This is to trace the history of ‘film policy’ in the first half of twentieth-century Britain. We will look at various official interventions to regulate or promote film production, distribution and exhibition. Successive British governments tried to establish British cinema which could compete with Hollywood, in both industrial and cultural terms. This paper suggests that these early policy objectives remain unfulfilled, even after the socalled ‘revival’ of British cinemas in the 1980s and 90s.