The New Yorker:

The actress, screenwriter, and novelist’s reviews and essays from 1918-19 display a comprehensive grasp of movie art and a visionary sense of its future.

By Richard Brody

Is Virginia Tracy the first great American film critic? She’s certainly one of the luminaries of the field, even though, as far as I can tell, she only briefly reviewed movies—from December 8, 1918, to October 12, 1919, in the pages of the Sunday edition of the New York Tribune, then a leading newspaper. I owe the discovery of her work to the review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. In recent years, the site has undertaken a major research project, in an effort to link to reviews of long-ago films by a wide range of largely forgotten critics—many of whom were women, some of whom were nonwhite writers at ethnically specific journals. A couple of years into the Rotten Tomatoes project, I reported here about some of the writers whose work was emerging and my excitement at following the links to this growing treasure trove. Still, I sensed that I had barely scratched the surface of what was becoming available and that further revelations were to come.

The movie that led me to Virginia Tracy was D. W. Griffith’s dramatically stark, stylistically bold film “A Romance of Happy Valley,” from 1919, which I’d never seen until its recent broadcast on TCM. Wondering what contemporaneous critics thought, I checked Rotten Tomatoes, and there was a review by Tracy, whose name was hitherto unknown to me, which I found astonishing in manner and thought: sensitive and sensible, analytical and ecstatic and dazzlingly stylish. Above all, she was thrillingly ahead of her time in her alertness to the art of directing. Here she is on Griffith:

In “A Romance of Happy Valley,” where his own material swarms upon him with such richness—his own material of side-lighted, incidental, accidental treatment—as to embarrass his story, he does not hesitate in his choice. It is the story he flings overboard like dead cargo. Sink or swim, survive or perish, he is for the moods, the temperaments, the adjustments of persons and places.

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