinson: "He's a real smasher, he is."

Early Monday morning, Arthur busses Nell roundly and climbs into the back seat of a large Austin to be driven to London for the week. As the car heads down the lane, Rank hangs out the window, waving and blowing kisses to Nell. After a few minutes of this, the lane makes a sharp left turn. Rank then scrambles across the car, rolls down the other window and waves until Nell is out of sight. Then he pops back on the seat, opens his ever-present and bulging briefcases, and begins the day's work.

Boy Loses Fortune. Such frivolities would no doubt have stirred the lightnings in Arthur's father, terrible-tempered "Holy Joe" Rank. A onetime mill hand, he modernized milling methods in Britain and made a fortune. From him, Arthur inherited mills and millions, Methodism and his whole-wheat character. Holy Joe was a complete bear, even in his dealings with heaven. "When I take a thing to prayer," he would bellow, "I always succeed." And with mere men he was twice as grizzly. He refused to install elevators in his office buildings: the workers might get soft and lazy.

Long before Holy Joe died in 1943 (at 89) he cannily transferred to his children (except Rowland, who drank, and had already died "by the will of God") millions of pounds worth of stocks and mills. He left a taxable estate of only -L-70,000.

Arthur was Holy Joe's third and favorite son. He quit school at 17 (he still misspells simple words) and went to work in his father's offices as a 10-shilling-a-week junior clerk. In World War I he rose to a sergeancy in a field ambulance unit in France. When he came home, father gave him the cash to buy Peterkin's Self-raising Flour Mill, just to see what the boy could do. Arthur showed him: the story goes that he lost -L-1,000,000. But Rank insists that he saved his skin by selling Peterkin for what he invested.

Then Arthur settled down. He married Millionheiress Laura Ellen (Nell) Marshall, daughter of Lord Marshall of Chipstead, onetime Lord Mayor of London. With brother James, Arthur learned how to steer his father's industrial machine. While James took time off to race horses, Arthur stuck to the grind of milling and selling 30% of all the flour consumed in Britain. Then in 1934 he got what seemed like a daft idea. He decided to go into the movie business.

There was Methodism in this madness. He bankrolled the Religious Film Society, a small Methodist film-making group. In 1935, Rank helped finance the production of The Turn of the Tide, a documentary film about the Yorkshire fishing villages. It won third place at the International Film Exhibit in Venice. Rank was shocked to find that Britain's big movie distributors were not interested in showing his prize. To make certain that people saw it, Arthur had to buy the Leicester Square Theater in London. In this small way, the renaissance of the British cinema began.

The Dark Ages. Until Rank moved in, the British film industry had spent 35 years in a Dark Age. In spite of fly-by-night stock promoters who fattened on the industry, a few excellent films had been made (The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Private Life of Henry VIII). But almost all British films were "quota quickies"--wretched flicks produced, chiefly with the backing of U.S. companies, to conform to British law that 20% of all movies exhibited in Britain must be made in Britain.

Conservative British capital had been afraid it would dirty its spats in this unlovely puddle. So when Rank decided to wade in, he had little competition. He did have the secret blessing of the Board of Trade. With Rank's money (plus a minority investment by bankers) General Film Distributors, Ltd. was formed.

Like a monopolistic python, Rank swallowed up one company after another, digesting or (as he called it) "rationalizing" the wildly irrational industry. The process, Rankmen say, cost $200 million, but Rank himself is said to have put in a comparatively small amount of his own money. The rest has been supplied by British banks and by public stock issues.

At first, Rank rented films for distribution in his small chain of theaters. But he found that distributors who owned theaters always helped themselves to the best bookings. So Rank bought up enough theaters--first the 354-theater Odeon chain, then the 283-theater Gaumont-British organization--to force them to show his films.

Then, to make doubly sure that he had movies for his theaters, he became a producer. He bought 66% of the British studios. To keep his studios and theaters equipped, he bought out G.B.-Kalee, Ltd. (screens, theater chairs, cameras), Taylor, Taylor, Hobson (lenses), British Acoustic Films, Ltd. (projectors, films) and Britain's largest television firm, Cinema-Television, Ltd. Under General Film Distributors and Manorfield Investments, Ltd., his two top holding corporations, Rank now controls 86 movie companies.

When Britons began to complain of Rank's near monopoly (one critic muttered of this "serpent's egg, which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous"), Lord Brabazon of Tara hinted at the Government's mind: "It is highly inadvisable at present, when a man like Mr. Rank has engaged to fight the American films, to worry him with pinpricks."

The New Day. That put things in a different light. Rank was "let off" with a cooed warning not to take any more big bites for a while. He still had plenty of half-digested companies in him, anyway. Rank already acknowledges a slight bellyache: "They call me a bad organizer, but I will not delegate until I know more than those to whom I delegate. Let me learn and then I will put the thing in shape."

To learn, Rank works 18 hours a day. He spends a half-day a week on his flour-mill affairs, the rest of the week on his movies. He is up and into a cup of tea by 7 a.m. in his suite in London's Dorchester Hotel. Before 8, in pops John Davis, 39, a slim, sharp Englishman who is Rank's general manager and heir apparent. He occupies the neighboring suite so that his encyclopedic movie knowledge, learned in 18 years in the business, is always at hand. By 9:30, Rank is in his office, a remodeled Georgian mansion in Mayfair. Business does not even stop during tea.

Dinner, in the Dorchester suite, is another meeting, usually with other top-Rankers. Among them is Leslie ("Silent") Farrow, 57, a stoop-shouldered, 6 ft. 4 in. bishop's-crook of a man who is Rank's chief financial adviser. Few underlings have ever heard Farrow say anything more than "Good morning." Another aide is G. I. Woodham Smith, 51, Rank's chief counsel, who has been described as "a good lawyer, American style--he laughs all the time."

After dinner, Rank buries himself in a pile of papers and a box of chocolates until 2 a.m. Nell keeps him company; she sits beside him and knits. "Hollywood has 30 years on us," he explains. "We must do three days' work in one to catch up."

My Friend, the Enemy. As hard a trader as he is a worker, he is ruthless with the tricksters of the trade. If anyone tries to out-trade him for the last penny, Rank usually manages to beat him out of the last ha'penny. And Rank is also ruthlessly fair, yet does not always take kindly to criticism. To a newspaper critic, he once roared: "Don't you know, when you write that kind of thing, that Christ is looking over your shoulder?" Yet Rank bears no rancor for Cinemactor James Mason, who thinks that Rank's monopolistic operations will eventually wreck Britain's movie industry. Recently Rank was called upon to accept a British drama award on Mason's behalf--a situation so whimsical that Rank recognized it with an amused twitch of his mustache. This week, at a friendly luncheon in Manhattan, he presented the award to Mason.

Compared to Hollywood's top moviemakers, Rank's technical knowledge of moviemaking is but little past the Brownie-camera stage. Partly for that reason, but mostly because he believes in "creative immunity," he gives his writer-producer-director teams their heads. They have a freedom unknown in Hollywood's major studios.

Perhaps not since the time of the Renaissance Popes has a group of artists found a patron so quick with a wallet, so slow with unsolicited directions and advice. Rank usually asks his producers only two questions: 1) What do you want to do? 2) How much will it cost? If he likes the answer to the first, he generally does not quibble with the answer to the second (though in recent months he has been conducting a drive to cut costs without, he says, cutting quality).

After he has made the agreement, usually verbal, to spend hundreds of thousands or millions, he has little more to do with a picture until it is ready for distribution. But then his problems begin. He is, in effect, Britain's movie censor, and as such often gets into brangles with Hollywood's Johnston Office. On one of these occasions, when there was too much "cleavage" for the Johnston Office in a Rank film, he spluttered in bewilderment: "But in England, bosoms aren't sexy!"

It is the creative immunity of its artists that is the chief hope of the British cinema. Most of it has been enjoyed--and most of the fine films have been made--by a small group of artists, "The Independents." There are four sets of Independents: The Archers, the Cineguild, Individual Productions, and Wessex Productions. Two Cities Films, Ltd. and occasional guest artists such as Laurence Olivier, Gabriel Pascal or Carol Reed (Odd Man Out) also do fine work.

Out of the 30 pictures Rank produced in the last year, only 15 were considered good enough to compete in the U.S. By inflicting what Hollywood technically calls the "stinkers" on Britons only, he has shrewdly created the impression in the U.S. that most British movies are up to or better than Hollywood's best, which they are not. But in competing for a bigger share of the world market Rank will have to turn out more & more movies. Mass-production may force him to use ready-made patterns. It is still a question whether he can keep the Bond Street cut that so many of his films now have.

Deals within Deals. Rank thinks he can. But the main Rank operation in the U.S. is more broadly based. Rank began laying the base in 1936, when he picked up a 25% interest in the then failing Universal Films, Inc. (now merged into Universal-International), thus buying a top U.S. distributor for his movies. Since then, Rank has made deals with Universal-International and Robert R. Young's Eagle-Lion (TIME, Dec. 10, 1945) to distribute at least 19 Rank films a year in the U.S. And this week he announced plans to buy or build theaters in 50 big U.S. cities, as "show windows for British films." Rank has made certain that a good picture will get distributed, a guarantee British pictures never had before.

Proposal of Marriage. Rank has still another ace in the hole. If Hollywood should not give him all he feels he is entitled to, the Board of Trade might conceivably cut the quota of U.S. pictures allowed in Britain (now a fat 80% of all pictures shown). At this prospect, Hollywood shudders. The U.S. movie industry last year made $75 million--at least 35% of its income and almost all of its profits--in the British market. Without that market, Hollywood could not afford to spend the millions it does on a single picture. For his part, Rank made only $8,000,000 in the U.S.

Rather than have their British profits reduced, many cinemoguls would prefer to see Rank make more money in the U.S. Though he is competing with the U.S., the competition has sometimes seemed so friendly that the antitrust division of the Department of Justice has cocked a suspicious eye at monopoly-minded Mr. Rank. As he said: "In my heart I have a great desire to cooperate with our American friends." And one of the friends has said: "We aren't looking for a fight. We want something like a marriage."

To make such a marriage possible, Rank has duded up his productions and slowed down their dialogue for the U.S. eye and ear. He has worked at keeping out unintelligible Britticisms and is careful with American slang. He has upped his annual publicity budget from -L-250,000 to -L-1,000,000. He has borrowed Hollywood stars to reflect glory on his own stars in British pictures. He has sent his own stars to pick up more reflected glory in Hollywood films.

Rank's lend-lease arrangement with Hollywood has not been all sugar & spice. A good many British stars who have come to the U.S. are considering staying (Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, James Mason, Deborah Kerr).

These losses, which Rank can ill afford, have taught him to change his way of treating his stars. He had been content to make verbal contracts with them. But when Phyllis Calvert, the No. 2 female star in Britain, went to Hollywood to visit and came back with a written contract, he decided that he had better get tougher. (He refuses to make another picture with Calvert, saying sadly: "I have turned her picture to the wall.") Rank now leashes his people with seven-year contracts before letting them loose in Hollywood.

Such stars as Ann Todd, Michael Redgrave, Patricia Roc, Stewart Granger and John Mills will take their suntans and return to Britain as better attractions at the U.S. box office. Some of his artists, including Margaret Lockwood, are still on the verbal agreement basis because Hollywood is no lure to them. They prefer--out of patriotism and regard for Rank--to stay in England. Director David Lean (Great Expectations) is a case in point. After previewing the movie, a Hollywood executive wired Rank to find out how long his contract with Lean ran. Said Lean, who has no contract: "Forever."

Size of the Dowry. Because of his lavish spending, Rank's pictures netted him only a modest profit last year. But his theaters netted him a profit of about $25 million. Unless the current slump in the box office gets much worse and nips Rank, Hollywood expects that he will have all the cash he needs to finance his picturemaking.

How quickly and how much can he gain on Hollywood? In Britain, if his production reaches 100 pictures a year --the maximum with present studios--he may cut Hollywood to 70% of the total box-office take in the United Kingdom, thus cut the dollar drain on Britain by about $20,000,000. On the same production basis, he might send enough top pictures to the U.S. to step his profits up to $18,000,000. This would be a blow to Hollywood. But Rankmen bumptiously predict that within five years they will be digging up $50,000,000 in Hollywood's acre, and cutting deeper into its take in Britain. This would certainly shake Hollywood, as well as make Rank's movies a big source of dollar exchange in Britain. It might encourage the Socialists to nationalize the industry. If that happened, then Hollywood might find that its marriage was turning out to be an affair with Bluebeard.

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