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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).