In Northcliffe Jail: Iris Barry, film journalist

ABSTRACT

A reinvestigation of Iris Barry’s work for the Daily Mail in the period 1925–30. Barry is celebrated as a critic and curator. As a founder of the Film Society in London in the 1920s and first curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s she is a heroine of minority film culture. This article argues that her role in mass film culture has been overlooked. While it has been acknowledged that Barry wrote for the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most popular newspapers, this article demonstrates that the number of articles she wrote for the paper has been underestimated by a factor of ten. Beyond the case of Barry, this article argues that elite institutions like the Film Society have been given undue credit for the phenomenon of ‘taking film seriously.’

KEYWORDS:

• Iris Barry
• Daily Mail
• film criticism
• film culture
• Film Society
• Museum of Modern Art

It is pleasing to be able to write that Iris Barry is not a neglected figure languishing in obscurity, and that her place in history is assured. In 2014 she was made the subject of a full biography, Lady in the Dark, by Robert Sitton; her role as first curator of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library made her the protagonist of Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies, published in 2005; and both Wasson and Leslie Kathleen Hankins have written scholarly articles and chapters about her contribution to British film culture and criticism in the 1920s. Paradoxically, however, Barry’s most numerous and widely disseminated writings – the contributions she made to the Daily Mail between 1925 and 1930 – are the least discussed. There may be practical reasons for this oversight: until the Mail was digitized in recent years it was difficult for scholars to access it. But it is also the case that her stint on the paper – bastion of suburban conservatism, bête noire of British intellectuals – sits awkwardly with the more conventionally appealing image of Barry, co-founder of the storied Film Society, as a modernist bohemian.

It is not that Barry’s work for the Mail has been ignored altogether. Haidee Wasson discussed it in her chapter in the collection Young and Innocent?, published in 2002, and devoted an article to the subject, ‘The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and Iris Barry,’ four years later.¹ What the following has to offer is a modest reframing, benefiting from the paper’s digitization, which has made the task of going through the thousands of issues in which Barry may have appeared – under her own name or otherwise – less onerous. My research, which began with a trawl through the microfilm but ended with the searchable version made available to subscribing libraries by Gale Cengage, reveals that the number of articles Barry published in the Mail has been underestimated by an order of magnitude.

Barry, at least when writing for the Mail, was a film journalist, a role that does not necessarily exclude that of film critic – her job title – but one that certainly exceeds it. The question is to some extent quantitative rather than qualitative, and has to do with the format Barry found herself writing in. Much of what she wrote was not criticism or (to anticipate possible objections) reviewing. It was news, gossip, opinion, reportage – practically anything so long as it was to do with film. It was in many respects no different from what other papers were publishing in the 1920s, and have continued to publish for the past century, except that it was written by Iris Barry.

Having said that, the number of Mail articles actually signed ‘Iris Barry’ was small. Hankins gives the figure of ‘over sixty columns,’ but these signed items, usually appearing on the editorial page, constitute a small part of her output.² In addition to these ‘Iris Barry’ columns – in fact there were about a hundred of them – there were more than 700 articles signed The Film Critic in the period 1925–30, approximately a hundred more initialled I. B., about 35 articles by The Film Correspondent, and numberless other short or very short articles on film that were not signed at all. In light of this, 800 is a conservative estimate for the total number of Barry’s contributions. It is unlikely that a full accounting will ever be possible; the Mail’s physical archive, when consulted, told me it has nothing directly relevant to Iris Barry, and it does not contain marked-up copies naming the authors of individual articles.³ One may well doubt that all 700 of The Film Critic’s contributions should automatically be attributed to Barry, but a large proportion would have been hers. It was a ‘real job,’ she wrote in retrospect, ‘more than a full-time one.’⁴ There is plenty of other evidence for attribution, but there are also grey areas, in part because she was neither the Mail’s first film critic, nor its first writer to be bylined as The Film Critic.

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Like most British newspapers, the Daily Mail increased its film coverage in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. At first, the Mail assigned a theatre critic, C. R., the task of writing an irregular, but sometimes daily, ‘Film News’ column, which often consisted of reviews. (Anticipating Dziga-Vertov and Eisenstein, some of C.R’.s first film articles were titled ‘Man with a “Camera Eye,”’ in March 1919, and ‘The Film Sense,’ in April.)⁵ In the summer of 1920 C. R. was replaced at the helm of ‘Film News’ by W. G. Faulkner, veteran film critic of the Mail’s sister paper the Evening News. Both titles were part of the press empire founded in the 1890s by Alfred Harmsworth, ennobled as Lord Northcliffe. Meanwhile, other items began to appear credited to ‘Our Film Correspondent,’ who may or may not have been Faulkner as well. Faulkner remained in post only until the end of 1920, but the Film Correspondent, whoever they may have been, carried on, supplying weekly ‘Kinema Notes’ from January through May 1921, plus other occasional contributions. It was then that the Mail hired its first big-name film critic, the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall.

The explanation for this appointment was provided in an editorial comment at the top of Weigall’s first regular column, on 31 May 1921, which was nominally a review of Fox’s newly released A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. Weigall, it was stated, was ‘the author of the famous article in the April number of the “Nineteenth Century and After,”’ an old-fashioned journal of opinion, ‘on “The Influence of the Kinematograph on National Life,”’ extracts from which had been reprinted in the Mail the day before.⁶ The famous article was codedly anti-Semitic. ‘The world is being Americanised by the photo-play; but the trouble is that this Americanisation does not represent the best element of that nation, or even the most popular,’ he had written.⁷ The ‘atmosphere’ of American films, according to Weigall, ‘is vaguely corrupt; their standpoint is not quite that of an Englishman nor yet of a true American.’⁸ In an earlier Mail contribution on film, Weigall had decried the American influence on such uniquely British characteristics as ‘honesty, honour, fair-play, and the like,’ and he carried on in this vein, writing several times each week, until February 1922, after which he returned to Egyptology.⁹

The Film Correspondent never entirely went away during the Weigall era, but March 1922, the month after Weigall’s departure, saw the advent of The Film Critic, whose columns were neither signed nor initialled. The Film Critic made contributions every few days until the end of 1922, but appeared only very occasionally in 1923 and 1924; The Film Correspondent appeared about as often. In these years most film coverage was unsigned, and it is not obvious why some articles were credited to The Film Critic while most were not. From February 1925, however, there was a modest increase in The Film Critic’s activity, and it is this that constitutes the first grey area so far as Barry is concerned. She joined the paper in that year, but it is not absolutely clear when. The date is critical because the reasons for her hiring are a site of contention among historians.

For a long time, one of the few authoritative pieces of writing on Barry was Ivor Montagu’s obituary, ‘Birmingham Sparrow,’ published in the Spring 1970 issue of Sight and Sound. It has the virtue of being first-hand testimony – and Montagu was able to draw on the reminiscences of Barry’s friend Beatrice Curtis Brown as well as his own. But it also promoted the idea, consistently put forward in Montagu’s writings, that everything of value in British film culture began with the Film Society, of which Montagu himself was founding chairman. Thus Montagu wrote that film critics in the early 1920s ‘were, for the most part, reporters or mere adapters and paraphrasers of the distributors’ publicity handouts’ and that the establishment of ‘analytical, critical standards was the last thing expected of them by editors.’¹⁰ Accordingly, ‘not one of what we called the “quality papers” – The Times, Observer, Sunday Times, the serious weeklies – had a critic (with the exception of Iris),’ who wrote for the Spectator.¹¹ ‘It was not the fashion to take cinema, or its potentialities, seriously.’ According to Montagu, the Film Society had changed all that.

There is an element of truth in Montagu’s characterization of film critics, then and since, but his claim about the ‘quality press’ is self-serving bunk. By the early 1920s not only The Times but also the Manchester Guardian, the Daily News, and the Daily Herald, all published serious coverage. The Daily Mail was not ‘quality’– it was the quintessential middle-class, mass-market paper – but evidently Arthur Weigall, whatever else one might have to say about him, was not adapting Hollywood press releases. What is in question here is whether it was Barry’s involvement in the Film Society, as Montagu strongly suggests without saying outright, that prompted the Mail to hire her. Having described the success of the Film Society’s first performance, which took place on 25 October 1925, Montagu writes that ‘the stage we had reached was one of Iris’s peaks. […] Like a footballer for a fee, she transferred to the Daily Mail.’¹²

She had certainly joined the Mail before the Film Society’s first performance. Her first signed article for the paper appeared on 9 October 1925. But when, and for what reason, are still to be determined. In a handwritten fragment in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art, printed in extenso but without significant commentary in Sitton’s biography, Barry gives a fairly detailed account of the circumstances of her hiring, placing the decision between the first public announcement of the Film Society in May 1925 – on the front page, as it happens, of the Mail’s great rival the Daily Express – and the Film Society’s formal launch in September, but for reasons that have little or nothing to do with it.

In the fragment, Barry recalls that the Spectator had

published quite a long article by me on the dire state of English film production & the steps which might or should be taken by parliament to combat the ‘stranglehold’ which the Amer. film – that is ‘Hollywood’ – had taken on British cinemas & British minds.¹³

This Spectator article is almost certain to have been ‘American Prestige and British Films,’ which appeared in the issue dated 11 July 1925, and which begins with an amused reference to the newspapers’ unusually intense interest in matters cinematic that summer. ‘It is as though no one had realised until now that over a third of the population goes to the pictures every week of the year, or that at least three-quarters of the films they see are of American origin,’ she wrote.¹⁴ The occasion for the newspapers’ special concern was the humiliating affair of ‘the escorted film,’ as Universal’s The Phantom of the Opera had become known in sections of the press, so as not to give it any more publicity.

At the end of June, Universal’s man in London had bamboozled a unit of the Hampshire Heavy Brigade, Royal Artillery, into escorting the film from the docks of Southampton to Waterloo, then through London to Wardour Street, with a marching band playing all the way. Just days before there had been a widely reprinted open letter, signed by Thomas Hardy, Edward Elgar, and the Poet Laureate, among others, calling for concerted action to rescue the British film industry, and the escorted film was just the thing to give this call emotive force. Soon the prime minister himself was avowing the need to do something – or at least for something to be done, since by and large British governments still held to the principle of non-intervention in economic affairs. Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives, back in power in mid-1925, had managed to fumble the 1923 General Election by advocating ‘Imperial Preference,’ a form of Protectionism, and an uneasy peace now reigned within the party, with the Free Trade faction narrowly in the ascendent. It was against this backdrop that the Mail, whose sympathies lay with the Protectionists, felt a renewed need for a film journalist, to argue the case for measures to undo the American stranglehold over the screens and minds not only of Britain but of the Empire beyond. Barry herself did not immediately put two and two together. ‘When I received a letter from the managing editor of the Daily Mail asking me to come & see him, I was delighted & also quite sure that he wanted to be informed about the Film S.’¹⁵ In the event, she ‘was charged with the really rather alarming duty of helping strongly to put the British film back on the map.’¹⁶

This may be counted a perennial aim of the Northcliffe press. A full decade before Barry joined the Mail, in the summer of 1915, W. G. Faulkner, from the pulpit provided him by the Evening News, had launched an onslaught on the American film trade, charged with ‘exporting her morals, her manners, and even her religion,’ as he wrote in one of many interventions that year, calling for restrictions on film imports.¹⁷ New York was at the time taking over from London as the world’s film distribution centre, a vestige of Britain’s financial and maritime hegemony before the First World War, and Faulkner sounded the alarm. In early 1916 the trade journal Cinema News, whose editor G. A. Atkinson had frequently clashed with Faulkner during the previous year, reported a speech by the secretary of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association, of which Cinema News was the official organ, under the headline ‘Hands Off, Lord Northcliffe!’ The trade, he said,

has to deal with the group of newspapers controlled by Lord Northcliffe, particularly the Daily Mail and Evening News, and especially the latter, which, for a long time past – long before questions of cinema taxation or restriction arose – has shown itself bitterly hostile to imported films.¹⁸

The Mail was indeed less active during this controversy, but ran a weekly column, usually titled ‘Film Notes’ and signed by The Projector, between October 1915 and April 1916. The anomaly of films made in North America going to South America and other territories via London was cleared up before the war was over, despite Faulkner’s protests, but the dream of reviving British production, and restoring British morals and manners along with it, persisted. After Lord Northcliffe’s death in 1922, his brother Harold, Lord Rothermere, took over as proprietor, and the Mail again became an advocate of state protection. (Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, meanwhile, which had hired G. A. Atkinson to serve as film critic, was more sceptical.)

It was apparently Lord Rothermere whose eye was caught by Iris Barry’s article in the Spectator. Still, the decision remains a confusing one since Barry made her dislike of British films quite plain. ‘As a pleasure-loving member of the public,’ she wrote in the same article, ‘let me confess that wild horses would not drag me to see the average British film while there was an American picture to be seen, or indeed, in any case.’¹⁹ Her prescription for the industry was

to face the fact that our films are bad; that they are nearly all boring, poorly conceived, wretchedly directly, hopelessly acted, and abominably photographed and titled. Even if money is raised for increased production here, as I am sure it will be, it will be a long time before we can make sound and entertaining films, simply because there has been no continuity of experience here, whereas in the States men and women in their thousands have grown up learning the business of film-making.²⁰

Once the fact had been faced, she proposed an injection of new blood, and the production not of quasi-American films but of authentically British ones in the ‘sound national tradition of character-creation’ typified by Charles Dickens. In another archival fragment, Barry wrote that she got the Mail job ‘certainly in part’ through Sybil Vincent, a journalist on the paper; perhaps she saw Barry’s virtues despite her divergence from the editorial line.²¹

Grey areas remain. It is still unclear who served as The Film Critic from February 1925, and at precisely what point Barry assumed the title. A thumbnail profile written about her in early December 1926 stated with a degree of precision that she had begun ‘some fifteen months ago.’²² The Film Critic did not appear between 15 September and 6 October, and Barry’s first signed article as Iris Barry appeared on the 9^th. There was a distinct increase in film coverage from October, and so my best surmise is that she began then.

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The crisis in the British film industry, resolved with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act, aka the Quota Act, in early 1927, dominated Barry’s first years on the job. The Film Critic wrote reviews and reportage; Iris Barry wrote opinion pieces about everything from cinema etiquette to auteur theory (to use a whopping anachronism); and almost every day the Mail would in some capacity report on the tortuous debate that led eventually to the government deciding to step in and impose a protective quota on distributors and exhibitors. Barry was responsible for at least some of this coverage, but did not much water down her view of British films.

In a signed opinion-page published on 21 October 1925, very early in her tenure, she wrote that ‘it is on quality that the English films of the past have failed’; two months later she wrote, again in a signed opinion-page article, that ‘the first necessity is to preclude several of the existing film-directors in this country from ever entering a studio again.’²³ In between these two articles, an anonymous editorial column of 29 October, representing the view of the paper, and almost certainly not written by Barry, endorsed a probably anti-Semitic and definitely xenophobic initiative within London County Council to restrict cinema licenses to British subjects, and claimed airily that British films ‘are infinitely superior to nine-tenths of the imported pictures,’ blaming the audience for not doing its bit and turning up.²⁴ Not that Barry entirely escaped the ambience of Northcliffe House. In the immediate aftermath of the General Strike of May 1926, she noted that those cinemas which had stayed open provided ‘one more means of preserving order and a stiff upper lip. It is incumbent upon the nation now to see to it that superb English films take their place upon our screens.’²⁵

The passing of the Quota Act in 1927 liberated Barry from the drudgery of reporting on it, though the year began with her job in jeopardy. In January she wrote to Ivor Montagu referring to a ‘great crisis’ at the Mail, ‘which ends in my staying with them. The battle was bloody but victorious.’²⁶ It was in April that the initials I.B. began to appear, possibly suggesting enhanced status in the aftermath. By then she had published her book Let’s Go to the Pictures, generally well received, though slightly sniffily reviewed by C. A. Lejeune, Barry’s opposite number on the Manchester Guardian. ‘Several years of film reviewing for weekly and daily papers,’ wrote Lejeune in January 1927, ‘and a leading part in the organisation of the Film Society, which shows specialised pictures to specialised audiences on Sunday afternoons, has given Miss Barry a good background of knowledge from which to write.’²⁷

The Film Society was one thing that Barry wrote very little about in the Mail, though one may divine traces of her involvement here and there. In February 1926, for example, she devoted a signed column to the difficulty of finding films once they had passed out of distribution.

There are in existence in this country a few firms dealing in junk. From their extensive library of old films can be hired early Biograph dramas, the almost forgotten films of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew and of the still older Broncho Billy. Some of the pictures are incomplete, most of them are spotty and flicker terribly.²⁸

The Film Society had shown a Broncho Billy film in its first programme, and included one of D. W. Griffith’s films for Biograph in the sixth, shortly after Barry’s article appeared. In this 1926 article, and others, one can perceive the outline of her future vocation as a curator, turning what had been considered junk into works worthy of accession by the Museum of Modern Art.

One of the rare instances of direct reference to the Film Society also serves as evidence that Barry was indeed The Film Critic. In an undated letter of spring 1927, discussing Film Society business, Barry asked Ivor Montagu ‘can you possibly let me (and only me, not Mycroft) see the silhouette film, as I would like to have a story about it in the Mail.’²⁹ Walter Mycroft was their colleague on the council of the Film Society and Barry’s oppo as film critic on the Evening Standard, and the silhouette film was Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, shown by the Film Society on 8 May 1927. Mycroft, she continued, ‘is the devil, and always writes about things first, which is no doubt my laziness but also not too good for my status as a getter of fine fresh news at Northcliffe Jail.’ Barry wanted to provide stills from Reiniger’s film for Beatrice Curtis Brown, then film critic of the weekly Graphic, but also to scoop her as well. An article titled ‘Film Out of Paper,’ signed by The Film Critic, appeared in the Mail on 3 May; a still from the film appeared in the Evening Standard two days later; and a whole page of stills appeared in the Graphic after the screening.

In the autumn of 1927 Barry travelled to Los Angeles for a few weeks, and filed a dozen signed reports on the film colony, as it was often described. ‘Palm trees line the wide, straight boulevards,’ she wrote in her first dispatch;

frequently at intersecting roads stand large plaster statues, bronzed or white, which also savour of the exhibition spirit. One shows a bull and advertises fountain-pens; another has a full-length figure of Janet Gaynor and advertises the film ‘Seventh Heaven’; a third shows a cow and milkmaid for somebody’s milk.³⁰

Later:

beneath all the smiling faces, despite the lovely, gay homes in which they live, and their colourful lives, one has the feeling that life in the film world in Hollywood is comparable only with the fierce struggles of vegetation in a tropical jungle.³¹

Barry’s return to England marked the beginning of her ‘imperial phase.’ Her Monday reviews section, a fixture since the start of her tenure that had grown from a tiny collection of capsules into something resembling a column – other reviews appeared as and when – was expanded into a section two columns across. Barry had continued to contribute to the Spectator for two years after joining the Mail – indeed, she wrote more signed pieces for the Spectator after joining the Mail than before, falsifying Montagu’s transfer analogy – and in 1927 she began writing for the Woman’s Journal, a new upmarket monthly where her fellow contributors included such luminaries as Rebecca West and Storm Jameson. From 31 May 1928 she had two Mail sections a week, the second on Thursday. By the year’s end it was not unknown for her to contribute three.

A highlight of this period, demonstrating Barry’s freedom to range beyond the confines of the review format, was a short series of articles, published in the spring of 1928, based on research into ordinary cinemas outside her usual West End beat. In Museum Movies, Haidee Wasson introduces Barry the curator, who would not tolerate rowdiness in MoMA’s auditorium on West 53rd Street, as ‘imposing persistent institutional discipline,’ and thereby tying MoMA to ‘class-inflected projects to reform cinemagoers deemed ignorant or dangerous.’³² As Barry reported from a shabby South London hall a decade earlier, attempts at disciplining the audience were not confined to elite cultural institutions. ‘Male attendants strode up and down the gangways shouting “Quiet there, please,” with little effect.’³³ Meanwhile in an East End cinema ‘everyone murmured “Oh!” or “Ooh!” at appropriate moments during the films, but order reigned.’

Coverage of the Film Society did not increase perceptibly, but Barry was sure to keep her readers abreast, at a time when the Mail claimed sales of one and three quarter million copies a day, of what was being shown in one fairly small cinema in the West End, the Shaftesbury Avenue Pavilion. This had become Britain’s first art cinema of any endurance with the opening of Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney in April 1928; earlier attempts had lasted a few months, and the Pavilion itself continued as a specialized cinema for less than two years. On occasion Barry was moved to advise the cinema on which films it ought to revive. ‘And what of the good “little” pictures which are seldom seen in cinemas of importance?,’ she asked in August 1928. ‘One thinks of “Lord Jim,” and “Mantrap,” and “Adventure,” and “Wild Geese,” and the now current “Jazz Mad,” of other really excellent films which have come and gone obscurely because no one quite realised until too late how good they were.’³⁴ The first three all happened to be directed by Victor Fleming. A while later she wrote that ‘The suggestion recently made in these columns that the Shaftesbury-avenue Pavilion might well include the best American pictures as well as Continental ones in its programmes of selected productions has been adopted.’³⁵ Barry’s role on the Mail straddled minority and ‘mass’ film culture.

In the same month, in September 1928, Barry attended the first presentation of The Jazz Singer in London. ‘From the moment that this novel evening’s entertainment began it was obvious that this new development – or perhaps it should be called branch – of the cinema has arrested public imagination.’³⁶ She had been covering developments in the sound film even before joining the Mail, but it naturally became the dominant topic during the year of transition to sound-equipped cinemas that followed – a transition one of whose effects was the end of the Shaftesbury Avenue Pavilion experiment. ‘Actually, of course, the cinema never has been silent,’ she wrote in May 1929.³⁷ ‘Only once the Film Society tried the experiment of showing a full-length picture in silence and learnt that the audience could not concentrate on the story because of the insufferable noise of coughing, whispering, and rustling made by 1,200 gathered together.’ Less than a month later she declared that ‘There is no longer any argument about talkers. They have arrived and conquered.’³⁸

Barry recounted the end of her time at the Mail in a handful of autobiographical fragments. The famous novelist Elinor Glyn had directed a film, Knowing Men, and Barry’s pan of the picture led to her dismissal from the paper. Lord Rothermere, she said, had dined with Glyn the night before the trade show.³⁹ The offending article, published on 6 February 1930, called the film ‘silly beyond belief and creates an overpowering desire in the spectator to depart hastily for a more wholesome atmosphere.’⁴⁰ Barry’s later claim, in an unpublished memoir written in the 1940s (and in the third person), that her dismissal was instant, and that ‘one week later Iris Barry was on the high seas bound for America’ was an overstatement.⁴¹ She wrote Montagu a week after the incident: ‘as you’ve probably heard, I’m leaving the Mail at the end of March. Officially, I have resigned and they’ve given me almost an illuminated testimonial, but in fact it is all rather unpleasant.’⁴²

It had been a hard four and a half years. In August 1928 it had been reported by the trade paper Bioscope that she was ‘relinquishing her film work in order to complete a novel’ by November, and would be ‘succeeded’ by a Russell Stannard, phrasing suggesting that the break was not temporary.⁴³ Two weeks later came the news that she ‘has now rejoined’ the Mail.⁴⁴ A novel, Here is Thy Victory, was written anyway, and was published about the time of her departure, in the spring of 1930. ‘I was happier and felt brighter before,’ she confided to Montagu after the axe fell, ‘and seemed to have more friends, or they were more accessible, or I was, or something.’⁴⁵

Her last film contribution as Iris Barry was published on 2 April 1930; her last contribution as Iris Barry, not about film, came on 14 May. The last item by The Film Critic had appeared on 3 April. Our Film Critic, who made his or her debut the previous day, held the fort until the middle of June, when Peter Burnup formally took over with his first signed piece. Barry’s move to the US, which was not immediate, was foreshadowed in an article she wrote for the March 1930 issue of Woman’s Journal, under her pen name Jeannie Wharton. ‘Stars Who Have Sailed Away,’ as the article was titled, would have appeared in the last week of February, and it is impossible to know whether it was written before or after her firing from the Mail. ‘Six thousand miles away an English film actor can amount to something,’ she wrote. ‘At home he wobbles in a morass both of his own and of other people’s uncertainty.’⁴⁶ Contrary to what Sitton says, Barry’s husband Alan Porter was already in New York, giving a course of lectures at the New School for Social Research. In the week of the Knowing Men trade show he spoke on ‘Marriage: or the Limits of Love.’⁴⁷

In a typescript of late 1934, untitled, seemingly unpublished, probably connected in some way with the National Board of Review, Barry wrote that it was in the late 1910s and early 1920s that

films were talked about in drawing rooms: and so the proprietors and editors of newspapers and magazines were forced to conclude that after all the movies were not so very vulgar and that they really deserved to be written about just as the theatre was.⁴⁸

It was, she went on, ‘between 1916 and 1925 that a critical approach to the motion pictures was established,’ placing her hiring by the Daily Mail at the end of this process.⁴⁹ In her 1940s memoir, still in the third person, she wrote of the advent of newspaper criticism that ‘there in a sense the whole thing came to an end. To her, as to many other thoughtful people whose fondness for films led them to cherish the evanescent quality of their favourites, this was an intolerable misfortune. For it is about as easy to recollect and gauge one film with another as it is to compare dreams.’⁵⁰ Perhaps so, but Iris Barry’s responses to the passing show of the 1920s have that evanescent quality too, and one worth preserving just as she would come to preserve the films.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry K. Miller

Henry K. Miller is the author of The First True Hitchcock, published by University of California Press in 2022, editor of The Essential Raymond Durgnat, and co-editor of DWOSKINO: the gaze of Stephen Dwoskin.

Notes

1. Haidee Wasson: ‘Writing the Cinema into Daily Life: Iris Barry and the Emergence of British Film Criticism in the 1920s,’ in Andrew Higson (ed.) Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), pp. 321–337; Haidee Wasson, ‘The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and Iris Barry,’ Film History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 154–162.

2. Leslie Kathleen Hankins, ‘Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste, Forming Film Culture in London 1924–26: the Adelphi, the Spectator, the Film Society, and the British Vogue,’ Modernism/Modernity, vol. 11, 2004, p. 489.

3. Email to author from Daily Mail Library, 21 March 2019.

4. Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film archive, File 07–05: Blue Herakles Notebook.

5. C. R., ‘Man with a “Camera Eye,”’ Daily Mail, 27 March 1919, p. 4; C. R., ‘The Film Sense,’ Daily Mail, 3 April 1919, p. 4.

6. Arthur Weigall, ‘Mark Twain Film,’ Daily Mail, 31 May 1921, p. 7.

7. Arthur Weigall, ‘The Influence of the Kinema on National Life,’ Nineteenth Century and After, April 1921, p. 668.

8. Ibid., p. 667.

9. Arthur Weigall, ‘Where is the Censor?,’ Daily Mail, 27 October 1920, p. 6.

10. Ivor Montagu, ‘Birmingham Sparrow: In memoriam, Iris Barry, 1896–1969,’ Sight and Sound, April 1970, p. 106.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 107.

13. Blue Herakles Notebook, op. cit.

14. Iris Barry, ‘American Prestige and British Films,’ Spectator, 11 July 1925, p. 51.

15. Blue Herakles Notebook, op. cit.

16. Ibid.

17. Anon., ‘American Film Kings,’ Evening News, 18 August 1915, p. 6.

18. Anon., ‘Hands Off, Lord Northcliffe!,’ Cinema News and Property Gazette, 10 February 1916, pp. 2–3.

19. Iris Barry, ‘American Prestige and British Films,’ p. 52.

20. Ibid.

21. Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film archive, File 05–14: Fragment beginning ‘Women have been kind.’

22. R. De Cordova, ‘Thumbnail Interview with the Great,’ Sphere, 11 December 1926, p. 498.

23. Iris Barry, ‘Creating a British Film Tradition,’ Daily Mail, 21 October 1925, p. 8; Iris Barry, New Blood for British Films,’ Daily Mail, 17 December 1925, p. 8.

24. Anon., ‘More British Films,’ Daily Mail, 29 October 1925, p. 8.

25. Iris Barry, ‘What We Owe to the Cinema,’ Daily Mail, 18 May 1926, p. 6.

26. BFI Special Collections, Ivor Montagu archive, Item 311: Card from Iris Barry to Ivor Montagu, 25 January 1927.

27. C. A. Lejeune, rev. Let’s Go to the Pictures, Manchester Guardian, 20 January 1927, p. 7.

28. Iris Barry, ‘Life of a Film,’ Daily Mail, 10 February 1926, p. 8.

29. BFI Special Collections, Ivor Montagu archive, Item 311: Letter from Iris Barry to Ivor Montagu, n.d.

30. Iris Barry, ‘The Painted but Pretty Flappers of Hollywood,’ Daily Mail, 18 October 1927, p. 10.

31. Iris Barry, ‘Film Stars Who Are Fighting For Survival,’ Daily Mail, 24 October 1927, p. 10.

32. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 2; p. 18.

33. The Film Critic, ‘Brightness Bought for Sixpence,’ Daily Mail, 11 April 1928, p. 2.

34. The Film Critic, ‘Sensationalism in New Films,’ Daily Mail, 23 August 1928, p. 17.

35. The Film Critic, ‘Films Spoiled By Bad Titles,’ Daily Mail, 13 September 1928, p. 17.

36. The Film Critic, ‘Actors’ Lisp in Talk Film,’ Daily Mail, 28 September 1928, p. 14.

37. The Film Critic, ‘First Talking Film From Mr Colman,’ Daily Mail, 9 May 1929, p. 21.

38. The Film Critic, ‘Talk-Films Have Come to Stay,’ Daily Mail, 3 June 1929, p. 16.

39. Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film archive, File 03–04: Fragment beginning ‘but one war agency.’

40. The Film Critic, ‘To-Day’s Blunt Truth,’ Daily Mail, 6 February 1930, p. 9.

41. Fragment beginning ‘but one war agency,’ op. cit.

42. BFI Special Collections, Ivor Montagu archive, Item 311: Letter from Iris Barry to Ivor Montagu, 17 February 1930.

43. Anon., ‘Speaking Personally,’ Bioscope, 22 August 1928, p. 36.

44. Anon., ‘Speaking Personally,’ Bioscope, 5 September 1928, p. 37.

45. Letter from Iris Barry to Ivor Montagu, 17 February 1930, op. cit.

46. Jeannie Wharton, ‘Stars Who Have Sailed Away,’ Woman’s Journal, March 1930, p. 60.

47. New York Times, 2 February 1930, Section 2, p. 22.

48. Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film archive, File 02–03: Manuscript beginning ‘At first the movies were scientific.’

49. Ibid.

50. Fragment beginning ‘but one war agency,’ op. cit.