"That's not blood," Godard is supposed to have said when asked about the violence in his Pierrot le Fou, "that's red."

Michael Medved is a fool. But not so much of a fool that he hasn't espied a healthy payday off the back of his badly written, dim-witted Right-wing follies. You could laugh at his book Hollywood Vs. America if it hadn't made him internationally famous and a pundit to whom the world's media flocks when it needs an informed view of censorship. (If you haven't already, read his half-baked bellicose bellowings; it always pays to know what the enemy is thinking.)

That has rather given the game away - this review has a position to take. It mans the barricades on behalf of the forces of light against the censorious hordes for which the loco Mr. Medved is standard bearer. It does not pretend to be impartial, to take an equitable stand in the debate. And nor, whatever editor Karl French might claim, does this book. 22 essays on the subject of screen violence, of which the second sentence of the introduction confesses: "I like violent films". It's fessing up at AA meeting to the occasional drink, or flinging back the doors to the closet and revealing ourselves as screaming queens. French and his publishers have legitimatized what it is we all so secretly love, but what, in these caring sharing days, we are not allowed to even tolerate. Not that reading the cast list on the back gives too many clues: this book has space for the senile ramblings of Mary Whitehouse and the insipid "common sense" of Medved. Both must look to the result and shudder.

Common sense is a good place to start. The self-appointed moralists (they are always that, even, let's not forget, the BBFC are a private commercial body with no legal sanction) always appeal to our "common sense" when the first salvos are whistling overhead. We perceive a rise in violent crime concomitant with a rise in cinematic violence, thus establishing a casual link. It's common sense. In much the same way we know the world was happier place in the past - where we could leave our doors unlocked, where neighbours looked out for one another, and where the nightmarish monsters of Hindley and Brady and Christie never existed outside of the story books. A world that never saw the Holocaust or the wholesale slaughter on the alter of capitalism that was the Great War. Common sense doesn't enter into it.

Not that we have even to rely on picking the moralist arguments apart to get at the truth - French has effectively done that for us by simple dint of organisation. Thus Martin Amis devastates Hollywood Vs. America in the essay immediately preceding Medved's own hand-wringing distillation (Hollywood's Four Big Lies). Amis has the taste for violent movies, so what chance Medved's mindless mulch? "If Dan Quayle were a lot brighter, this is what he would sound like," he writes.

"People who are horrified by violence are very middle-class, they have been separated from elemental life," Camille Paglia tells French. She has a point. You can only get upset about the abstract if no longer worry on the essentials sorted. Mary Whitehouse is the book's second fool, but in her pending senility she seems scarcely worth the space to decry. Her arguments are littered with dates from the 70s and references to A Clockwork Orange. (Only Tony Parsons seems so rooted in the past.) And the deference of her - and others - to the honesty of killers and rapists is affecting: surely their clients shouting-up to blame Oliver Stone for their misdemeanours is music to the ears of defence lawyers, as Joan Smith points out.

On page 2 of his introduction (the same page where he quotes Godard), French revisits John Sturges' Bad Day At Black Rock as a favourite example of movie violence. "You're not only wrong," Spender Tracy tells Ernest Bourgnine, "you're wrong at the top of your voice." You can sure that he is aware of the irony where some of his contributors are concerned.