Their father died in 1942 and J. Arthur Rank became director of General Film Distributors and John returned from the Army as joint managing director. However, neither John or James enjoyed working for a large corporation. In 1948, they went to S.G. Warburg for financial backing for two new companies, Independent Film Distributors, and a production arm, Romulus Films. According to critic Ronald Bergan, "Their aims were ambitious: to produce artistically valuable and yet commercially viable films, whose subjects would be wider than the Little Englanderism of British pictures of the period, and featuring big stars." An obituarist of James Woolf stated that John "was the main financial brain and James primarily in charge of artistic policy."