Rank Organisation, The

Rank Organisation, The, British film production and distribution company, for some 30 years the major force in the British film industry. It had its origins in 1933 when J. Arthur Rank, a prosperous flour-miller and Methodist with no great interest in cinema, thought of showing religious films at his regular Sunday school lessons. Finding few that were any good, he resolved to try making them himself. Since Rank had money to spare at a time when few in the industry had any at all, he gradually gained control over every aspect of the business, and by 1942 found himself heading the largest film combine in Britain.

A large, shy, ungainly man with (in his own words) “no talent for making films”, Rank was as unlikely a movie mogul as could be imagined, but for a few years he proved an open-minded and open-handed studio boss. He backed the Ealing Studios under Michael Balcon, and offered unstinted funds and freedom to some of Britain’s finest film-makers, including David Lean, Carol Reed, and the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Productions included Brief Encounter (1945, Lean), Henry V (1945, Laurence Olivier), Great Expectations (1946, Lean), A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Powell and Pressburger), Odd Man Out (1947, Reed), and The Red Shoes (1948, Powell and Pressburger).

In 1948, however, the Organisation faced bankruptcy. It pulled back from the brink, but the cost was shown in the declining ambition and quality of its film productions thereafter. Rank retired from day-to-day involvement, ceding control to his vice-chairman, John Davis, who showed little affection for films or the people who made them. The films he appreciated—and steered the company towards producing—were low-budget production-line fare such as the Doctor series (1954-1970), the Carry On films (1958-1976), and the comedies of Norman Wisdom. Under his guidance, the Organisation steadily withdrew from the inherently unpredictable business of film-making, turning itself into a leisure conglomerate deriving 90 per cent of its profits from the Rank Xerox photocopying franchise. It produced its last film in 1976, and in 1997 divested itself of its distribution arm, retaining only Pinewood Studios and the Odeon chain of cinemas to connect it with the industry it once dominated.