"Are you really a wealthy man or are you speculating with other people's money?" George Bernard Shaw once asked J Arthur Rank. "I am all right," Britain's only film tycoon gruffly replied.
There was a certain irony in the exchange. At the time, the Rank Organisation was planning a big-budget adaptation of Shaw's play Caesar and Cleopatra, to be produced and directed by the flamboyant Hungarian Gabriel Pascal. Scheduled to shoot for four months, the film (released in 1946) took close to two years to complete at more than double the original budget, and undermined Rank's confidence in British film-making for good.
To mark the 70th anniversary of the golden gong (the iconic Rank symbol that opened all his films), a new boxed set of Rank "classics" is being released on DVD.
Predictably, the ill-fated Caesar and Cleopatra is not among them, but perhaps it ought to be. The story of Pascal's Shaw adaptation captures perfectly that strange mix of vision, extravagance and muddle-headedness that characterized Rank in his pomp. With Rank's money and seemingly endless reserves of goodwill, the autocratic Pascal built his own sphinx, imported camels and covered Denham Studios with sand. He recruited the best cinematographers of the day as well as a small army of leading British actors. The result was a film that bored most critics rigid.
"Pascal sold a bill of goods to Arthur," said another Rank producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, in the early 1990s. "If we'd been consulted, to a man we would all have said (to Rank) that you are raving mad. Do not let Gabriel Pascal attempt to direct anything. He does not know how. It will be a disaster."
In the years leading up to Caesar and Cleopatra, J Arthur Rank had undergone an unlikely transformation. In 1935, the middle-aged Yorkshire flour tycoon and Methodist Sunday-school teacher backed The Turn of the Tide, a religious-themed yarn about warring families in a fishing community. It won a prize at the Venice festival but sank without trace at the British box office.
Rank then started to back the company General Film Distributors in order to get his own foothold in distribution. At first, he seemed like just another financier dabbling on the edges of British cinema. Soon, though, he was to preside over the biggest film empire in British cinema history. His tentacles began to stretch into every corner of film-making: animation, newsreels, B- movies, children's films, Shakespeare adaptations, Ealing comedies and Gainsborough costume melodramas, as well as movies on the scale of Pascal's folly.
Rank acquired the best studios, the best labs and the cinemas. His company was a fully integrated "major" with every bit as much muscle as its Hollywood rivals.
And yet, Rank didn't tally at all with the stereotype of the Sam Goldwyn or Louis B Mayer-type studio boss. A patrician, slightly aloof figure with a love of British countryside pursuits (golfing, shooting), he was nicknamed "Uncle Arthur" by his employees. Rank freely admitted he knew very little about the medium he had embraced with such fervour.
"He wasn't at all what you would call an artistic man," his daughter Shelagh Cowen said of him. "He was a man of action and great thought, a man of vision, but not aesthetically -- he bought the brains to do that for him."
Those brains -- favorite directors included David Lean, Powell and Pressburger, and Launder and Gilliat, all part of a company called Independent Producers Ltd (IPL) -- were given carte blanche.
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