Ernest Betts
Ernest Betts (1 June 1897 – 15 June 1975) was a leading British film critic of the twentieth century, and author of one of the most important books about film in Britain in the 1920s. He was a regular contributor to several national newspapers from the 1920s to the 1970s, but also wrote for modernist "little magazines" such as Close Up. He was also considered by the BBC as a candidate to become its Film Correspondent in the late 1920s.[1]
Betts attended University College School and King's College, University of London. After serving in World War I in Mesopotamia, Betts began a career as a freelance writer on the arts, contributing to newspapers such as the Daily Herald and Westminster Gazette. He would describe his war experience in The Bagging of Baghdad (John Lane, 1920). By 1922 he was a reporter on the Birmingham Gazette[2] whilst also acting as editor of the magazine Dancing World. In 1924 he began to write for the popular magazine Cinema and in 1926 became an assistant to Sir Basil Clarke at Editorial Services Ltd., perhaps the first public relations agency in Britain.[3] Encouraged by his work for Clarke, Betts became a director of another PR firm, Albemarle News Service, with offices in Old Bond Street. Betts concentrated particularly on PR services for the media industry, representing leading cinemas such as the New Empire and the British operations of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. [4] However, Betts would leave Albemarle in May 1929 to concentrate on a career as a film critic.[5]
One reason for this was the success of his new book Heraclitus, or the future of films. Commissioned by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. for its popularizing ‘To-day and To-morrow’ series on modern culture, science and technology, edited by the distinguished public intellectual C.K. Ogden. The series included over one hundred volumes aimed at the general reader. As Max Saunders notes, authors ‘were expected to delineate the contemporary state of the field, then project its future’[6]. The success of Heraclitus, and Betts’ successful self-promotion as a public intellectual, would lead to opportunities in broadcasting with the BBC, as well as to publication in Close Up. Betts had been invited to speak on the BBC about cinema as early as the summer of 1927 though the opportunity came to nothing.[7] However, the publication of Heraclitus encouraged the BBC to commission from Betts four talks in 1929, with a fifth following in 1930.[8] The text of the first talk would also be published in the BBC's magazine The Listener.[9] At the same time Betts became film critic to a succession of newspapers, beginning with the Week End Review in 1931, then joining London's Evening Standard in 1932, and combining that with writing for the Sunday Express in 1932. From 1934 he would be the film critic of both the Sunday Express and Daily Express.[10] Betts combined his critical work with an attempt to break into screenwriting. He finally succeeded by collaborating on the screenplay for Love in Exile (1936) with Roger Burford, Gene Markey and Herman J. Mankiewicz. He would be more successful, however, as a critic commentating on others' screenplays. He persuaded the publisher Methuen to take the unusual step of bringing out editions of the shooting scripts of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1934) and Jew Süss (1934), contributing introductions to both volumes. These were amongst the first publications that examined film scripts in their own right as works of literary merit.
Betts would remain as the Express newspapers film critic until the 1950s. He then moved to the People and remained there until a few years before his death. In 1973 he would also publish The Film Business, a history of British cinema 1896-1972 - something he was uniquely qualified to do, having been born in the year of cinema's invention, and spent most of his life as an insider, promoting it and commentating on it.
References
- ↑ Hilda Matheson to Lionel Fielden, 5 July 1929, BBC Written Archives, Talks. Film Talks 1929-37, R51/173/1.
- ↑ 'Ernest Betts', International Motion Picture Almanac, 1937-38
- ↑ 'Ernest Betts', International Motion Picture Almanac, 1937-38
- ↑ 'Ernest Betts', International Motion Picture Almanac, 1937-38; Bioscope, 12 December 1928
- ↑ Bioscope 15 May 1929
- ↑ Max Saunders, ‘The Future in Modernism. C.K. Ogden’s ‘To-Day and Tomorrow’ Book Series’, in Utopia. The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life. European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Volume 4, edited by David Ayers, Benediky Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen and Harri Veivo (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 383.
- ↑ Ernest Betts to R.S. Lambert, 18 July 1927, BBC Written Archives, Ernest Betts personal file.
- ↑ Ernest Betts, ‘The Future of the Cinema’, 6 March 1929, 9.15 pm; ‘Film Criticism’, 1 November 1929, ‘Film Criticism’, 15 November 1929, ‘Film Criticism’, 29 November 1929.
- ↑ Ernest Betts, ‘The Future of the Cinema – Art or Commerce?’, The Listener, I, 9 (13 March 1929): 331
- ↑ 'Ernest Betts', International Motion Picture Almanac, 1937-38
Ernest Betts
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