‘J. Arthur Rank: The Rise and Fall of His Film Empire’By Gareth OwenBearManor Media, 375 pagesIn a forgotten novel, “Nobody Ordered Wolves,” published in 1939, screenwriter Jeffrey Dell, a J. Arthur Rank screenwriter, delightfully depicts the crazy mad world of the film industry. The wolves, which reproduce at an alarming rate, have been ordered by nobody knows who for a film nobody has yet written or can even remember wanting to write and at a steady multiplying cost no one wishes to contemplate.The advent of the studio system and moguls like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, virtually dictators who promised Wall Street they could order the chaos and make movies pay, had their counterpart, most improbably, in the figure of J. Arthur Rank, met with scorn, at first, because what could a Yorkshire flour mill owner possibly know about making movies? Even worse, he was a devout Methodist, hardly attuned to the ways of sinful cinema.Soon, however, as one of his directors, Jill Craigie, then married to Jeffrey Dell, told me, the “Methodism in his madness” allowed her and others to make significant documentaries and feature films and to create in Pinewood Studios a state of art production facility that Hollywood filmmakers often used, even for American settings, because of the superior quality of the sets, cinematography, and sound stages.You could talk to Rank, Jill Craigie told me, and even, sometimes, go over the head of John Davis, the numbers man in the Rank organization who cared only about the bottom line and not a wit about educating the public or bolstering the Christian nation.Craigie called Rank a “benevolent dictator.” As Gareth Owen explains, Rank did not show up on sets and interfere with directors and producers. Of course, he wanted his films to make money, but they also had to have a higher purpose—or at least Rank had to be cajoled into believing the film at hand provided moral uplift. As Mr. Owen shows, Rank sometimes lost money, went through hard times similar to what the Hollywood studios suffered, especially in the television age. Yet over more than four decades the Rank organization produced films of remarkable quality. When Marilyn Monroe decided to forsake Hollywood and form her own production company, she turned to Pinewood and Laurence Olivier, and the result is a film, “The Prince and the Showgirl,” in which she appears more elegantly than in any Hollywood production but also with a virtually saintly aura in exquisitely shot cathedral scenes, set up by the incomparable Jack Cardiff.Rank himself is a rather shadowy figure in Mr. Owen’s book, and yet this is not to be faulted. Not only did Rank want it this way — that is, unlike Hollywood moguls he did not preen; he did seek the limelight — he wanted his directors and stars and production staff to feel, as Mr. Owen says they did at Pinewood, part of some cause larger than themselves. So don’t look for anecdotes about J. Arthur Rank in this book. What you will get, instead, is a wonderful insight into how a corporate mentality like Rank’s understood how to delegate authority and how to choose projects like “A Night To Remember,” the 1958 classic black-and-white drama about the Titanic. Rank was told not to do that subject which had already been done twice. But veteran producer William MacQuitty, whom I interviewed, convinced Rank to go ahead by telling him a story. MacQuitty as a young boy had seen the Titanic launched and evoked the tremendous excitement and pride so many felt as the ship set off. That was enough for Rank to say yes. It would then be up to Rank managing director, John Davis, to make sure the filming came in on budget.With prestigious pictures such as “Great Expectations,” “The Lady Vanishes,” and “The Red Shoes,” and Pinewood productions of James Bond films, the Rank organization endured and often thrived. Rank had the savvy to diversify his portfolio of companies and invest in new inventions, like the Xerox machine.The Rank organization came apart, finally, in the 1990s, no longer able to compete in a shifting media environment and prone to excesses — in part, due to the outlandish behavior of Davis, much more dictatorial than Rank, who died in 1972, leaving his business without his vision.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie” and “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress.”
