Although it was the case that, in the 1960s, Alloway wrote about fewer media than he had in the previous decade, he retained interest in a range, and did still publish occasional criticism about the movies. There had been much anxiety since the 1950s about the deleterious effect of movies, and especially the effect of violence on youth. Just as Left and Right attacked the Americanization of British society in the 1950s, in the 1960s in the USA, according to Richard Maltby, Hollywood was still a primary target of attack by cultural commentators “whether they came from liberal humanists alarmed by what they saw as a decline in cultural values, or the disaffected Marxist social critics of the Frankfurt school, who saw the politically oppositional role of Art being destroyed by its absorption into a capitalist system of production and consumption.”

Alloway's criticism continued to go against the grain. In 1963, while working at the Guggenheim, he summarized the ideas he had developed in the 1950s in “Lawrence Alloway on the Iconography of the Movies” in the journal Movie. In it, he argues against the still current concept of the auteur in favour of genres, iconography, the typical, and expendability. “Film criticism is haunted by the spectre of uniqueness,” he wrote. “Masterpieces are expected, and they have to be masterpieces defined as cases of survival, of high endurance and permanence. In fact, movies are a popular art…” A particular movie ought not to be thought of as an original and expressive creation of a director, but as a variation on a theme within a genre so that “The meaning of a single movie is inseparable from the larger pattern of content-analysis of other movies.” There may be several other films within a cycle, and these may be rejected by hide-bound critics as opportunistic and exploitative but, “in fact, a cycle explores a basic situation repeatedly, but from different angles and with accumulating references.” A concern with meaning rather than artistic creativity was what was needed: the critical convention of “treating movies as personal expression and autographic testament has led to the neglect of the iconographic approach.