3. Cinema Comes of Age (Films Registered With the UK Board of Trade and Industry Jan 1928 - May 1985)

The Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 required that all features, short films, documentaries and serials intended for commercial exhibition should be registered with the UK Board of Trade. Amongst many other things, the Act was intended to bolster UK film production and prevent near-total market domination by Hollywood studios, and the register provided a reliable method of keeping track of film trends on an industry-wide basis.

The register was published weekly in the government periodical Board of Trade Journal (BoTJ) from January 1928 to the Act's repeal in May 1985. Aside from a number of documentary features (inexplicably excluded from the register, but reviewed in Kine Weekly), along with a few other items (see below), this provided a near-complete listing of everything screened in the British Isles during this extended period.

KW obtained permission to publish the register from the outset, and did so until the late 1940's. Indeed, they took up the slack in August 1942 when the BoTJ abruptly suspended the weekly listings (no reason appears to have been given, but the publication was slimmed down considerably during wartime). Normal service was resumed in July 1946.

This Index covers all feature-length items listed in the register, along with the handful of excluded titles mentioned earlier, presented here on a month by month basis. This provides a handy online reference to an incredible resource which is otherwise only available to those with access to back-issues of KW and the BoTJ, or a long out-of-print two-volume compilation, Video Recordings Act 1984: Index of Films Registered With the Board of Trade and Industry (1986), which only covered the period from 1940 onwards!

NB. Serials were registered by individual episodes, sometimes traversing one month to another (ie. first four chapters in April, the rest in May). In those cases, I've listed the serial as a completed item in the month when the first episodes were registered, without reference to subsequent registrations.

NBB. Although the register was established in January 1928, the Act itself didn't come into force until April of that year, which explains why a good number of dramatic features appear to have been excluded from the register during the early days of its implementation. All of these absent items were reviewed in Kine Weekly, and are indicated by the symbol '[KW]'.