[Gutenberg 26474] • Some Naval Yarns

Frederick William Mordaunt Hall (1878-1973), better known as Mordaunt Hall, was an advance agent for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show circa 1907, by which time he was already referred to as "an old newspaper man. " He worked at the New York Press from 1909 to 1914, when he joined the New York Herald. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War I, and did intelligence work. He wrote about his wartime experiences in the book Some Naval Yarns (1917). In the early 1920s, he wrote movie intertitles, with a young Alfred Hitchcock designing and lettering them, at the Famous Players-Lasky studio in Islington, England. Hall's byline first appeared in The New York Times in 1922. He was the first regularly assigned motion picture critic for them from 1924 to 1934. After retiring from the Times he hosted a New York radio program on movies and movie players, and was a drama critic for the Boston Transcript. He worked for the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York, later joined the Bell Syndicate as a copy editor, and occasionally wrote articles.