Word: rank
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Beaver demanded to see General Cinema Finance's balance sheet. The Beaver's Daily Express hinted that the Stock Exchange might suspend dealings in Odeon stock "until full accounts of the General Cinema Finance Corp. . . . have been published." The Tribune, a Socialist weekly, thought that Rank might have lost so much money on his prestige films for the U.S. market that G.C.F. needed a financial transfusion from Odeon...
Whatever the truth, the proposed merger would make Odeon the prime company of Rank's financial pyramid...
...Rank had already cut back plans for big-budget pictures in favor of ?200,000 and ?250,000 productions. And some of his (and the world's) most talented moviemakers, feeling the cold hands of businessmen curbing their artistic impulses, had deserted him for Sir Alexander Korda (TIME, Nov. 17), who is concentrating on prestige films. Carol Reed (Odd Man Out) and Powell & Pressburger (Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) had already gone. British critics had begun to note the deterioration in Rank films; recent films, said the Sunday Times, ranged from "mediocre to ghastly...
Hollywood, which had quailed at Rank's hand-tooled best, did not fear for a moment that his mass-produced best could compete with theirs...
Nicholas Nickleby (Rank; Prestige) emphasizes, by contrast, the fine restraint that distinguished Great Expectations (TIME, May 26). The producers of Expectations realized that Dickens' literary grimaces would be made ridiculous by the least suggestion of mugging by the actors. The producers of Nickleby have permitted Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Stanley Holloway & Co. to tear into their meaty parts with about as much finesse as a pack of jackals. Still, this particular melodrama-which intersperses the quarrels between a vicious uncle and his virtuous nephew with a savage attack on the schools of Dickens' day -scarcely deserves...