This paper examines the role of film production in promoting British cultural hegemony in Egypt before and after the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of Alliance, which formed a significant step towards Egypt’s political independence. I argue that British cultural interest in Egypt was initially shaped by a negative policy, i.e., an indirect one that focused more on limiting European cultural expansion than promoting British cultural hegemony. Yet the 1936 Treaty urged for a shift to a positive cultural policy, i.e., a direct one, aiming to sustain the amour-propre of the “White” man, hence the soldier of the British Empire, as the ultramodern civilized man. Considering the looming shadows of WWII, the new positive policy was equally expected to ensure stability in Egypt during the war. It was also hoped to regulate the post-Treaty amour-propre of the Egyptian ruling elite as modern sovereign rulers of a modern and civilized Egypt. Being a new powerful medium of communication, film was expected to contribute to these ends. But the British government’s reluctance to provide funding for film production or screenings, the entrenched French cultural hegemony in Egypt and Hollywood dominance over the film market proved that the reliance on film to serve the new positive policy was too late to bear the expected fruit. Moreover, the unilateral abrogation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1951 made it difficult for British producers to operate in Egypt to the extent that the first threat on a British business in Egypt after WWII arose from a conflict of interest between British and Egyptian film producers over Rivoli Cinema, which was by then the second entertainment center of its kind in the world(the other being its sister theater in New York). The case of Rivoli Cinema does not only shed new light on how business competition could have possibly played a role in instigating the fire which burnt the Cairo business district during the famous Cairo Riots; more importantly, it stands as an utmost expression of the failed British attempts to employ film production in service of a positive British cultural policy in Egypt as the blaze of British imperial power was diminishing while new regional and international political powers were emerging.