Word: laundering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder have put their bright stamp on some of Britain's deftest moviemaking, first as co-scripters (Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, Carol Reed's Night Train), then as a writing-producing-directing team (The Adventuress, The Notorious Gentleman, Green for Danger). Last week the team improved U.S. moviegoing prospects with two new films...
Adapting a play by John Dighton, Scripter-Director Launder gives them both plenty of opportunities. Sim plays the smug, hand-rubbing headmaster of a boys' school who is thrown for a loss when a mixed-up Ministry of Education dumps a girls' school on the premises. ("Someone," he moans, "is guilty of an appalling sexual aberration.") Headmistress Rutherford is the formidably efficient battle-ax who leads the invasion, tackles one of the problems of boys-&-girls-together by canceling biology classes...
...eight British films turned out since 1945 under their Individual Pictures trademark, plump, chipper Sidney Gilliat, 42, and quiet, precise Frank Launder, 43, have not yet been caught with a dud. Why do their pictures always make a tidy profit? Launder, a onetime repertory actor, and Gilliat, who thought he would be a journalist, point significantly to the fact that they have always been able to make pictures without too much front-office bossing...
They quit the J. Arthur Rank Empire two years ago because, says Launder, "the organization was heading for more centralization and more control . . . we were for decentralization." They even give each other plenty of leeway. When one of them gets an idea for a movie, he consults closely with the other, then does the script and direction himself, drawing freely on his partner's advice...
Last week, sponsored by Sir Alexander Korda, who finances and distributes their product and gives them a cut in the profits, Launder & Gilliat were making the most of their independence. While Launder worked on a film called Beauty Queen (about "the kind of a girl who starts in the News of the World and ends up there, too"), Gilliat was mulling over a movie biography of Gilbert & Sullivan...