The Rank gong was withheld from Paul W S Anderson’s first film, 1994’s Shopping, putting him alongside Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg…
It was in the early 1930s that an icon of British cinema, the Rank gong, was first banged. In a sequence shot at Pinewood Studios, a man by the name of Carl Dane was the first to be seen on screen performing the opening ident to the films of The J Arthur Rank Organisation, followed in turn by Billy Wells, Phil Nielman and Ken Richmond. Every official Rank film was gonged onto the screen, right up until it shut up shop in 1997. At that point, Carlton Communications snapped up Rank Film Distributors and a library of 749 films, in a deal worth £65m.
Here’s the Rank gong in action…
Pretty much every one of those films was introduced by the famous gong, but in a small handful of cases, the gong was withheld. The reason? Punishment of sorts for the production in question not meeting with the approval of Rank bosses.
Director Nicolas Roeg certainly felt the wrath of this. In 1980, his film Bad Timing – also known as Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession – was released. Headlined by Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, Harvey Keitel and Denholm Elliott, and it’d be fair to conclude that the Rank organisation was not happy with it. “A sick film made by sick people for sick people” came a quote in the press, not from a moral crusader or a politician, but from Rank itself.
Roeg came to the film following the four-in-a-row run of Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth, but the subject matter of Bad Timing – rape and suicide are among the matters it addresses – earned it an infamy. Rank’s decision to slam its own film, and the absence of a video release in the US, meant the movie attracted few eyeballs.
Those who did see it though – and it’s since been issued by the Criterion Collection of physical media releases in the US – may have noted the absence of the gong, as Rank tried to distance itself from the movie. It still distributed it, but it hardly put much heft into publicising the feature.
Five years later, Rank pulled the same trick. This time it was a movie from Ken Russell that had got under its skin. Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins headlined Crimes Of Passion, a 1984 erotic thriller for which Rank held release rights in the UK in 1985 (the movie went by the name of China Blue in some territories).
In this case, Rank didn’t go to the trouble of having one of its own executives badmouth the film, and once again, it fulfilled its distribution commitments. But when Crimes Of Passion made it to UK cinemas, the Rank gong at the start again was absent. Still, it didn’t stop the company issuing a video release of the movie in 1986, with a Rank Video logo – complete with a gong – adorning the front cover.
But it’s the final case of the Rank gong withdrawal that got my attention. The testing subject matter of Bad Timing, and the rumping and pumping of Crimes Of Passion at least can be seen to have upset some moral code within the Rank group. Yet when it came to the feature directorial debut of Paul W S Anderson, there was a feeling that it had simply folded a little in the face of tabloid pressure.
The film in question was Shopping, from a time when Paul W S Anderson was still known as Paul Anderson. A commercially-slanted British action drama, it gave a first lead role for Jude Law, and the cast also includes Sadie Frost, Sean Pertwee, Sean Bean (but does he die?), hello to Jason Isaacs (beautifully billed as ‘Market Trader’ and Jonathan Pryce. A heavily commercial British film at a time when those were on the rare side, it was written and directed by Anderson, produced by Jeremy Bolt, and reviews weren’t particularly kind.
However, who needs reviews when you have the British tabloids to stir the pot? They duly went to work, with the usual suspects reacting in horror to the depiction of ram raiding and joyriding in the film. Coming in the midst of a period when film censorship was heavily in the spotlight in the UK, Shopping found itself very much targeted by UK newspapers, and took some modest commercial benefit for doing so.
Just to get to a cinema screen in the first place had been a bit of a journey. The Metropolitan Police initially objected to a scene where police cars are under attack in the movie. Then the BBFC in the UK effectively held the release of the film up by three months, as it refused to give Shopping a certificate, only relenting after several screenings of the film, and plenty of chats with its distributor.
With local police forces demanding a look at the film under the threat of localised bans in the UK, Rank withdrew its gong from the front of the movie. It was still distributing the movie, but not with its logo on the front of it.
Producer Jeremy Bolt wasn’t impressed. “Rank distributing the film without the gong is a bit like Doctor Who without the TARDIS”, he thundered to Premiere UK magazine’s July 1994 issue. “I’m appalled that they’re going to take it off. I always saw it as a mark of quality”.
Shopping’s subject matter isn’t involving nookie or anything, which is what made Rank’s decision unusual. The suggestion from the aforementioned Premiere article was that Rank had been scared off by ‘the recent adverse tabloid publicity surrounding the picture, and the new mood of censorship’.
Still, by distributing the film – which presumably, in fairness, by this stage it was probably obliged to do – it could look to be appalled whilst counting the loot at the same time. Some trick.
This was certainly a case in the end too of the controversy giving the film some publicity oxygen, and it certainly didn’t work out badly for Paul W S Anderson. Before the movie had landed in June 1994, New Line Cinema had asked to see a cut of it, and off the back of that offered Anderson the director’s gig of its upcoming Mortal Kombat film, a job Anderson gleefully accepted. By the time Shopping arrived in UK cinemas, Anderson was in America, in pre-production on his Hollywood debut.
As for Rank, it’s believed that Shopping was the final time it withheld its famous gong.
Rest assured that 1977’s The Uncanny, featuring brainwashing cats, absolutely has its gong where it’s supposed to be…
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