Oscar Deutsch (1893-1941), the son of a rich Hungarian scrap metal merchant in England,
built his first Odeon Cinema Theatre in 1930. Deutsch's mission was to provide quality
cinema for British movie goers - the name Odeon was an acronym for Oscar Deutsch Entertains
Our Nation. Deutsch chiefly built his theatres in large urban suburbs and, by 1936, he had
built 150 Odeon theaters valued at 10 million pounds.
In 1935, United Artists bought into Odeon. At this time, United Artists needed British
theatres in which to distribute its pictures because a substantial portion of the company's
profits were generated in the British market. Deutsch needed the association with United
Artists because he needed cash for his ambitious theatre building projects. The result was
that by the mid 1930s, United Artists had acquired a fifty percent share of Odeon's holding
company, Odeon Cinema Holdings, Ltd. Florenz M. Guedalla, then the United Artists legal
counsel in Great Britain, and Murray Silverstone, the United Artists Ltd. managing director,
were key players in United Artists penetration of the British market.
In order to raise additional cash during the late 1930s, Deutsch floated two stock issues
and it was a result of the seond of these in 1938 that British film magnate J. Arthur Rank
was able to buy into Odeon Cinema. By 1939 Rank was on the Odeon board of directors. After
Deutsch's untimely death in 1941 his associates sold their shares to Rank who then became
head of Odeon.
By the early 1940s, Rank had created a huge empire encompassing about 600 theatres, a
distribution network, and over half of the studio facilities in Great Britain. United
Artists soon found it difficult to cooperate with Rank and by 1943 he began to exclude them
from the British market. Although United Artists still owned 50% of Odeon, after the mid
1940s it could not book its pictures in Odeon theatres.
