Everything you knew about cinema is probably wrong

by Nick James, Editor Sight & Sound

The Ultimate Film Chart reveals that the British really love British films! Can this really be true? Haven't the British always preferred Hollywood films?

Think again. Box-office figures dominate most discussions about films in the UK, with massive US blockbuster success as the story the media have been telling us for years. But now we can say it isn't so. Of course the most famous Hollywood successes like Gone with the Wind and Star Wars are at the top of any list, but what if I tell you that Spring in Park Lane (1948), a star vehicle for the British actress Anna Neagle with an 'upstairs downstairs' social class plot directed by her husband Herbert Wilcox, is up there with them? Surely not?

Well, yes it is. And we know now because a new survey conducted by the BFI for Channel 4 suggests that much we thought we knew about cinema tastes in Britain is wrong. The new Ultimate Film Chart places Spring in Park Lane precisely as the fifth biggest film in the UK of all time. How is this possible?

Box-office top 100s are usually based on statistics gathered only since the 1970s, but this new chart, compiled using the best means and sources available to assess cinema admissions before the 1970s - as well as those since - has radically redrawn the top 100 in favour of British films. For instance, you'll find an astonishing three more Anna Neagle vehicles in the top 50 - at No.17 is The Courteneys of Curzon Street (1947), at No.42 Piccadilly Incident (1946), and at No.49 I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945), making Neagle possibly the most successful cinema actress in British film history.

And this Brit rediscovery is not just a one-woman phenomenon. Take Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in the highwayman costume romp The Wicked Lady (1946): it's up at ninth, just below Titanic, or another Mason vehicle The Seventh Veil (1945), which just beats Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to the tenth spot. Another one-time matinee idol, Dirk Bogarde, can be found playing a cockney killer at No.29 in The Blue Lamp (1950) outclassing the likes of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - which doesn't even make it into the top 100!

So how did Channel 4 and the bfi come to this revelation? The fact that cinema admissions reached an all time high in the 1940s, just before the advent of home television, aroused bfi researchers' curiosity as to how the biggest films then would compare to recent big successes. In the peak year of 1946, there were 1,638 million admissions, which had declined to just 54 million by 1984, to be helped back to around 176 million through the multiplex revolution by 2002 - still a mere fraction of that 1946 figure. It was obvious therefore, that the popular cinema of the 1940s far outstripped much of today's - although there were vastly more titles being distributed then, so the comparative difference is not as great as the overall admission figures suggest.

In the absence of straightforward box-office data it was important to draw on as many reliable sources as exist to assess the probable box-office figures for pre-1970s films. In pre-video and -DVD days, there was a lot more repeat viewing of films - news items about middle aged ladies watching Gone with the Wind or The Sound of Music for a record umpteenth time appeared regularly. And just a glance at the subject matter of Anna Neagle blockbusters tells you that the pre-television audience for film in the UK was not dominated by teenage boys but by older women.

Nonetheless there's an overriding impression of a consistent preference for British subject matter throughout the whole list. Out of all the top 30 films one could, at a push, claim around half as having British subject matter (assuming you allow the likes of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Mary Poppins as British-originated subjects). What does that say to a British film industry that's always trying to imitate the Americans? Perhaps they would do better to try to tempt that older female audience back into the cinema with British subjects and matinee idols like Jude Law. Except that that's what Hollywood is doing these days.

There's also a definite showing for the British film-makers who dominate critics best-ever polls such as the one Sight & Sound runs every ten years. Carol Reed's The Third Man, which did best of all the Brit films in Sight & Sound's 2002 poll and also won the bfi's 100 Best British Films poll in 1999 is at No.26 here (and his Oliver! is at No.74). David Lean has two films, Dr. Zhivago at No.44, and Lawrence of Arabia at No.85. Michael Powell, who figures so strongly in critics' polls with such idiosyncratic works as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, is at No.63 here with his rather tame 49th Parallel. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that the great Alfred Hitchcock's one and only entry in the list is his adaptation of Rebecca, at No.73.