Cathleen McCarthy

In 1920, a thirty-year-old woman named Cathleen McCarthy got a job as a reporter at The Peterborough Examiner. As the only woman reporter on staff, she quickly found herself in charge of the “Women’s Page” and its “society” and fashion features. Within a year or so, however, she was also writing film reviews—and would continue on that beat until she left the paper in 1937. McCarthy was not only the first film critic in Peterborough, but also one of a very few in Canada.

When she got the job, McCarthy had already spent over half of her life in the workforce. Born in Ontario on December 26, 1889, she had moved with the rest of her family—mother Margaret, father Hiram, and sister Mamie—to Peterborough around 1901. Her father, an abusive alcoholic, soon deserted the family—or was pushed out—leaving the women to fend for themselves. At the age of fourteen, McCarthy was working as a bookkeeper in a downtown plumbing and bicycle shop (McCarthy, “Diary”; McCarthy, “Memories of Learning”; McCarthy, “Memoir fragment”).

From an early age, McCarthy immersed herself in literature and music. Her diary, running from December 25, 1905, to October 3, 1910, survives in the Trent Valley Archives, and the December 29, 1905, entry notes that she had read The Pickwick Papers (1837) ten times (McCarthy, “Diary”). Later in life, after seeing the film David Copperfield (1935), she pondered in a March 21 review: “What can a poor writer do when confronted with a picture like this, especially if she spent a lot of her younger life reading Charles Dickens’s works and wishing, somehow or other, they could be translated into action” (Jeanette, “At the Theatres: At the Capitol: ‘David Copperfield’”). She also clearly had a passion for motion pictures as a young woman. Her diary entries indicate that she dropped into Peterborough’s three nickelodeon theaters about 200 times in a five-year stretch. Thus, for someone with literary interests and an appreciation of film—and having put in long years at what she saw as the tedious work of bookkeeping and stenography— landing a job at the Examiner in 1920 must have been a dream come true (McCarthy, “Memoir fragment”).

McCarthy’s film reviews were published under an assigned byline, “Jeannette” or “Jeanette” (the spelling varied at first, but eventually became “Jeanette”). However, the Examiner did not hide that “Jeanette” was Cathleen McCarthy (and “Cathleen” was spelled with a “K” in the earlier years). Her real name also appeared in the introduction to the women’s columns. In 1935, for some reason, perhaps related to a change in newspaper ownership, her byline became her own initials, “C.L.M.”

McCarthy produced seventeen film reviews in the fall of 1921 and then stayed away from writing about movies over the next three years. In 1925, she once again took the job up with a consistency that would remain in place for over a decade. That year, she penned forty-five reviews—in addition, of course, to doing her other daily work for the paper. In the end, by 1937, she had written over 800 film reviews for The Peterborough Examiner. During this period, Peterborough had only two dedicated motion picture theaters, the Capitol and Regent, and many of her reviews covered everything seen and heard in the whole program, providing us with a clear sense of the flow of the daily cinematic experience.

With or without a byline, McCarthy also wrote other film or entertainment articles over the years, including “Censorship of the Movies,” “What Peterboro Theatre-Goers Think of Some of the Movie Stars,” and “The Year’s Ten Best in Peterboro Would Be Difficult to Select.” She provided an important first-hand account of the experience of three young boys attending the silent picture show with “He Sees Wings” and she introduced the talkies to the city in 1929 with “Capacity House Views Showing of the Talkies.” McCarthy also wrote three short plays that were performed at the Capitol Theatre in the 1920s. She did reviews of local music events and regularly had poetry and short stories in the paper. She also wrote an advice column, using the name “Annie Laurie,” in which she welcomed “letters of inquiry on subjects of feminine interest” (“Advice to Girls”).

McCarthy wrote in an assured and snappy idiomatic style, capturing the social flavors and preoccupations of the time. Here and there, her work reveals glimpses of an unacknowledged feminism—after all, she spent much of her time at the Examiner writing about women’s subjects—and she engaged, often ironically, with certain stereotypes of women (Jeanette, “Women’s Page – Women Voters”; Jeanette, “Women Are as Good Car Drivers as Most Men”; Jeanette, “Do Women Love Trouble?”; Jeanette, “Theatres: At the Regent”). Befitting her background, she showed concern for people in Peterborough who did not have wealth at their fingertips (Jeanette, “Peterborough Has Many Cases of Want”; Jeanette, “Some Girls Live on $6.50”). At the same time, she was fully a person of her times, with more than a few hints of racism in her words, accepting prevailing views of Black people and “savage” Africans, for instance (Jeanette, “At the Theatres: At the Capitol:’Trader Horn’”; C.L.M., “At the Theatres: At the Capitol”; C.L.M., “Talkie Talks: At the Capitol‘Show Boat”).

As a film reviewer in a small city, McCarthy had to walk a fine line in her criticism, taking care not to alienate the newspaper’s advertisers; she was also clearly promoting films, getting people out to see them. Most often, she drew out the best of whatever movie was under her eye. But she could be critical, as exemplified in an early swipe at The Swan (1925), featuring stars Frances Howard, Adolphe Menjou, and Ricardo Cortez. From the more positive remark that “The whole story has a fairy-tale atmosphere but is entertaining and gorgeous in spots,” she moved to its key flaw:

The characterizations in this picture are extremely good, with the exception, perhaps, of the heroine, who is just about as wooden a dame as a lady could possibly be. Evidently Miss Frances Howard became overawed with the dignity of the role assigned to her, that of the Princess Alexandra, or else the director had certain ideas about the deportment of a princess. (Jeanette, “At the Capitol – ‘The Swan’”)

McCarthy questioned how anyone in the audience would believe that “a vital young man like Dr. Walther” (played by Cortez) would ever fall in love with the “frigid creature” that was the princess.

When McCarthy watched the films that she reviewed, it was while seated amidst other moviegoers, and she displayed a keen interest in audience expectations and responses: applause, absorption, laughter, tears, puzzlement, shrieks, and even disgust. For example, in her review of Hands Up! (1926), she mentioned that “it was a regular scream” for those who saw it with her. Still, she did not “personally” find herself laughing to death—“but then, we may not have been in a laughing humor” (Jeanette, “Raymond Griffith”).

In her piece on The Heart of Salome (1927), starring a young Walter Pidgeon, she noted that anyone drawn to the film through its advertising and who thus expects to “get a thrill out of sitting through the screening of the picture will be sadly disappointed” (Jeanette, “Theatres – At the Capitol: ‘The Heart of Salome’”). She continued:

Whether the censor’s shears have been busy or whether the scenarist got tired when halfway through and allowed the tale to fizzle out to a flat finale, is problematical. At any rate, ‘The Heart of Salome,’ from the point of view of the admirer of pornographic [sexual- Ed.] pictures, is distinctly disappointing.

While the picture had “promising elements on hand,” what might have been a “stunning affair, carried out to a different ending,” simply did not succeed.

McCarthy also opined that Across to Singapore (1928), with Ramon Novarro, Ernest Torrence, and Joan Crawford, was “a picture with a curious tempo. In the first sections the action is slow and a little tiresome, and in the final sections it moves so fast that the audience gasps with relief at the finale” (Jeanette, “At the Capitol: Ramon Novarro”). She added that, “Both Novarro and Ernest Torrence are a little out of focus in their parts.” Such pokes indicate the arrival of film criticism— the act of appraising and evaluating and not just promoting—on the local front.

One among many film favorites was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). “Moving pictures come and go,” she wrote, and:

the ‘movie’ public goes to see them and is more or less impressed, according to the nature of the production. It is a far cry since the days when effects were reached by crude methods, and Theda Bara, for instance[,] had to weep huge glycerine tears from a huge face, plastered close to the audience to convince people that she was sorrowing about something. But the scope of the moving picture has not yet reached its limit apparently. Anyone who sees ‘Metropolis’… will be convinced of the extraordinary power of the camera’s eye that can project itself a thousand years hence in imagination and weave for present day audiences a moving tapestry of things and events and peoples in that far-off day. (Jeanette, “At the Capitol: ‘Metropolis’”)

McCarthy noticed “peculiar inconsistencies” in what she saw as “an overpowering and spectacular production.” But she found a kind of reassurance about the world she was then living in and, oddly enough, looked forward one hundred years to the time we ourselves are now experiencing: “If 2027 is going to be anything like ‘Metropolis,’ people of 1927 should be very happy indeed to be living in an age that refuses to give all its worship to Efficiency.”

McCarthy left Peterborough in 1940 to work in Ottawa for the war effort. By 1943, she was in Oshawa, where she finally got the job she had long desired: doing “men’s reporting” with The Times-Gazette (“Men’s Reporting”). She soon gave up the position to move back to Peterborough to be with her ailing sister. She remained in Peterborough, a single woman, for the rest of her life—and never did give up writing. Her byline, now Cathleen McCarthy, eventually resurfaced in the 1970s when, in her eighties, she wrote articles for the independent community newspaper Common Press and Trent University’s newspaper, Arthur. She died in 1984, five years short of her one hundredth birthday.

In her later years, McCarthy gave a couple of interviews with the press. Yet in those interviews, and in all of the articles she wrote in the 1970s—at least twenty-five, looking back on her life and other historical moments and figures, and including three long pieces called “Memoirs of a Reporter” (1977)— she never once mentioned that she had been a film critic.

From today’s vantage point, it is clear that McCarthy understood how films were made and appreciated them as a popular art. She read the trade journals and the fan magazines and, as her columns show, even went to the cinema when she was not reviewing films (Jeanette, “He Sees Wings”; Jeanette, “In Woman’s Realm”). From her first true review in October 1921 of The Affairs of Anatol (1921) to her final piece on Under the Red Robe (1937)—and countless titles both famous and now-long-forgotten in between—McCarthy gave readers glimpses of the good, the bad, and the local in moviegoing. There was never again such a regular, long-lasting film critic in the city.

See also: Ray Lewis