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.

I was all the more struck by her connection of the film to Griffith’s (now lost) 1918 war movie, “The Greatest Thing in Life.” Wanting to know more about this proto-auteurist, I read the small batch of her work at the Rotten Tomatoes links, and then trawled archives on my own.

In the forty-four pieces that Tracy published at the Tribune in that brief span of time, she established many things at once: a voice at once snappy and fancy, slangy in its vocabulary and tone and positively Jamesian in its syntax; a small but distinguished pantheon of actors and, yes, directors; and a set of ideas about movies in general which are far more consequential in film culture than most of the movies she discussed. Her reviews of individual films are attuned and alive to what I consider the principal subject of any great critic—the cinema itself. (For me, a review that unfolds the specifics of any individual movie without regard to a background of the cinema as a whole is like a movie projected not onto a screen but into the void.) Indeed, many of Tracy’s pieces of film criticism aren’t reviews—they’re movie-centered essays, in which she develops in detail her probingly comprehensive view of the art form over all. She may even be the cinema’s first major theoretician. Her body of work cries out for a complete reissue in book form.

Tracy, born in 1874, was the daughter of actors, and she began her career on the stage, in the eighteen-nineties. In 1909, she published a book of short stories about the lives of theatre people, “Merely Players.” In her love of movies, she was fighting an uphill battle against the intellectual orthodoxies of the time, which revered theatre as a serious art form and disparaged movies as merely popular entertainment. In her first piece of film criticism, in December, 1918, she mocks those prejudices and also sets out a bold thesis about movie acting and about the fundamental difference between a great stage performance and a great screen one:

Innocent intellectual persons ask us with a sort of polite terror, like diplomats extending raw meat to a tiger accredited from the Bolsheviki, what an intelligent creature like ourselves can see in movie acting. “So bombastic, my dear, so false and tawdry and mock-heroic!” That’s their fetish: the lack of naturalism.

Her argument in this piece unfolds almost in a kind of Socratic dialogue, a format she’d often return to. She cites a 1916 movie called “Honor Thy Name” (“the present re-issue of an old release”), writing that “every foot of the film was crowded with nature itself, every-day-est nature, so that to the screen-wise it was one long triumph of the infinitesimal muscular inflections, the almost impalpable play of response and reserve which form the special province of movie acting. And we awaited with an ogre-ish, lip-licking smile the surrender of our intellectuals.” The intellectuals didn’t surrender, of course, but Tracy understood that intellectuals devoted to stage acting aren’t likely to register the sort of understated acting that defines the art of movies: “If you are so clever that you can look at a thing without seeing it, you say that it isn’t acting at all, it’s just personality.” She calls her adversaries “screen-blind.”

Tracy developed this concept of acting along with a concept of movies at large. Her thesis is neatly encapsulated in the title of a 1919 piece, “More Than Plot to Make a Picture.” She derided critics and viewers who focussed on plot and conjured one such, a straw-intellectual she calls “Our Friend the Enemy,” who tells her, “Movies make, doubtless, excellent illustrations to plots, if you care about plots and their illustrations” but complains that they “can have no treatment of their own”—no original artistic point of view. Tracy’s rebuttal is a twofold move: first, she describes a recent movie plot in a way that comically lays bare its tangled absurdities; then she praises the emotional expression of a particular scene, for all its implausibility, that’s “most justly a visible and not a narrative stroke and is kept within the bounds of the realist unreality by the mysterious lighting and the sense of midnight and magic.” She adds, “Certainly it is the soft, persuasive, undidactic medium that quietly works into your very bones the wonder,” and tells her intellectual frenemy, “Ah, you see, you can always save your discrimination by taking your stand firmly on the plot! I just float with the treatment.”

The mastery of mood, style, and image that she sought was to be found in the best of popular melodramas and “thrillers,” such as several starring Mary Pickford, as she noted in another dialogue-essay: “ ‘No medium,’ we took up the cue as impressively as possible, ‘not even verse, fits popular legend so well as photography like that, where every light and shadow, texture and surface, every mystery here and revelation there, carries the significance of the emotion itself, till a picture’s photography is as permeative and as dramatically essential as our muscular system is to our own motion.” The art of acting, too, outleaps the story. Tracy praises a movie, “The Lion and the Mouse,” in which the acting and atmosphere are far superior to the plot, and caps the description with a sublime anecdote regarding her relative indifference to the screenplay:

To see two people so equipped and alert playing into one another’s hands so skillfully, so delicately, with such freedom and richness of suggestion as to create a whole background which has never entered the plot’s poor wooden head, this is simply entrancing. It is almost enough to make us say, like a foreign screen celebrity whose dinner was just being trundled across the restaurant in a reverential wheeled wagon: “Ah, de scenario—it’s de scenario you make over such a fuss! An’ what is it, den, de scenario? De li’le cart for de dishes!”

She expressed frustration with movies that did little but tell a story clearly and efficiently, however skillfully and professionally, and she considered such films to involve unwonted borrowings from theatre, by way of “the economy and unity of the play form.” To wit: “We can’t help scenting a danger in this complete competency of stagecraft, so compact, so firm, so balanced, moving so evenly and yet suspensively toward a climax which has not a loose thread, every incident constructive and yet naturally stressed.” Though she considered Griffith’s “Broken Blossoms” a summit of the art, she criticized his direction of “True Heart Susie”: “We were too conscious of him standing a little between us and the picture and pointing out, a trifle too emphatically, its funniness, its pathos, its simplicity, as though a hand were occasionally laid upon the continuity and we became aware of a voice saying: ‘Just a minute! Hold that till they notice how true this is and how lovely is its homeliness.’ ” In particular, she reproached his direction of Lillian Gish’s performance: “Everything you insist upon an actress’s doing may be admirable and yet the mere insistence may give her an air of being stage-managed to death.”

Nonetheless, her sense of style and spontaneity didn’t completely ignore stories and characters, the “cart” on which the “dishes” were brought. She complained that audiences rejected complex stories and that studios tailored their movies to fit narrow tastes: “For here are some of the stone pits which the public—the ultimate authority—has built around our pictures: No stories dealing with ‘problems,’ fairy tales, legends, history, psychology, politics, religion, capital and labor, the war, unhappy endings or married life. Then every little studio has rulings all its own. . . . But they are all very keen on their pictures being ‘close to the heart of modern life.’ ” She complained about movie heroes being more like figures of adventure fantasies “than like bank clerks or truck drivers or farmers or advertising experts, the young dentist from Harlem or the young lawyer from Kankakee.” And, above all, she didn’t like the representation of “foreigners” by American actors in American movies, and she made this notion of representation a linchpin of one of her most controversial pieces.

In April, 1919, just five months after the end of the Great War, she saw representation in political terms—indeed, global ones. Considering several Hollywood-made movies set in China, she inveighed against such misappropriations, contending that “pictures about those strange creatures, foreigners, with stories written by American authors and acted by American actors, are not likely to turn out about foreigners at all, but add to our cosmopolitan understanding mere figures of ourselves in fancy dress for the sympathetic parts and, for the unsympathetic parts, mere stock bogies, in some danger of spreading misunderstanding for still another fifty centuries.” Criticizing such exotic films, she says they’re sometimes “brilliant and splendid pictures; we desire these avidly, but, with these, those of us whom the war has made feel so ignorant desire a corrective.” This article contains an amazing, appalling historical detail: that “the American market had been closed to foreign films!” They were, she says, about to be readmitted, a fact that she greets enthusiastically, for the sake of “pictures written and motivated not only by foreigners of foreigners but for foreigners, pictures which are the natural self-expression of our world-neighbors and would be like windows let into their lives. When are we going to see some?”

Tracy’s endorsement of foreign films sparked an outcry—reeking both of protectionism and of jingoism—to which she responded in her column the following week. Remarkably, she was both optimistic and pessimistic: she felt that, precisely because not many Americans would be receptive to the realistic depiction and self-expression of lives lived elsewhere, foreign films would pose no danger to Hollywood—would “starve” at the box office. As a result, she wondered whether the releases of international movies could “be kept going by subscription,” as part of the cultural diet of “a determined minority.” This way, “the disdained movie might become a sort of shibboleth for the elite—a class, a cult, an inner shrine.”

Yes, as early as 1919, Tracy had imagined the film society, the art house, and the nonprofit. And it gets better: either the art-house audience, “instructed and instructing,” would encourage the making of better American movies, she predicted, “or else the elite and the foreigners would remain shut exclusively in the temple” and everyone else would continue to watch and enjoy “the ordinary movies.” Either way, foreign films would give American viewers, and producers, and exhibitors, nothing to fear.

Despite Tracy’s trenchant essays and cinema-sophical dialogues, despite her far-reaching view of the art and its aesthetic and social power, she appears to have run up against something that’s inherent in the practice of criticism: the weight of the ordinary. The prolific Griffith couldn’t work fast enough; she revered Charlie Chaplin’s films (he hadn’t yet made any features) but never wrote at length about them; and much of the fare that she considered aroused neither her enthusiasm nor her contempt (nor even, she admitted, any desire to write about them). She brushed up against the danger of contriving capers and curlicues to adorn discussion of run-of-the-mill movies—the kind of critical writing that veers into sociology in lieu of aesthetics, and that tempts writers to distort their own sensibility by magnifying infinitesimal virtues into grand rhetoric. Instead, Tracy, “instructed and instructing,” went to Hollywood and co-wrote a quartet of films released between 1921 and 1923—three historical costume dramas, one modern melodrama—all directed by J. Gordon Edwards (who happens to have been the grandfather of Blake Edwards). Then, she wrote more fiction, including the inside-Hollywood novel “Starring Dulcy Jayne,” published in 1927. In the nineteen-thirties, she went back to Broadway as an actor, and she died in 1946, reportedly, at the age of seventy-one.

Had she been able to hold on as a film critic for a few more years, she’d have been able to mine a far richer seam of regularly released masterworks. She didn’t get to write about films by John Ford, Lois Weber, Allan Dwan, and Erich von Stroheim (who was then just starting out). Chaplin started making features in 1921, Ernst Lubitsch moved to Hollywood in 1922, and the nineteen-twenties saw great and rapid advances in “foreign” films by F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, and, yes, Alfred Hitchcock. There was also a great flowering of screen comedy, as exemplified by Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon. Then came an American new wave that included Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, Gregory La Cava, Frank Capra, and a new generation of actors (such as Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, and Joan Crawford) to join them. Tracy would likely have been a visionary critic to herald their artistry, which few, at the time, understood as an art at all. ♦