Gone With The Wind is the UK's favourite

One glance at the top 10 and a number of questions spring to mind.

Where are blockbusters such as Spider Man 2 or The Lord of the Rings movies? And who has ever heard of The Best Years of Our Lives?

It is immediately clear that there has been an enormous sea change in both the types of films made and the audience for those films over the last 70 years.

Half of the top 10 is made up of films made in the 1940s while there is one film from the 1930s, two films from the 1960s, one film from the 1970s and one film from the 1990s.

Disney's animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, made in 1938, is the oldest film in the top 10, while Gone With the Wind, from 1940, is the most popular film of all time at UK cinemas, attracting 35 million people.

Other films from the 1940s include Spring in Park Lane (1948), starring Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding, the fifth most popular film of all time.

It is also a British film - making it arguably the most successful ever British film, seen by more than 20 million people.

Empathy

US movie The Best Years of Our Lives, from 1947, was the big Oscar winner that year and British audiences clearly had empathy with the tale of three World War II veterans returning to their home towns in middle America to find their lives much changed.

It was the sixth most popular film of all time at the UK box office, while in ninth spot was British film The Wicked Lady (1946), starring Margaret Lockwood.

A bodice-ripping yarn, it was the first British film ever to be cut for the US box office.

The final film from the 1940s to make the top 10 is The Seventh Veil, another British movie, starring James Mason.

THE ULTIMATE FILM TOP 10 Gone With the Wind (1939) The Sound of Music (1965) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Star Wars (1977) Spring in Park Lane (1948) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) The Jungle Book (1967) Titanic (1997) The Wicked Lady (1945) The Seventh Veil (1946) In depth: British film

But what can account for such a seemingly strange imbalance in the popularity of the decades?

The simple fact is that cinema attendance in the 1940s in the UK was almost 10 times the size it is today.

In the 1940s the average annual cinema attendance was 1,400,000,000 people, compared to a mere 167 million in 2003.

More intriguing is how 1940s films such as Spring in Park Lane, The Courtneys of Curzon Street (17th place) and The Bells of St Mary's (20th) have failed to remain part of popular culture in the way Gone With The Wind has.

Clearly, movie going tastes have changed dramatically - the list of films topping the UK box office charts for the last 10 years is dominated by special-effect laden blockbusters such as Terminator 3, The Matrix Reloaded, Attack of the Clones, X Men and Batman Forever.

But while these films have grown in popularity as special effects become ever more mainstream, some film genres have endured.

Spring in Park Lane was a romcom of its day, while dramas such as Gone With The Wind have their echo in movies such as Titanic. While so many of today's films seem to be sequels, they are not a recent phenomenon - The Bells of St Mary's was the follow-up to Going My Way.

Family-centred dramas such as The Best Years of Our Lives and The Courtneys of Curzon Street have fared less well - perhaps because the very nature of families has changed so sharply over the last 60 years.

But it is clear that animated movies are as popular today as they were 60 years ago.

Impact

Snow White (3rd) and The Jungle Book (7th) both make the all-time top 10 while Shrek 2 was the most popular film at the box office in the first half of this year.

Strangely only one film from the 1950s, South Pacific, makes it into the top 20.

Cinema attendance was still on average about six times higher than it is today but it would appear that films did not have as much of an impact as they did a decade earlier.

However, attendances were plummeting in the 1950s - from 1,395,000,000 at the start of the decade to 581,000,000 in 1959.

The difference in cinema attendance through the decades highlights just how impressive it is for a film such as Star Wars, released in 1978, to even make the top 10.

More than 20 million people saw the film at a time when cinema attendance for the year stood at 126 million people.

Titanic, in eighth spot, also performed remarkably well at the box office.

In all, a quarter of films in the top 20 were made in the last 11 years as cinema attendances continue to recover from the disastrous 1980s.

People may not go to the cinema as much as they did 60 years ago, but contemporary blockbusters have the same sort of hold over audiences as did their 1940s counterparts.