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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.