Each year, now, must have its ballyhooed film, its exorcist or shark, to be pre sold and promoted with books and toys and serialisation and smash the box office records. (Nobody talks in terms of seats sold, only of money taken, which is meaningless these days.)

For 1977 we have the fantasy Star Wars, which is really nine million dollars worth of Flash Gordon – lashings of spaceship special effects that appeal to the kid in us, especially if that kid was like this kid, reared on Larry "Buster" Crabbe and Ming the Merciless of Mongo.

George Lucas, its writer-director-romantic, is too young to have seen Buster and Charles Middleton on a Saturday arvo, except on television. But he pays them due and exuberant homage, from the written foreword, which rolls away from us into space just like the old serial, to the triumphant final procession of our heroes (John William's lushly orchestrated march adds another Hollywood thrill from the thirties) up the aisle of a cheering palace, grinning inanely at each other.

However: "The best American film of the year?" That's what we are assured by the mass-circulation magazines, which, presumably, have also been pre-sold on it. What nonsense. There have been plenty of others. For instance, well, I'm sure there must have been one or two.