A wonderful companion piece to histories of the British film industry -it shouldn't be taken as a "start text", but as a way of revisiting history its wonderful, full of fascinating characters and stories.
Sweet's mission seems to have been to reclaim the saga of British cinema from its established legends - to wit, that nothing much happened in British cinema until the 60s apart from a brief period during and after WW2, that Rank films were staid garbage, the 1927 quota act was really bad (cf the 1938 quota act), British silent cinema was a mess.
Sweet goes in through the back door (so to speak) on many things - he talks about Ealing, but focuses on non-comedy Ealing; he analyses Dirk Bogarde, but pre-Victim Bogarde; he looks at Gainsborough female stars, but instead of the usual suspect (Lockwood) his focus is on Phyllis Calvert, Pat Roc and Jean Kent; when he talks about Rank the film he gives most extensive appraisal to is the weird camp flop The Singer Not the Song; when dealing with horror in the 60s he is not so much interested in Hammer and Michael Reeves as Tony Tenser and Patrick Walker (a director of whom I was totally unaware - a big inspiration for Malcolm McLaren, apparently); he devotes a chapter to sexploitation and more pages to Penn Tennyson than Michael Reeves (surprisingly there isn't a section devoted to Tommy Steele).
Full of gossipy tidbits and accounts of interviews with aging film industry participants tend to be moving (a few turn out to have saved their money, thank goodness); it has a sort of Easy Riders Raging Bulls feel to it, but the scholarship is there. I admit I didn't find the stuff on the silent era that interesting (something about that time just doesn't do it for me, maybe because I didn't grow up seeing their films, and also if you don't hear them speak so they become less real - and as Sweet points out, nobody's more forgotten than a silent film star).
The stuff about sexploitation is absolutely fascinating - the 70s were an era when England's most popular films were spin offs of TV shows or comedies like Confessions of a Taxi Driver - depressing, but fascinating. The book has been made into a TV series.
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