What's your favourite British film? No, I'm not talking about Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Love Actually - pictures as British as Gruyere. I'm talking about The Colditz Story and The Captive Heart, about Seance on a Wet Afternoon and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Films starring John Mills and Jack Hawkins, Anthony Steel and Sylvia Syms, Richard Wattis and Googie Withers. Films that before anything else - including the chance of making money on foreign shores - are about Britain and Britishness. Small films, generally. Cosy films most of the time. Monochrome films almost without exception.
Attitudes towards them tend to be similarly black and white. The average critic has never had much time for British pictures, and serious critics no time at all. In the 1950s, Roger Manvell, the pioneer director of the British Film Academy, said that home-grown films put him in mind of "faded leaves painted in exquisite detail by a lady in Cornwall". A decade later, in the highly influential magazine Movie, Victor Perkins asserted that "British cinema is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive." Francois Truffaut was even less kind. There is, he once suggested, "a certain incompatibility between the words 'cinema' and 'Britain'". There is a fitting ambiguity to that "certain": righteous abrasiveness hiding beneath diffident politesse. What is this British cinema Truffaut deplores, after all, if not a cinema that obsesses over surface niceties while fighting shy of emotional revelation?
Certainly, a glance at the cover of Shepperton Babylon suggests that Truffaut and co had a point. Matthew Sweet's fascinating labour of love is adorned with a three-quarter-length study of a stetsoned and leather-trousered Dirk Bogarde. The image - in which Bogarde's left arm is wrapped around his waist, his right elbow resting on it the better for his hand to fondle his cheek - comes from Roy Ward Baker's The Singer Not the Song, a homoerotic western that contrives to be even more confused about itself than its damply camp leading man. Bogarde, who had bought the leather trousers while on holiday in Rome and insisted on wearing them throughout the film, doubtless fancied they helped give him the rough-trade look that Marlon Brando had recently made his own. Yet the set of his hat is too jaunty, the cock of his wrist too come-hither, the leather about his loins too lustrous for the effect to be anything other than laughable.
But if Bogarde was no Brando, Matthew Sweet is no Kenneth Anger. Though his title is plainly modelled on Anger's Hollywood Babylon, his book could not be more different. Not for Sweet Anger's tabloid tittle-tattle. Although the odd unwanted pregnancy and abortion-induced death sneaks into its pages, Shepperton Babylon is essentially a passionate love letter to our national cinema. Until reading it, I thought it was only me who watched those "they flew to Bruges"-type films that go out on Channel 4 of an afternoon. Sweet not only watches them, he records them to watch again. How many other viewers of Bhowani Junction have noticed that, by the time he came to star in the film, Stewart Granger's "sideburns had turned a snowy white, like the first trickle of an avalanche hitting the lower slopes"? Not that Sweet is just a buff. His judgements are spot on. George Formby, with his "receding chin . . . huge mouth full of monstrous clothes-peg teeth . . . jug ears . . . tiny eyes and . . . slick of Brylcreemed hair", really did look "like a human being reflected in a tap". The Boulting brothers' comedies were "sour and plaguey". John Mills never could act.
Despite its panoptic feel, however, the book has some curious omissions. Margaret Rutherford - one of our cinema's most singular creations - gets only one mention; Will Hay gets none. And where are Alistair Sim, Ian Carmichael and Terry-Thomas? Where are the Hammer Horrors, James Bond and the Carry Ons? True, these mini-genres have been widely written about, but nobody has ever come up with a persuasive explanation for their enduring popularity. Still, Sweet gives us plenty to be getting on with. His mammoth researches - including conversations with writers, directors, producers, actors and cameramen from the earliest days of British cinema to the 1970s - will furnish ideas and material for a hundred PhDs.
Whether he has really put up a defence of the British cinema is another thing. Much as I enjoyed Shepperton Babylon, the book never dissuaded me from the Truffaut line. The best British films just do not compare with their counterparts from other countries. I love School for Scoundrels, but cannot pretend that it is as vital a work as Scarlet Street. For all its emphasis on the realities of war, The Big Blockade tells me less about life than the fantasy world of The Big Sleep. Our cinema's broken-backed nature might be down to politics (the class system), sexuality (the repression underlying the stiff upper lip) or aesthetics (the dominance of our literary tradition). Whatever, but for all their succulent ham, British movies have never quite cut the mustard.
Christopher Bray's critical biography of Michael Caine will appear from Faber & Faber this autumn
