Rank and Vile

After Rank, second-tier films you're cranking
You're at Anglo? Career must be tanking!
This flick with Carl Boehm
As a sick Peeping Toehm
Makes nerves jangle with fear as he's shanking.

David Cairns



This is part of the Late Show: The Late Films Blogathon, being held at David Cairns' Shadowplay.

Rank and Anglo refer to British film companies. After a long association with the Rank Organisation, in 1960 director Michael Powell made Peeping Tom at Anglo-Amalgamated. The film starred Austrian-German actor Carl (Karl) Boehm as a a serial killer who murders women using a portable film camera which also records their dying expressions of terror.

From Wikipedia:
The Rank Organisation was a British entertainment conglomerate founded by industrialist J. Arthur Rank in April 1937. It quickly became the largest and most vertically integrated film company in the United Kingdom, owning production, distribution and exhibition facilities.

Anglo-Amalgamated Productions was a British film production company, run by Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, which operated from 1945 until roughly 1971 (after which it was absorbed into EMI Films). Low-budget and second features, often produced at Merton Park Studios, formed much of its output. It was the UK distributor of many films produced by American International Pictures (AIP), who distributed AA's films in the United States.