What does it mean to talk about a British "national" cinema? To what extent can British cinema, dominated for so many years by Hollywood, be considered a national cinema? Andrew Higson investigates these questions from a historical point of view. Challenging the received wisdoms of British cinema history, and combining detailed analyses of film texts from the early 1920s to the 1940s with studies of industrial and cultural contexts, this is a wide-ranging survey of the concept of a purely British film industry.