The Man From The McCarthy Agency

Matthew Sweet reveals the untold story of Harold McCarthy, arguably the most powerful British film critic of the twentieth century, despite the fact that his name never appeared in a newspaper byline. From the 1930s to the 1960s, McCarthy supplied reviews of 11,000 films to independent cinema managers from Cork to Calcutta - reviews that shaped what cinemagoers saw on the screen. And yet his importance only became clear recently when a huge archive of his work surfaced at auction. With the help of Harold's family, Matthew Sweet goes on the trail of the man from the McCarthy Agency - and along the way uncovers a lost world of forgotten cinema, to which McCarthy's work is now our only guide