Description:Oscar Deutsch was small, bald and bespectacled. Watching him walking onstage at one of his many opening nights to the strains of the Dagenham Girl Pipers, you may well have found your attention wandering. Deutsch was, however, a man of hidden heights, the so-called Napoleon of filmland, a dashing and mercurial empire builder who, as Managing Director of Odeon Theatres, tagged his initials on high streets the length and breadth of England. Born in Balsall Heath in 1893, Deutsch spent part of his childhood in Waverhill Road, Handsworth, and attended King Edward’s Five Ways. At seventeen, he joined the family metals and skins firm, Deutsch & Brenner of Hockley, but while scrap metal lined his pockets, it could not contain him. Had he but known it, he was all along the very model of a modern movie mogul – Jewish East European background, provincial upbringing, gainful but prosaic employment - and he found his way into films around 1920 with childhood friends Victor Saville and Michael Balcon, whose tales you’ll find told elsewhere. He acquired his first local cinemas in the mid-Twenties and built his first, at Brierley Hill, in 1928. His first Odeon followed two years later at Perry Barr. In the Thirties, he was president of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, and rubbed shoulders with Chaplin on the board of United Artists. Cancer shadowed and drove him through years of sixteen hour days and seven day weeks, before claiming him at the age of forty-eight. He left a wife, three boys and three hundred cinemas.