Mordaunt Hall

Frederick William Mordaunt Hall ( born November 1, 1878 in Guildford, Surrey, England; † 2 July 1973 in New York City ) was an American- British film critic and journalist. He was from October 1924 to September 1934, the first salaried film critic for the New York Times. His criticism style was later referred to as " talkative, irreverent and not very analytical".

Life

Frederick William Mordaunt Hall was born the son of a school principal from Tottenham in Guildford, Surrey. To his friends he was known as " Freddie " and he later claimed that his second first name is not " William " but " Wentworth " was. Hall emigrated in 1902 to New York and worked from about 1907 for the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill, where he was introduced there as an "old newspaper man." From 1909 to 1914 he worked as a journalist for the New York Herald, where there was an incident with him, another reporter and theater producer Oscar Hammerstein 1909. Hammerstein sued both that they had attacked him in the New Yorker Hotel Knickerbocker. After Hammerstein returned to Europe, the lawsuit was dropped.

Also, Hall returned to Europe, as he was during the First World War as a Lieutenant for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve where he worked in the intelligence service, fed. He recorded his wartime experiences later in the book Some Naval Yarns, which appeared in 1917. After he had completed his service in 1919, he returned to England, where he wrote for the popular Famous Players - Lasky Studio intertitles, among other things, for the young Alfred Hitchcock.

1922 Hall returned back to the United States and in the same year a reporter for the New York Times. From October, he became the first full-time film critic of The Times, and remained so until he retired in September 1934. He then had a year long radio show about movies on a local New York radio station and wrote from 1936 to 1938 reviews for the Boston Transcript. In 1942 he worked for the CBS television. Later he joined the Bell Syndicate at as an editor and occasionally published articles.

In 1909 Hall married the 23 -year-old U.S. citizen Helen Rowe, who died in 1971. On December 10, 1941 two days after the United States entered the Second World War, Hall was a U.S. citizen.

Works

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