Alloway recalled in 1973 that he wrote about movies for two reasons. First, he loved movies. Second, writing about them moved him closer to the “more general notion that the whole of society is the province of an art critic's attention…” The London Pavilion was a regular venue for Alloway (often accompanied by Paolozzi), and it also provided one of the main venues for the movies he was to review. We have seen that Alloway's first review, in 1950, was of the British film The Third Man (1949) and was characterized by an iconographical-cumsymbolic approach. In 1954 he had lectured at the ICA on science fiction movies and—with del Renzio—Westerns, and a year later he ran a series that examined film as “modern popular art” rather than an “art form manqué.” His next published articles on film were in 1957 and typify his approach to movies as part of the continuum model of culture. Mainstream, serious discourses on cinema presented films as the individual artistic expression of the director. This pre-eminence of the auteur was upheld by the old guard of the ICA when they showed, for example, Surrealist films, or by the British Film Institute's magazine Sight and Sound that essentially propounded the ideals of the influential French journal Cahiers du Cinema which, around the time of Alloway's ICA film series, was praising the new wave of directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer. Hollywood films were dismissed as commercial and lacking in integrity and, therefore, in artistic value and, although Sight and Sound began to admit the occasional Hollywood auteur—such as Hitchcock or John Ford—to the canon, the notion of hierarchy in value was firmly entrenched. The film historian Ian Cameron has written how Sight and Sound was characterized by “a set of liberal and aesthetic platitudes which stood in for a deeper and more analytical response [which]… meant that the critical approach to all films was equally impoverished.”

Alloway felt the Cahiers approach to American movies was doubly flawed. First, its auteur-orientation gave it an inflexible high art focus, and, second, “The ‘psycho-analysis’ of Hollywood movies by French intellectuals, for example, can only be based on an inability to understand the language.”