“I don’t necessarily think that partnering with American producers is the best thing to do. They eat you up and spit you out – that’s the reality that we all know.”Doing it alone can be costly, too, however Rank tried to spend his way into the US. In 1945, he backed the wildly extravagant film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), the most expensive British film ever made. It cost more than Gone With The Wind (1939), whose star, Vivien Leigh, had been chosen by director Gabriel Pascal to star alongside Claude Rains’s Caesar. Pascal, the only film-maker trusted by Shaw to film his works, designed his own life-size sphinx and let money slip through his hands like the vast consignments of sand with which he filled Denham Studios.

The film was supposed to shoot for two months, but took over two years to complete The end result was an enormous anti-climax “A dismal ordeal,” complained critic Richard Winnington. “It cost over a million and a quarter pounds, took two and a half years to make, and well and truly bored one spectator for two and a quarter hours.” The film came nowhere near to making its money back.There are always excuses when the Brits slip up in Hollywood. In Rank’s era, British film-makers blamed the protectionism of the Americans. “They are only interested in seeing their own lives on screen,” Rank’s second-in-command John Davis complained. “I did have the honour of seeing [MGM boss] Louis B Mayer,” one of Rank’s producers Hugh Stewart recently recalled.

“The little bastard wandered up to me and said, ‘Don’t let Mr Rank wave his Union Jack at me!’ There was a deliberate attempt to put British films out of business. Nothing will convince me that that wasn’t so.”Speak to some of the executives involved in more recent attempts at breaking into the US market, and a deeply contradictory picture emerges. For Michael Kuhn, former boss of PolyGram (the outfit behind everything from Four Weddings and Funeral to Trainspotting and Being John Malkovich), Rank, Korda, Goldcrest et al were under-resourced even before they started, and therefore bound to fail. He refutes the notion that Hollywood is determined to keep competitors out of its market. “That’s what I call the Puttnam myth – that the studios are conspiring to prevent people coming into the business We’re so below the radar. It’s preposterous to suggest they even think about us!”James Lee, former boss of Goldcrest, isn’t so sure. “After 20 years of searching for the Holy Grail, I am convinced that it is simply impossible to compete against the major global distributors.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re British, French, Spanish, Chinese or an American independent in Seattle, everyone suffers from the same problem. They simply can’t get access to worldwide distribution.”But he doesn’t think this is the whole problem. The irony about FilmFour, he suggests, is that unlike many of its predecessors, it was structured in a fairly sensible way. “Everybody is saying things went wrong when the Warner Bros deal was struck, but the only solution is to partner with a studio. Warner Bros was prepared to distribute FilmFour movies if they were good They weren’t.