A World on His Shoulders: Nat Cohen, Anglo-EMI and the British Film Industry

Laura Mayne

doi:10.3366/jbctv.2021.0554

Abstract

Despite being one of the most significant players in the British film industry of the 1960s and 1970s, Nat Cohen remains a curiously neglected figure in histories of that era. At Anglo-Amalgamated he oversaw a varied slate of productions, from B-movies and cheap programmers to box-office successes like Ken Loach’s Poor Cow. He greenlit some of the greatest commercial hits of the 1960, including New Wave dramas ( Billy Liar, A Kind of Loving), pop musicals ( Catch Us If You Can) and horror films now widely considered to be classics of British cinema ( Peeping Tom). After Anglo-Amalgamated was acquired as part of EMI’s takeover of the Associated British Pictures Corporation (ABPC), Cohen headed Anglo-EMI, where his business acumen and shrewd commercial instincts led to him being dubbed ‘King Cohen’ by the press and widely recognised as one of the most powerful men in the British film industry. Drawing on recent scholarly work on the role of the producer, this article will explore links between Anglo-ABPC and EMI through the lens of Cohen’s career and distinctive ‘movie mogul’ persona.

Highlights

The Anglo-Amalgamated logo would be familiar to almost anyone who was a cinemagoer in the 1960s, and the exact iconography changed over the years, the specifics remained the same: a chiselled figure of Atlas holding aloft a metal sculpture of the Earth inscribed with the names of the company’s partners, Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy
He argues that in general we might think about three distinct kinds of production role which have existed throughout the history of British cinema, or three ‘types’ of producer: the ‘moguls’ who, like Korda or Balcon, ran big companies and tended to contract producers to make films; the ‘independents’ or ‘middle-tier’ producers who might contract producers and produce their own films; and the ‘artisans’ who produced low budget independent films on an ad-hoc basis (Spicer 2017)
Accounts of Cohen’s modus operandi and film production policies are riddled with contradictions. Cohen is by his own account a producer who was able to action decisions quickly, adapting and anticipating changing audience tastes, and Anglo’s production slate would certainly support this theory: Cohen and Levy had anticipated a number of highly profitable trends including pop-music films, the Carry On comedies and the films of the British New Wave

Summary

Introduction

The Anglo-Amalgamated logo would be familiar to almost anyone who was a cinemagoer in the 1960s, and the exact iconography changed over the years, the specifics remained the same: a chiselled figure of Atlas holding aloft a metal sculpture of the Earth inscribed with the names of the company’s partners, Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy. By the late 1950s Anglo had grown from small distributor-renter to a profitable production company that could be relied upon to supply the major circuits with consistently high quality second feature product Their Scotland Yard and Scales of Justice shorts were dependable, formulaic crime dramas which could be slotted in to cinema programmes, while their series of one-hour second features based on Edgar Wallace short stories made by Jack Greenwood at Merton Park were some of the most critically acclaimed ‘B’ pictures that played on the ABC circuit. Many of these films served a dual function and could be distributed to cinemas in the UK and sold to television networks like ABC (the American Broadcasting Company). When ABPC was acquired by EMI in 1969, Anglo became a subsidiary of the largest film company in Britain

Walt Disney

Findings

Conclusion