by Stephen Vagg
The career of Nat Cohen has been given long-overdue re-appraisal in recent years, via several academic articles as well as Paul Moody’s book on EMI Films. Cohen was never that famous in his lifetime, which is odd – after all, he certainly didn’t avoid publicity, he owned several successful racehorses, the words “Nat Cohen Presents” was slapped on scores of films, and at one stage, he was acknowledged as the most powerful person in the British film industry. But the cinephile community never seemed to embrace him the way they did, say, Sir Alex Korda, Sir Michael Balcon, Lord Lew Grade, Sir James Carreras, or even Sir John Davis (who everyone hated but still discussed all the time). Neither did the “establishment” – there were no knighthoods and peerages for old Nat.
We think this was due to a couple of reasons. Cohen wasn’t known seen as a creative executive but rather a money man. Also, perhaps, there’s an element of British filmmaking that’s uncomfortable with Jewish people; Jewishness (for lack of a better word) is more traditionally associated with the USA (Hollywood and Broadway), and thus being “pushy” and “money grabbing” – there has long been a strand of anti-Semitism (both conscious and unconscious) with the British cultural scene. Some filmmakers got around it via excellent establishment connections and classy credits, like Korda and Grade, but not Cohen. Articles on him routinely mentioned the fact that his dad was a butcher; Bryan Forbes bitchily dismissed Cohen as someone who would be “just as happy making shoes” as movies; Alan Parker claimed Cohen “looked more like a Soho strip club spiv than a film mogul” with a “lowbrow taste in film production and claiming “No one could remember any films he’d made”; Vernon Swell called Cohen someone who “knew nothing about films.”
Yet Cohen was one of the most significant British executives of the 20th century, with a list of credits that was rich, prolific and varied. He was also one of the most successful, if not the most successful, studio head that a British film company ever had, up there with Ted Black. Also, like Black, despite being very successful, Cohen was ultimately fired.
It’s time to look back at his life, times and movies.
Cohen was born in London in 1905, the only son of parents who had recently emigrated from Poland (he had one older sister). Cohen’s father was, as journalists never seemed to tire pointing out, a butcher – but Cohen Snr also had a number of side hustles, including investing in cinemas. Cohen went to work for his father, but was more interested in the movie side of things – an interest presumably accelerated in 1931 when he married Ailsey Defries, daughter of Harry Defries, chairman of the Sterling Film Company. By the following year, Cohen had saved up enough to buy his own cinema, which he later called a “flea pit”. He would hire movies that had been released a couple of times and see if he could squeeze some dollars out of them. It was hard work, “a modest living” as Cohen admitted later, but also excellent grounding in understanding audiences. Cohen must have been good at it – within a few years he owned a small circuit of cinemas.
Cohen was ambitious and keen to move into distribution and production. In 1942, he went into partnership with a fellow cinema owner, Stuart Levy (the two men got to know each other when Cohen sold Levy some cinemas, which is cute). They formed a company, Anglo-Amalgamated – or, rather, two companies, Anglo-Amalgamated Productions and Anglo-Amalgamated Distribution, but for ease of reference we will use the one term.
Singer Tommy Steele described Cohen and Levy as being like “Abbott and Costello. They didn’t so much as hold a meeting as do an act.” Steele added, “There was a degree of madness about them – but you had to be mad to take the chances they took – with a little eccentricity for good measure.” There was also tragedy – both men would be widowed relatively young, Cohen’s wife dying of cancer in 1948, with more misfortune to come for both. But that’s down the track. Levy would be crucial to Cohen’s career (he’s an even more obscure figure).
Anglo-Amalgamated embarked on a multifaceted expansion program after the war that was cautious but also ambitious. It involved four main strategies:
a) Continue to distribute old movies, which were cheaper to get the rights to, and squeeze whatever dollars they could out of them (old Hal Roach comedies were a particular favourite at Anglo).
b) Form relationships in the US with smaller independent producers (it wasn’t worth approaching major studios) and distribute their movies that the major British distributors are less enthusiastic about.
c) Start making short featurettes which could be used as support attractions to the main feature (back in the 1940s and 1950s, no one going to the movies expected to see just the one movie). The earning capacity for supporting shorts was limited (you generally got paid a flat fee) but provided a regular profit if made inexpensively. They could also be grouped together and sold to American television. (Commercial television wasn’t introduced to Britain until 1955.)
d) Begin producing its own feature films.
This was smart. In the late 1940s, British filmmakers were going broke left, right and centre due to their inability to control costs and/or make films for which there was a decent market (eg J Arthur Rank, Sydney Box, Alex Korda). Cohen and Levy avoided this through shrewd management and building up slowly yet steadily. Strategies (a), (b) and (c) ensured a constant cash flow for their company until strategy (d) could get up and running.
The shorts and featurettes made by Anglo Amalgamated originally included travelogues and documentaries. (Sidebar: One of them was a documentary called Shark Oil about… well, shark oil. In 1951, a boat launch being used to film scenes for the documentary off Achill Island in Ireland struck a rock and sank in shark-infested waters. Four passengers were put on a raft while a fifth passenger swam four miles through heavy seas to get help. By the time a rescue party arrived all four passengers put on the raft had died – including the wife of the swimmer. That story doesn’t have much to do with Nat Cohen incidentally, we just put it in here because it was interesting.)
Anglo made dramatic shorts as well, most notably the “Scotland Yard series”: 30-minute dramas based on real life criminal cases, written and presented by crime writer Edgar Lustgarten. It sounds like a television series on the big screen, which it was, basically – and, not surprisingly, the episodes were sold to American television. They were popular – by December 1959 Anglo had made 35, most of which were directed by Ken Hughes and Montgomery Tully and shot at Merton Park Studios.
Nat Cohen dipped his toe into feature film production by investing in a low budget murder-musical, Murder at the Windmill (1949). Little remembered today, this film showed many of the hallmarks of later Nat Cohen movies in that it:
a) didn’t cost much;
b) had a very exploitable angle (it was set at the Windmill Theatre, famous for being able to see naked women on stage, as dramatised in the 2005 film Mrs Henderson Presents);
c) was exportable to the USA, being a crime piece (which traditionally travel well) and having American interest (there are some American characters, and many GIs remembered the Windmill fondly from visiting it when on leave during the war);
d) demonstrated Cohen’s eye for talent, being written and directed by Val Guest and produced by Daniel Angel, who both became among the country’s leading filmmakers (Guest was reasonably well established but it was Angel’s first movie as producer); and
e) did not rely solely on Cohen’s money (he almost always took on financial partners for projects, thus lessening the risk).
The movie was a hit and Cohen invested in the next Guest-Angel collaboration, Miss Pilgrim’s Progress. He and Angel shared a “presented by” credit for both movies.
Anglo-Amalgamated’s first produced feature was 1951’s Assassin for Hire, from a script by Australian writer Rex Rienits (the story had debuted on Australian radio and turned into a British TV play). It bore the hallmarks of the bulk of early Cohen product – low budget, crime, made with one eye on the American market.
The movie was successful by its modest standards and Anglo went off on a crime film spree. After all, another hallmark of Cohen was “if something succeeds, then wash and repeat”. He was a big believer in franchise and milking genres – as well as reusing talent. Thus, Sydney Talfer, star of Assassin for Hire, also appeared in Anglo’s Mystery Junction, Wide Boy, and The Floating Dutchman, while Rienits wrote Wide Boy, Noose for a Lady and River Beat for the company. Wide Boy was directed by Ken Hughes who also made The Brain Machine, Case of the Red Monkey, Confession and Timeslip for Cohen, as well as writing Portrait of Alison.
Vernon Sewell directed a bunch of Anglo movies including The Floating Dutchman, Ghost Ship, Counterspy, Dangerous Voyage, Radio Cab Murders, Johnny You’re Wanted, Wrong Number, Urge to Kill, and House of Mystery while Montgomery Tully directed Dial 999, The Key Man, The Hypnotist, The Man in the Shadows, Escapement, The Long Knife, Man with a Gun, and The Man who was Nobody.
(NB some of these films were made by other companies that Cohen and Levy had an interest in, Insignia Films and Bruton films. They also had a financial interest in Merton Park Studios.)
Once Cohen and Levy decided to make a movie, they typically left the filmmakers completely alone while they did it, which led to false impressions as to the extent of their ability. Vernon Sewell commented, “I think they had a couple of butchers shops. Or dress shops. They came into the business with no knowledge about anything.”
This was an astonishingly ignorant claim from a director about two people who had owned cinemas for decades and already had a fair amount of success. Sewell was a public school-educated yacht owner, so snobbishness may have been involved, but it was not untypical of attitudes towards Cohen.
From the 1940s, Cohen made regular trips to the US and formed strong relationships over there – not with the majors, who wouldn’t have given him the time of day (though apparently he was a friend of Sam Goldwyn), but similar independent operators like Robert Lippert, Nassour films, Todon (the company of actress Donna Reed and her husband Tony Owen) and ARC (who became American International Pictures). His association with these led to Anglo distributing a number of American films and obtaining distribution deals for his British productions. These contacts also made it easier when Cohen started importing B-list American stars to appear in Anglo films to make them more appealing across the Atlantic – names like Cesar Romero (Street of Shadows), William Lundigan (Dangerous Voyage), Phyllis Kirk (River Beat), Richard Conte (Little Red Monkey), and Terry Moore (Portrait of Alison).
As Anglo’s budgets increased, two stars would be brought over for a film: Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox (The Sleeping Tiger), Sydney Chaplin and Audrey Dalton (Confession), Gene Nelson and Faith Domergue (Timeslip), Gene Nelson and Mona Freeman (Dial 999), Richard Basehart and Mary Murphy (The Intimate Stranger), Zachary Scott and Peggie Castle (The Counterfeit Plan), Zachary Scott and Faith Domergue (Man in the Shadow). This cultural desecration harmed Cohen’s critical reputation, although Anglo did continue to make cheaper movies with all British casts.
Now, there were a number of companies working this side of the street in the British film industry of the 1950s, using the same methods as Cohen and Levy – organisations like Butchers, Renown Films, Adelphi Films, Tempean Films, Eros Films, Hammer, and the Danzinger brothers. So did independent companies with links to the majors like Warwick Films and Frankovich Productions. However, Anglo would be the most successful, matched only by Hammer. Lots of other British companies knew how to keep costs down, import American stars, sell films to America and to make crime pictures. What would separate Nat Cohen (and Stuart Levy) from the pack was an ability to spot talent and leave them the hell alone.
For instance, they gave early jobs (and, later, relatively large budgets and imported stars) to directors such as Ken Hughes and Guy Green (River Beat, Portrait of Alison), who both became big time directors in the 1960s. One of their key in-house execs was Julian Wintle, who became a major producer. Most significantly, Cohen threw a lifeline to Hollywood director Joseph Losey, who fled the US after being blacklisted in the early 1950s.
There was a long tradition of canny producers hiring top level blacklisted talent on the cheap and Cohen leapt in, offering Losey a thriller, The Sleeping Tiger for a low fee. The director disliked Cohen personally, but was grateful for the job (as most blacklisted people were), and the creative freedom Cohen gave him, not to mention the use of two American names (Alexis Smith, Alexander Knox) and a rising British star (Dirk Bogarde, just before Doctor in the House). There was a risk in Losey’s hiring – so much so, the director was credited on the final movie as “Victor Hanbury” (a real person who “fronted” for Losey). Nonetheless, The Sleeping Tiger was a profitable, launched the legendary Bogarde-Losey association, and Cohen used Losey again for The Intimate Stranger (this time the director was billed as “Alec Snowden” – another real person – with screenwriter “Peter Howard” actually being another blacklistee, Howard Koch).
Losey had a far, far happier experience working for Cohen than he did at Rank under John Davis for The Gentleman and The Gypsy where his film was re-edited, re-scored and basically trashed (something Davis was often accused of doing). The director would later make two classic films for Cohen under his own name: The Criminal and The Go Between (of more anon).
The story of Nat Cohen and Anglo Amalgamated until 1956 was admittedly not that distinguished from an artistic point of view. Their films were usually fast and unpretentious, and some of them very enjoyable (we’d definitely recommend Assassin for Hire, and anything by Hughes or Losey especially Wide Boy and The Sleeping Tiger). However, there’s no denying a “sameness” to Anglo’s diet at this stage. It was all, basically, crime – yes, some of the films had a slightly bigger budget and better actors and directors, the (typically American) stars varied, and there were a few sci fi-ish ones in there (Timeslip), but on the whole, it was spivs, shady ladies, murder and dark alleys. However, firm foundations had been laid, and the next two years would see Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy blossom into becoming two of the most significant figures in British filmmaking history.
