General Film Distributors (GFD), later known as J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors and Rank Film Distributors Ltd., was a British film distribution company based in London. It was active between 1935 and 1996, and from 1937 it was part of

the Rank Organisation 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, distribut ...

. General Film Distributors was created in 1935 by the British film distributor

C. M. Woolf Charles Moss Woolf (10 July 187931 December 1942) was a British film distributor. Biography Woolf made a fortune by financing, distributing and exhibiting films after World War I, including some of Alfred Hitchcock's first films. In 1935 he resi ...

(1879–1942) after he had resigned from

Gaumont British The Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced and distributed films and operated a cinema chain in the United Kingdom. It was established as an offshoot of the Gaumont Film Company of France. Film production Gaumont-British was founded in 18 ...

and closed his distribution company

Woolf & Freedman Film Service Woolf & Freedman Film Service was a UK film distributor which was founded by film producer C. M. Woolf, and which operated from 1919 to 1934. The company distributed more than 140 films over a 15-year period. In 1935, Woolf formed a new company, G ...

.The Independent 1 July 1999: Obituary: Sir John Woolf
Retrieved 2011-09-02 In 1936, J. Arthur Rank and the paper magnate Lord Portal, convinced him to make it a daughter company to their General Cinema Finance Corporation, which just had acquired the British distribution rights for all

Universal Pictures Universal Pictures (legally Universal City Studios LLC, also known as Universal Studios, or simply Universal; common metonym: Uni, and formerly named Universal Film Manufacturing Company and Universal-International Pictures Inc.) is an Ameri ...

titles (by buying a large chunk of Universal in the US). One year later it became the cornerstone in

The Rank Organisation 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, distribut ...

. General Film Distributors kept its own name within the Rank Organisation until 1955, when it was renamed J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, which in turn was renamed Rank Film Distributors Ltd. in 1957. Rank Film Distributors was acquired by Carlton Communications in 1997 and closed. It was C.M. Woolf's secretary who devised the man-with-a-gong trademark which was adopted by the Rank Organisation when it was founded in 1937. Athletes who played the Gongman in the film sequence over the years, included boxer Bombardier

Billy Wells William Thomas Wells, better known as Bombardier Billy Wells (31 August 1889 – 12 June 1967), was an English heavyweight boxer. Fighting under the name "Bombardier Billy Wells", he was British and British Empire Champion from 1911 ...

and wrestler

Ken Richmond Kenneth Alan "Ken" Richmond (10 July 1926 – 3 August 2006) was an English heavyweight wrestler. Richmond was born in London. His father abandoned the family when Richmond was 3. Before he got into freestyle wrestling, he was a whal ...

. Also, George Francis Moss Snr played the Gongman. During the 20 years General Film Distributors had its original name, the company distributed over 450 mainstream films.IMDb: General Film Distributors (GFD)
Retrieved 2012-10-31 A British DVD distributor, active since 2005, uses the same name but is unrelated to this company.

References

External links

Francis Donald Klingender, Stuart Legg: ''Money Behind the Screen'' (1937), pages 37-41
Retrieved 2012-10-31 {{Cinema of the United Kingdom Film distributors of the United Kingdom