Miskell's study of filmgoing in Wales sets out to examine the cinema as a social and economic institution and his emphasis is local rather than national. Given that around half the population went to the pictures regularly, this is a topic of no small historical significance and Miskell has crafted a thoughtful, detailed and enjoyable book.

Cinema's local dimension is something hitherto marginalized in the subject's historiography, no doubt owing to the fact that people across the UK watched the same pictures. Miskell shows that although films with a Welsh setting were popular, there was a clear preference in Wales for American movies, which offered something exotic, glamorous and foreign to contrast with the audience's own lives. Similarly, most reviewers for the local press in Wales did not indulge in highbrow concerns about raising public tastes through art, but instead treated movies as entertainment, again meaning that it was Hollywood that found favour. Seemingly because of rural/urban divides, cinema-going in Wales was higher than in most of the south of England but lower than in the north and major conurbations. Nonetheless, Miskell concludes that there was ‘nothing particularly remarkable or distinctive’ about the appeal of the cinema in Wales.

Yet the book argues convincingly that the local dimension still mattered. Audiences liked the picture-house because it was a familiar and convenient part of the physical and mental landscape of their everyday lives. Cinemas were important focal points within local communities towards which people felt a sense of ownership. Indeed, most cinemas were small, owned and managed by eminent local men, and could be considered as a sort of community centre or club. This was probably true of small cinemas in England too, but there they were slowly being marginalized by the plush ‘dream palaces’ of the 1930s. In Wales, economic conditions meant that such venues were far less common. It was thus in the provision of cinemas themselves that Wales had a degree of difference in the experience of film going. There were those who saw the cinema as a threat to the various guises of Welsh national identity. To some Nonconformists it was associated with moral degradation, while to some leaders of the Labour movement the cinema lacked social and political realism and conviction. Like the calls to use the cinema to express Welsh nationhood, the political opponents struggled to make headway against the lure of Hollywood glamour. However, on the question of Sunday opening, Nonconformists were able to exercise influence and Welsh cinemas stayed shut in even the biggest towns until the 1950s, a decade when many tenets of Nonconformist Wales appeared to be collapsing. Miskell's study of the cinema demonstrates how popular culture was a complex and overlapping mix of local, national and global influences and loyalties. To consider the cinema in Britain only in terms of debates over Americanization is to misrepresent most people's experience of it, just as it is misleading to portray Welsh culture in terms of either the distinctiveness of Welsh-speaking Nonconformist Liberalism or the class-consciousness of Labour. Miskell points out how these cultures were not independent of each other, just as the American influences on Wales were not at the expense of Welshness.

Yet, despite this convincing conclusion, in places Miskell still sets different cultural expressions against each other when he argues that the ‘immense popularity of film-going in Wales suggests that the cultural values commonly associated with Liberal or Labour Wales were far from universal’ (p. 4). It might be true that for the hundreds of thousands who went to the pictures every week ‘entertainment took priority over education; the pictures meant more than party politics; movie stars provided more inspiring role models than Methodist ministers’ but Nonconformity, the Labour movement and consumer activities like the cinema were all part of the same cultural milieu. Proving any of these things is very difficult because it was the critics that were vocal about the relationships between popular and political or moral cultures, rather than ordinary people who lived their lives in less polarized fashions. Miskell is surely right that the appeal of the cinema lay in the ‘startling difference between the world depicted on the silver screen and that in which audiences actually lived’ (p. 184), but understanding precisely how most people understood and reacted to that contrast is as complex as ever.