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By the late 1940s J. Arthur Rank (or the Rank Organisation as it was now called), owned: Five major film studio complexes, Pinewood Film Studios, Denham Film Studios, Ealing Studios, Lime Grove Studios and Islington Studios (the studios at Lime Grove were sold to the BBC in 1949, as were Ealing Studios in 1955).
General Film Distributors (GFD), later known as J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors and Rank Film Distributors Ltd., was a British film distribution company based in London. It was active between 1935 and 1996, and from 1937 it was part of the Rank Organisation .
The Rank Organisation was founded in 1937 by producer Joseph Arthur Rank as "General Film Distributors". Rank, as a company, still exists today as The Rank Group plc., a hotel, resort, and casino operator.
Feb 24, 2023 · The Rank Organisation was a British entertainment conglomerate founded by J. Arthur Rank in 1937. It became the largest vertically integrated film company in the UK, owning production, distribution and exhibition facilities. It diversified into the manufacture of radios, TVs and photocopiers.
J. Arthur Rank, Baron Rank (born December 22 or 23, 1888, Hull, Yorkshire, England—died March 29, 1972, Winchester, Hampshire) was a British industrialist who became Great Britain’s chief distributor and one of the world’s major producers of motion pictures.
He began by forming a partnership with film maker C. M. Woolf to form General Film Distributors, which in 1936 was incorporated in Rank's General Cinema Finance Corporation but continued to handle all distribution for the Rank organisation until 1955, when it was renamed J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors.
In 1936, J. Arthur Rank and the paper magnate Lord Portal convinced him to make it a daughter company to their General Cinema Finance Corporation, which just had acquired the British distribution rights for all Universal Pictures titles (by buying a large chunk of Universal in the US).
