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.