In the Seventies and Eighties, in particular, I was a real movie buff. In addition to watching many of the current movies, I was frantically catching up on movie history: haunting the National Film Theatre and seeing as many old films as possible on TV. I was soon struck by how few pre-War British films were available (not much more than the main Hitchcocks and a half-a-dozen Alexander Korda pictures). I had very little sense of what routine British programmers were like in the Thirties and this has always seemed like a massive gap in my knowledge.

For this reason alone I was very intrigued to see that three of the Arthur Wontner Sherlock Holmes movies were now available on DVD.

Triumph of Sherlock Holmes is a decent adaptation of the Valley of Fear, bulked out to feature film length by the addition of Moriarty. Wontner's Sherlock Holmes is not as memorable as Basil Rathbone's, but is probably as close to Conan Doyle's character as any. Because this movie is based on a Conan Doyle book, there is more actual deduction in it than in most of the later Universal movies.

The structure of the film is somewhat awkward (as was the book) with a 25 minute flashback in the middle, during which the actual story grinds to a halt. I cannot help feeling a good screenwriter could have handled this better. The production design is fairly basic, but not obtrusively so. The direction is strictly point-the-camera-and-shoot. If this is at all typical of British film-making in the Thirties I can appreciate why relatively few films from that era have stood the test of time.

Any criticism of this movie, and the other two movies on the DVD, has to be subject to one major reservation. The prints are so poor that they are hard to watch. Apart from the very soft image, there is extensive damage, grain and dirt. The sound is often so poor that some of the dialogue difficult to understand - especially, I suspect, for those not familiar with the various British accents.

The quality of these movies is so far below what audiences at the time would have experienced, I feel that, in a sense, I still haven't really seen them.

I recently bought a DVD of a supposedly lost British horror film, The Ghoul, which was even worse - only to discover that MGM had released a version in pristine condition discovered in the vaults of the British Film Institute. I cannot help wondering if there are much better versions of these Sherlock Holmes movies (and many other old films) also sitting unseen in storage.

The fly-by-night companies that release these old, out-of-copyright, movies frequently use ragged, degraded prints that give a completely false impression of what these movies were really like. But I don't blame them: at least they are making some obscure movies available for viewing once again. The onus is on the great film libraries to start releasing their back catalogues (preferably with digital restoration) on affordable DVDs.

This surely is part of their remit as organisations.