Walter C. Mycroft The Time of My Life

Walter Charles Mycroft (1891-1959) was the film critic of the Evening Standard from 1922-1927, and also a founding member of London's Film Society. This long-lost memoir, which Mycroft wrote mainly in the 1940s, offers a detailed account of the vagaries and complex economic vicissitudes of British film production in the 1930s. Mycroft also recalls how he selected film stories for directors Harry Lachman, E. A. Dupont, and Alfred Hitchcock, and he reveals, for the first time, the true story behind Hitchcock's departure from British International Pictures. Mycroft also provides incisive portraits of British film industry captains: the charismatic Alexander Korda, C. M. Woolf, the rising J. Arthur Rank, and above all John Maxwell, the shrewd iconoclastic Scots lawyer who built Associated British into the largest and most financially successful film corporation in pre-war Britain. The memoirs conclude with the death of Maxwell and Mycroft's fall from grace at Elstree. The volume is supplemented by four appendixes consisting of Mycroft's earlier writings on the aesthetics and business of film production, along with a filmography of over 200 films on which he worked. This memoir provides both scholars and the general reader with new and fascinating insights into the world's of British journalism during the first two decades of the twentieth century and of British film production during the 1930s. Walter Mycroft: The Time of My Life will be of interest not only to scholars of British journalism and pre-war British film production, but to anyone who is interested in pre-war British culture.