It would be fair to say that most general histories of British cinema – from pioneering works such as Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England and Charles Barr's Ealing Studios to more recent studies such as Brian McFarlane's The Cinema of Britain and Ireland – have focused primarily on films rather than on the film industry. This is no criticism of those works nor of the many excellent studies of British directors, studios, genres and stars that have enriched British cinema scholarship over recent decades; but it does point to a significant lacuna in the critical historiography of British cinema that this monograph seeks to address. As John Davis – who as managing director of the Rank Organisation for over a quarter of a century knew a thing or two about the film industry – put it: no film can be made without finance. The Money Behind the Screen therefore is a history of the financing of British films – and of the wider fiscal politics of the British film industry – from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s. It explores the contexts for the provision of film finance, the relations between producers and financiers, and the role of the different agencies involved in funding films.

One does not have to be a Marxist to recognise that the film industry exemplifies the capitalist model par excellence: the economic base and structure of the industry not only determine the organisation of film-making but also influence the nature and content of the films produced.