It was the summer of 1933. Alistair Cooke — born in Salford, honed by Cambridge, Harvard and Yale — was a cocky 24-year-old planning a first trip to California. He told The Observer, and explained that he had arranged interviews with Hollywood’s finest, though he’d done nothing of the sort. Would the paper like some articles from him? The Observer said yes; when approached, the interviewees said yes too.

So the future presenter of BBC radio’s Letter from America was off, talking pretentiously with Charlie Chaplin between bites of swordfish, trading ideas with the great director Ernst Lubitsch and taking his first lick, on Katharine Hepburn’s invitation, at that icon of American ice cream the Good Humor bar. They were charmed days in a lucky life.

And the life was shaped more by the movies than you might think. Cooke had been a film fan since childhood, and it was the movies that launched him professionally in 1934 when, after a heavy assault, he won the position of BBC film critic.

He gave fortnightly talks on the radio for two-and-a-half years, after which itchy feet took him permanently to the land he’d grown to love, in the cinema as much as anywhere else. America, land of the free and home of the brave, of colourful slang and Loretta Young, a star whom he adored.

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Even when his film criticisms ceased he kept looking at America through cinema’s mirror. Collecting material for the anthology Alistair Cooke at the Movies I found I had amassed material covering 75 years, from 1928 to 2003, from the coming of sound through Hollywood’s glory and decline, through Cinerama, The Exorcist and the digital threat. He saw it all.

Some Hollywood stars never left him either. Chaplin became a friend and remained a subject of fascination long after their paths divided. It wasn’t just Chaplin’s art that fascinated Cooke, it was also his physique: those hands that resembled “some ivory knick-knack”, those equally tiny feet “peeking out like mice from under high-held trousers” — a description once read, never forgotten.

Before his BBC stint started Cooke worked daily at the Chaplin household, mostly on a script about Napoleon, one of Chaplin’s long-cherished projects. He also made a little home movie on Chaplin’s yacht, All at Sea, full of larking about, star impersonations and the young Paulette Goddard (Chaplin’s new love) looking extremely beautiful. Brazenly, Cooke asked Chaplin to be best man at his own wedding in Pasadena in 1934. Chaplin agreed but never showed up, possibly irked that Goddard hadn’t been invited as well.

The lissom beauty of Loretta Young, seen in films “lying crushed and frail in an emotional pause”, was never encountered, except perhaps in Cooke’s dreams. In his very first BBC talk, delivered on October 8, 1934, in a voice he later compared to the sound of “hysterical daffodils”, he told his audience that it shouldn’t expect any objective criticism of his idol. Then the Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald arrived in the British film Turn of the Tide (1935): “After Hollywood has tricked out its sirens with the last secret of sex-appeal, along comes a plain girl in a woollen sweater . . .” He was immediately smitten.

As a child of the Edwardian age, Cooke always felt comfortable expressing his pleasure in the female physique, though not every prospect pleased when he met screen goddesses in the flesh. As a critic in the 1930s he resisted Greta Garbo’s charms until Anna Karenina, when he discovered a tenderness and subtlety of gesture that touched him greatly. Then in 1952 they shared a love seat at a private screening of Chaplin’s Limelight. She was as warm as an iceberg, Cooke found. “I spent the evening,” he recalled, “just keeping lit the chain of her cigarettes. Afterwards, there was a small pathetic attempt at conversation. She had only one thing on her mind: the awful price of vegetables.”

To be a friend of Cooke’s you needed better topics than that. You needed to be well-read, quick-thinking, sparklingly funny, honest and direct. Lauren Bacall, “the lovely rascal”, was made for him, with her acerbic wit, flaxen hair and “lynx-like glances”. So was her husband Humphrey Bogart, the “ageing juvenile with the scar, the odd lisp, and the look of implied derision” who’d become a myth playing tough cynics with a gun.

Cooke first encountered them on a train in 1952 while reporting on the campaign of the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, and cemented the contact over many late-night sessions of talk and drink. Bogart told him how tired he was of truck drivers, urchins, even cops, making tommy-gun sounds if they spotted him in New York, though he hadn’t played a gangster in years. Cooke’s intimate knowledge led him to categorise Bogart in his Guardian obituary as an idealist, “a very complex man, gentle at bottom, and afraid to seem so”. It was a perceptive judgment.

Most of these friendships postdated Cooke’s film-critic stint, which continued on American radio until commentary on the war and the social scene took over in the early 1940s. He had trouble enough with Chaplin’s friendship when Cooke found he didn’t really like Modern Times and agonised over his review for the BBC. As a critic he was idiosyncratic, even in the way he saw the films. Not for him the dedicated press screenings; he preferred to see them in public, clutching his hat and his cigarettes. Sometimes he worked the audience’s remarks (or snores) into his reports.

His attitude was distinctive, too. In the 1930s the intellectual fashion among British film critics was to treat Hollywood snootily and to pour praise on foreign delicacies or anything self-consciously arty. Cooke took the opposite view, proclaiming that “Hollywood puts out less nonsense than most art-theatres”. He was withering about “whimpering, fish-like” films from France, and the baroque clutter of Josef von Sternberg’s Marlene Dietrich vehicles, where the director “tried to make What the Butler Saw look like Ibsen”. Instead he championed Warners’ gangster movies, fast and brutal; Fritz Lang’s Fury: smart films that captured the here and now.

The qualities he enjoyed in his Hollywood friends were those he liked in performers. He liked the directness of Gary Cooper and the simplicity of his acting — more like behaving than acting. He found it harder to enjoy the players of the 1960s and beyond, when realism produced stars with the looks of Elliott Gould and the sartorial sense of “out-of-work plumbers”. He hated violence in films “glutted with broken bone, twisted guts, and rivers of blood” (that’s Taxi Driver). As for pornography, you can hear him screeching with pain over mainstream features featuring “the themes, the actual sight and sound, of rape, disembowelling, even defecation”.

By 2003, still broadcasting to the BBC from New York, Cooke’s view of cinema had become entirely retrospective. He saluted departed friends in his talks, furrowed his brow at modern trends and relished memories of that jaunty assault years before on Hollywood’s royalty. He was 94; he’d earned his nostalgia.

Alistair Cooke at the Movies, edited by Geoff Brown, is published by Allen Lane the Penguin Press on Aug 13 (£20)

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