Mordaunt Hall | |
---|---|
Born | Frederick William Mordaunt Hall November 1, 1878 |
Died | July 2, 1973 New York City, US | (aged 94)
Occupation(s) | Writer, critic |
Mordaunt Hall (1 November 1878 – 2 July 1973)[1] was the first regularly assigned motion picture critic for The New York Times, working from October 1924 to September 1934.[2]
His writing style was described in his Times obituary as "chatty, irreverent, and not particularly analytical. […] The interest of other critics in analyzing cinematographic techniques was not for him."[2]
Born Frederick William Mordaunt Hall in Guildford, Surrey, England,[3] and known to his friends as "Freddie",[2] he later claimed his full name was Frederick Wentworth Mordaunt Hall.[4] His father was a school headmaster in Tottenham.[5]
Hall immigrated to the United States, residing in New York, in 1902[6] and worked as an advance agent for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show from around 1907, by which time he was already referred to as "an old newspaper man."[7] In 1909 the theater impresario Oscar Hammerstein I accused Hall and another reporter of assaulting him outside New York's Knickerbocker Hotel.[8] The case was suspended when Hammerstein left for Europe.[9] He worked at the New York Press from 1909 to 1914, when he joined the New York Herald.[2]
He married Helen Rowe, an American, in 1909.[10] She died in 1972.[11]
Hall was commissioned a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War I, and did intelligence work.[2] He wrote about the wartime experiences of others in the book Some Naval Yarns (1917). He returned from service in 1919.[12]
In 1919, Hall returned to England,[13] where in the early 1920s he wrote movie intertitles, with young Alfred Hitchcock designing and lettering them, at the Famous Players–Lasky studio in the London borough of Islington.[14] The Halls returned to America in 1922,[15] and his byline first appeared in the New York Times that year. After retiring from the Times in 1934, he hosted a New York radio program on movies and movie players in 1934–1935, and was a drama critic for the Boston Transcript from 1936 to 1938.[16] On December 10, 1941, two days after the United States entered World War II, Hall became a U.S. citizen.[17] He was working for the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York in 1942.[18] He later joined the Bell Syndicate as a copy editor,[2] and occasionally wrote articles.[19] He died in New York City at age 94.
His successor as chief film critic of the New York Times was Andre Sennwald.