Word: ranking
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...pictures in the show included something by almost every first-rank U.S. painter. Edward Hopper had sent along a harshly lit Conference at Night that was rock-solid in composition and rock-bare in theme. It made a notable addition to Hopper's hard comments on the loneliness and scantiness of a lot of city life-paintings that bite deeper than propaganda pictures of the "social-consciousness" school ever could. By contrast, Grandma Moses' glowing, not very "primitive" Out for the Christmas Trees and Louis Bouche's slapdash evocation of the New Lebanon Railroad Station, though just...
...movie empire which Britain's Cinemogul J. Arthur Rank put together in 14 years was in the midst of its own austerity program. Up for sale this week at public auction will go his studios at Shepherd's Bush and Islington. Rank, who could use the money, hopes that they will be knocked down for not less than ?250,000, possibly to BBC's television division. (The studios are too antiquated to interest U.S. moviemakers in England.) Of the four studios which will be left to Rank, two are shut tight and two are operating at only...
...Time for Comedy. But the tight fix of Rank, who turns out 50% of all British films, is no joke to Britons. In the last twelve months, he has fired nearly 1,800 production workers (about 35% of his staff) and kept step with other British moviemakers by cutting the pay of most of those left by 10 to 20%. The drop in movie production was so sharp that Labor
...ghastly fact had already been clear to British investors, who are taking a steadily dimmer view of Rank's future as a movie magnate. His producing enterprises have been in trouble before (in 1946 they lost ?474,777), but those were the hopeful days when Rank was talking of making 60 pictures a year and beating Hollywood at its own game of mass production. How badly he had flopped was shown by the prices of stocks in his two top companies, both at their eight-year lows. Gaumont-British common, which hit a high of 18s. last year...
...Rank's troubles were caused by the fact that he had grown too big too fast. After he had won critical huzzahs and made money on such pictures as Henry V, he had attempted to increase his annual output of pictures from 25 to 60. Directors like Sydney Box (The Seventh Veil), who had been turning out five good films a year, were told to make 20. There was not enough moviemaking talent for all the pictures and the result was a dreary parade of box-office flops which cut into the profits of Rank's theaters...