Rank Video Library story · 9:57am Jul 27th, 2017
The Rank Video Library was the video arm of one of England's most important film studios. J. Arthur Rank, a flour miller, started a film unit on April 23, 1937. Initially a studio that mainly focused on Methodist themed short subjects, Rank quickly expanded as a powerhouse of British filmmaking through such timeless classics as the 1948 version of Henry V, the 1950 version of Hamlet, The Red Shoes, The Ladykillers, The Ipcress File, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Carve Her Name with Pride, Sapphire, and Victim (one of the first films to have a real, honest-to-God portrayal of an LGBT person), and was also responsible for the long running Carry On series in England.
The '60s and '70s were slightly hard on Rank. They were however a large company, having had a record label called Top Rank for a while, made copy machines under the Rank Xerox name, held huge stock in ITV's first south-east England franchise holder Southern Television, and sold colour TV sets in conjunction with a Japanese company called NEC. With this size, Rank was unable to attain too much success in the main film concern until 1976, when they made a movie called Bugsy Malone with Paramount Pictures (who held North American rights); the gangster musical was the film that really got Rank back into serious filmmaking. With Tony Williams in charge of Rank Films, they made remakes of The Thirty Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes, along with more original films Wombling Free, The Riddle of the Sands, Tarka the Otter, Eagle's Wing, Bad Timing and Silver Dream Racer, which would be their final film.
The '80s had nothing to write home about as Rank was converted into an importer of films.
After a time Rank Film Distributors was in trouble because they hadn’t got any new product. So Rank Film Distributors was then given chunks of money to go and buy into pictures because they made a blunder. And they carried on, on that basis, not directly making them and they had no direct control over what they made at all, no influence. They just bought into pictures. They did an output deal with Orion [following that studio's buyout of the Filmways distribution arm] and that carried on until – until they sold the shooting match. Then the decision was made to get out of film, so RFD was closed down, Rank Film Advertising was sold off, eventually the laboratories went. [Rank] Cinemas was the last one to go.
- Tony Williams, then the head of the mostly crumbing Rank Organisation.
The '80s was also the video age as Rank started up the Video Library, which was partly a harbor for ABC-owned films. Rank's video arm also distributed UK releases of Cannon, Orion and Disney films in the '80s and manufactured tapes that were distributed by Warner Home Video. The video unit closed up shop by 1993. Two years later, the outstanding shares of the organisation were bought by the Rank Group, which today operates an online gaming service called Rank Interactive, the Mecca Bingo club chain, and the UK's largest casino operator, Grosvenor Casinos. In 1997, Rank sold the Rank film library (i.e. the films natively produced by Rank) to Carlton Television, who originally, of all things, got the world-famous Gongman off their prints of these films due to their unfortunate habit of axing old logos from old films. It is being restored and in fact has been restored onto current prints of said films by the library's current owner, ITV Studios Global Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of ITV plc.
