Cinema history is a strange thing. A couple of months ago the Guardian began a series in which film critics write about ‘the classic film I’ve never seen’, some admitting to have unaccountably avoided exposure to genuine masterpieces such as Metropolis (1927) or À Bout de Souffle (1960). Others have revealed they have yet to sample undemanding box-office hits such as Top Gun (1986) or Titanic (1997). If the latter are classics, then so is On the Buses, the biggest selling British film of 1971.
The showing of motion pictures to paying customers began in the 1890s, and crowds flocked to see brief footage of someone treading on a hosepipe. Yet by Edwardian times, picture houses were already being criticised as an immoral influence, and the battle lines were drawn between the champions of supposedly respectable high culture and the upstart popular medium
of cinema.
Adrian Wright’s excellent book is devoted to an area of British film history that has sometimes been loftily dismissed or simply fallen through the cracks, examining in chronological order 320 musical films from the earliest British talkies to the end of the war.
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