IT is recorded that, after J. Arthur Rank had signed a contract for a major piece of film business, he turned to a secretary and said: "It's curious, isn't it, to think that Jesus Christ is in the room with us now." He was not, and never was, remotely a hypocrite. One reflects that if Rank had been a camel, he could have passed through the eye of a needle without even touching the sides.
There is a certain irony, however, in the likeness of the man which appears on the front and back covers of his biography. The former picture, we read, is reproduced by courtesy of one Mrs S. M. Cowen, the latter by permission of the Rank Organisation. Both photographs are in fact exactly the same; it is as they were there to refute any charge that another face could possibly have existed.
The face repays study. It is massive, devoid of guile, the hair is slicked down; then comes a vast, unlined expanse of forehead, a beaky nose over a trim moustache which breaks the monotony of the landscape, and the clear, serene eyes of a teetotaller and a super Methodist. There were those who admired Rank for his Christian qualities and his frequent kindliness, just as there were those - the young James Mason included - who saw him as the "worst thing that has happened to the British film industry". What is hardly disputable is that, as a subject for biography he is stupefyingly boring.
The Ranks became millers in 1825 when John Rank rented a windmill near Hull. There was a son, James, and then a grandson Joseph Arthur's father - who had a lifelong limp from being obliged to wear boots that were too tight. This Joseph was a promethean figure. Ousted from the family business, he borrowed a windmill for three days a week ground the wheat, collected the flour sacks, canvassed for orders and made his own deliveries. Within thirty years, he owned more milling interests than any one person on earth.
In 1883, the Waltham street Methodist Chapel in Kingston proved to be his road to Damascus. Business money, that is and faith became one, an inseparable as Hyde and Jekyll. His son's biographer says: "He saw God as helping him to make the money - in order for him to give it away in God's service." Al prominent Methodist described him as "a real Victorian and not a very good employer. He was all for grinding the faces of the poor and making money." He carried his lunch in a brown paper bag and would not install elevators in his office buildings lest it make his workers lazy.
J. Arthur Rank adored, and took inspiration from, his father. He, too, was of an evangelical cast of soul, and in 1930 the idea came to him of spreading God's word by the making and distribution of religious films. What began as a hobby became a passion - he made more than 300 shorts - and evolved into a business. His biographer Michael Wakelin employs the rather strange subtitle "The Man Behind the Gong", evoking a mental image of Rank standing at the far side of the thing with fingers in ears, but we know what he means. The image of a beefy looking male striking a gong was a familiar one to two generations of filmgoers. (The actual instrument was a fake, made of plaster, and there were three "gongers" down the years, the best known of whom was "Bombardier" Billy Wells.)
As one might have suspected, there is not much about films in this biography. Rank was a kind of benevolent Napoleon who never ventured near the front line. He hardly ever read a script or expressed an artistic opinion. When he had seen Oliver's Hamlet, his only comment to the director star was "Thank you very much, Sir Laurence", for which he was not forgiven.
He delegated. He became an island in an ocean of accountants and hatchet men, the most prominent of whom was John Davis. Rank tended to give film makers a free hand, and usually the results were trash, but now and again there emerged a classic such as Brief Encounter, Henry V, Great Expectations and A Matter of Life and Death. By and large, the archetypal Rank film was a novelette on film. The author describes The Attacked Lady as a story of a highwaywoman who was also a prostitute, which is not so and only proves what he knows. Rank's own pocket synopsis casts a light on the man, both as a theologian and a connoisseur of film: "I only agreed to it because there's a moral in it. You have two pretty girls, Margaret Lockwood and Pat Roe. One of them falls to temptation and gets shot in the end [!]; the other lives happily. That's the moral. (The salutary lesson was wasted on the Irish film censor who banned The Wicked Lady).
Rank diversified. There were Rank hotels and howling alleys. Television came and drove the company £18 million into the red, but John Davis saved the day by creating Rank Xerox. Even so, Mr Wakelin tells us that when Rank died he left "only" £6-7 million. John Davis wrote: "Whilst our Annual Meeting last year was taking place, I knew that Lord Rank, President, friend and colleague of us all, was slowly passing to a happier place." As a businessman, he might have added that one can hardly get happier than "£6-7 million."
Rank led the kind of private life one would expect. He was a devoted husband and father and a caring employer. Both at his home in Hampshire - which was compared by his sister in law to a public lavatory - and on trips to Scotland, he held shooting parties and decimated the surrounding fauna. Guests were expected to leave on Saturday so that their host and his wife could devote Sundays to prayer.
Four years before he died, he was out walking in Scotland and had what he described as a revelation of the glory and splendour of God. One is tempted to think that in his case it was coals to Newcastle or, if he had been of another persuasion, holy water to Lourdes. Thereafter, he propounded new rules for one of his Methodist charities, Cliff College: if their evangelism did not give proper emphasis to the Holy Spirit, the Rank money would go elsewhere.
He conducted a Sunday school class, and we are told that he was "rather" boring. Given that his biographer is a Christian man to the point of decorating each chapter with a pious envoi, one would be tempted to suggest that the degree of boredom was paralytic. One is left with the shameful thought that it would he a terrible thing to die, go to heaven and he confronted there with J. Arthur Rank.
As for Mr Wakelin's book, it is detailed, conscientious, partisan and alas - eminently worthy of its subject.