Did you ever hear the one about the Jewish film critic who stood up to be counted in the war against the collapse of modern morality? It's not a joke, although sometimes it certainly reads like one.

And why Jewish? Because it's very important that self-appointed public moralist Michael Medved is Jewish: it allows Michael Medved some perspective upon the slump in the religious enrichment of modern popular culture without that he can criticised as launching his assault from the ivory towers of Christian Fundamentalism, with all that implies. It's a cop-out of the best kind.

Michael Medved has one wife, three kids, enough respect for his religious creed that he refuses to drive on the Jewish Sabbath, and speaks to a nation as film reviewer for the Sneak Previews US TV show. Michael Medved is oft-quoted as being anti-drug even in the 60s. Michael Medved has also been called insane.

It's worth recalling from the start that the storm greeting the arrival of Hollywood Vs. America was, in numerous ways, skillfully manufactured. The Sunday Times (owned, like HarperCollins and Sky, by Rupert Murdoch, it bears noting) serialised large chunks and flew the 44-year-old author over here to debate the state of contemporary film-making with such a high-talent panel as David Puttnam, Michael Winner and Barry Norman. So far so good. But if you hammer the people often enough you can get them to believe almost anything - Michael Medved's arguments went dangerously national (if not global) and took on a life of their own, helped no doubt by the mooring just off our coast of the good ships Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant and Man Bites Dog. This was a fight just waiting to happen:

"America's long-running romance with Hollywood is over. As a nation, we no longer believe that popular culture enriches our lives. Few of us view the show business capital as a magical source of uplifting entertainment, romantic inspiration, or even harmless fun. Instead, tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy, an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children. The dream factory has become the poison factory."

Hollywood Vs. America is a virtual manifesto, a blueprint for a PG world where no film ever oversteps the bounds of violence, bad language, and never ever offends against organised religion. It goes without saying that urination, excretion, necrophilia and masturbation are a collective no-no, which makes ever more delicious the book's train-spotter obsessiveness with identifying the likes of My Own Private Idaho, Unforgiven and Far and Away for their urination scenes; the list is easy to find, just look under 'Urine' in the index, and you'll find it sharing a sub-head with 'Vomit'. 'Excretion and Masturbation' are equally usefully bracketed together.

But perhaps lambasting the writer for an obsession with detail is a mistake, and indeed one he would like us all to make, masking as it does the real meat of his argument. It should also be noted that this is one critic gunning not just for Hollywood but all popular culture. Take this for example:

"The perspectives of the loony left...are robustly represented in Hollywood - as evidenced by the triumphal career of Oliver Stone - while the outlook of the radical right is all but invisible. Several mainstream record labels have released recent albums with songs that glorify the left-wing racist Louis Farrakhan; it is hard to imagine those same music companies sanctioning tributes to the right-wing racist David Duke."

Two useful pointers are highlighted by the above: firstly, the selective redefinition of the infamous Farrakhan as 'left-wing' when few, if any, on the left would stake a claim for him as one of their own; and more perniciously, a few pages earlier Michael Medved favourably quotes "music industry analyst" Bob Lefsetz as saying of the most notoriously right-wing of musics:

"Country...unlike the rest of popular music, is talking about real lives. They're making honest records, and that's why their music is connecting with the public."

Where this leaves Rap isn't made clear, but, significantly, later he attacks the "appalling lyrics of violent, woman-hating groups like Guns'n'Roses or Geto Boys or Napalm Death" proving that fact and propaganda make strange bed-fellows. He goes on to quote pious English producer David (Chariots of Fire) Puttnam:

"Every single movie has within it an element of propaganda. You walk away with either benign or malign propaganda."

It seems as though the problem here is one of definition.

"Would Mr. Valenti (president of the Motion Picture Association of America) have spoken out in behalf of a film biography of slain black leader Malcolm X that portrayed him as a paid agent of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI... Or a revisionist view of Holocaust victim Anne Frank...as an out-of-control teenage nymphomaniac who risked capture by the Nazis night after night to satisfy her raging hormones?"

That is Michael Medved on Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and the debate on that particular subject has been well-aired previously (even if the BBC's reasons for not screening it as proposed were largely glossed over), but the author is tracking here a more insidious target - The Handmaid's Tale, Nuns on the Run, Light of Day, Crimes of Passion, Edward Scissorhands, Cape Fear, and particularly Michael Tolkin's fascinating The Rapture, are all singled out (among many others) for not towing the party line. For their sins, stand up also R.E.M. ('Losing My Religion'), The Jesus and Mary Chain, Faith No More, MC900 FT Jesus, and (surprise, surprise) "the critically acclaimed New Wave band Dead Kennedys." In the world of Hollywood Vs. America, it seems that religious belief is not simply a matter of personal choice but of inalienable fact:

"To suggest that the major entertainment corporations might exercise greater discretion and sensitivity before investing their millions in projects that assault someone else's religious faith is not a call for an end to free expression in Hollywood."

Whereas someone else's faith in the baneful qualities of organised religion, or indeed in the non-existence of a God in any sense are clearly entirely suitable targets for the suspension of such discretion and sensitivity. Frighteningly, Michael Medved sees no irony in quoting the notorious Production Code of 1930 in defence of his case.

All of which is by way of an example of the crude obviousness with which Hollywood Vs. America operates. While no one with a political agenda is likely to shoot themselves in the foot by the suggestion of a workable alternate viewpoint, the selectivity of Michael Medved's argument is remarkable in its focus. He describes himself as a "raging liberal", employing it would seem the curious American derivation of the word. Take this for example:

"No director in the history of motion pictures has been more attuned to that everyday heroism than the late - and much lamented - Frank Capra...(his) faith in those 'positive qualities of humanity' is perhaps the most significant missing ingredient in today's popular culture."

While no one is going to deny the appealing degree of value-for

-money schmaltz that Capra turned into a career, it should not be glossed over that the championing of family, the belief in individual heroism, the promotion of America The Great (the essential qualities lacked by contemporary film, according the Michael Medved) propounded by It's A Wonderful Life or Mr. Smith Goes To Washington masked a right-wing agenda every bit as vehement as that expounded here. Witness - Robert Redford is attacked for the dreary Havana, not for its obvious flaws but for Redford's political stance; Kevin Costner is praised up to and until JFK; Hollywood is blasted for not finding glory in the Gulf War (the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Susan Sarandon and particularly John Cusack are accused of a "contemptuous dismissal of patriotic instincts.")

Here are some sample chapters: 'A Bias for the Bizarre', 'Promoting Promiscuity', 'Maligning Marriage', 'Bashing America', 'Hostility to Heroes'.

It is, after all, Michael Medved himself who chooses to quote from Frank Capra's 1971 autobiography decrying the arrival in La-La Land of the "hedonists, the homosexuals, the haemophilic bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent." Scratch a "raging liberal" and it seems you still find a Bible-thumping, homophobic bigot for your trouble.

And so, all this wallowing in excess must have a point, yes? Michael Medved, shining knight of concerned America must be suffering for someone's sins - he must have a solution. Indeed he has.

Michael Medved does not believe that in a free society we should live under the strictures of governmental censorship. An admirable voice for common-sense and free speech, were it not for an advocating of a more insidious doctrine of commercialism by way of a solution. That is, the market itself being essentially self-governing, curbing its own worst excesses, be they religious, sexual or violent, turning out streamlined factory-pressed processed PG product - church-going happy families for church-going happy families, effectively eradicating the very need for that censorship in the first place.

Michael Medved's argument is one that offers as its central plank the box office success of PG-rated product over its X-rated siblings; if the studios made family fare, suitable for the little ones then the coffers would overflow and the world should be rightfully satisfied.

It is an argument that, possibly, makes some commercial sense (assuming it holds true for all PG material), but would spell artistic suicide. Contemplate for a moment the work that would never have been made under such a system - the majority of Martin Scorsese's back catalogue, David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Greenaway, the Coen Brothers, Nic Roeg, Roman Polanski, countless beloved horror and thriller movies, and individual classics like McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Oshima's Ai No Corrida. And in the past year, films like One False Move, Belgium's jet-black comedy Man Bites Dog, not to mention the Ferrara and Tarantino pictures.

But is all this simply alarmist? Are we running scared from a phantom?

Remember that both Reservoir Dogs and Bad Lieutenant were placed on indefinite suspension for video certificates because of the fuss stirred up by Michael Medved's pernicious nonsense. (That the far more disturbing Man Bites Dog slipped uncut under that particular net is unquestionable proof if it were needed).

Remember that, beyond your own prejudices, the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest have been to court for their music, Ice-T dropped by his multinational label, and not forgetting Jello Biafra's financial ruin in defence of artistic freedom.

While we wait to see whether the brave new worlds of satellite and video can truly shatter barriers and freely disseminate information as they threaten, we have to be on our collective guard. Hollywood Vs. America is in essence a very badly written, often self-contradictory diatribe, its understanding shallow and obvious, but it is being taken seriously by some in positions of power. For that reason alone it can be begged, borrowed or stolen, but certainly its crude message is one that should be required reading. "Now is not the end," he quotes Churchill finally. "It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."