AllMovie

A powerful force in early film criticism, novelist and playwright H. Van Loan started a motion picture column, "Flashes of the Screen," which from its inception in 1914 was syndicated to more than 200 newspapers. Not exactly an objective analyst of the film scene, Van Loan also functioned as a publicity manager for Universal, two jobs that at one time actually overlapped. A busy screenwriter in the later 1910s and the 1920s, Van Loan is today perhaps best known for the 1926 Broadway play The Noose, co-written with Willard Mack, which was filmed twice: in 1928 under its original title and in 1936 as I'd Give My Life.