ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the overlaps between a middle-class and middlebrow film by taking an inductive sample of all the films produced by Hollywood in 1947 through which to weigh Hynes’s 1949 view that all Hollywood is a middlebrow form against MacDonald’s 1960 critique of the middlebrow as an exception to popular culture. The book tracks the possible intertwining of class and taste in an often ignored category of cinema and defines as ‘between the highbrow art cinema and lowbrow masala films’. It also traces the reception of continental cinema and Television (TV) in the United Kingdom (UK) from the 1920s to contemporary TV, and demonstrates that films that may be popular genre pictures in their nations of origin become, through distribution in the UK and the addition of subtitles, middlebrow.
