Mordaunt Hall (1 November 1878 – 2 July 1973) was the first regularly assigned
motion picture critic for ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', working from October 1924 to September 1934.
[Mordaunt Hall, Wrote of Screen]
, ''New York Times'', July 4, 1973, p. 18.
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."
Biography
Born Frederick William Mordaunt Hall in
Guildford,
Surrey
Surrey () is a ceremonial county, ceremonial and non-metropolitan county, non-metropolitan counties of England, county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant ur ...
, England, and known to his friends as "Freddie",
he later claimed his full name was Frederick Wentworth Mordaunt Hall. His father was a school
headmaster in
Tottenham
Tottenham () is a town in North London, England, within the London Borough of Haringey. It is located in the ceremonial county of Greater London. Tottenham is centred north-northeast of Charing Cross, bordering Edmonton to the north, Wal ...
.
Hall immigrated to the United States, residing in New York, in 1902 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." In 1909 the theater impresario
Oscar Hammerstein I accused Hall and another reporter of assaulting him outside New York's
Knickerbocker Hotel. The case was suspended when Hammerstein left for Europe. He worked at the ''New York Press'' from 1909 to 1914, when he joined the ''
New York Herald''.
He married Helen Rowe, an American, in 1909. She died in 1972.
Hall was commissioned a lieutenant in the
Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...
, and did
intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can ...
work.
He wrote about the wartime experiences of others in the book ''Some Naval Yarns'' (1917). He returned from service in 1919.
In 1919, Hall returned to England, where in the early 1920s he wrote movie
intertitles, with young
Alfred Hitchcock designing and lettering them, at the
Famous Players-Lasky
Famous Players-Lasky Corporation was an American motion picture and distribution company formed on June 28, 1916, from the merger of Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Company—originally formed by Zukor as Famous Players in Famous Plays—and ...
studio in the London borough of
Islington. The Halls returned to America in 1922, and his
byline
The byline (or by-line in British English) on a newspaper or magazine article gives the name of the writer of the article. Bylines are commonly placed between the headline and the text of the article, although some magazines (notably '' Reader' ...
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. On December 10, 1941, two days after the United States entered World War II, Hall became a U.S. citizen. He was working for the
Columbia Broadcasting System in New York in 1942. He later joined the
Bell Syndicate as a
copy editor
Copy editing (also known as copyediting and manuscript editing) is the process of revising written material ( copy) to improve readability and fitness, as well as ensuring that text is free of grammatical and factual errors. ''The Chicago Manual o ...
,
and occasionally wrote articles.
[E.g., guest writing Ray Tucker's syndicated column "The National Whirligig" on Dec. 2, 1955.] He died in New York City at age 94.
His successor as chief film critic of the New York Times was
Andre Sennwald.
References
External links
*
*
''Some Naval Yarns'' by Mordaunt Hall (Google Books online text).
All ''New York Times'' movie reviewsof Mordaunt Hall.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hall, Mordaunt
American film critics
Critics employed by The New York Times
1878 births
1973 deaths