After serving in the Merchant Marine, he started writing for American Mercury, Fortune, and Time during the 1930s.
[1] In 1934, he joined The New Yorker and began contributing satirical short stories and irreverent profiles.
[1][2] He became the magazine's regular film critic in 1945, employing a writing style that tended to be terse and was often condescending.
[2][3] He gained a reputation as something of a nemesis of Alfred Hitchcock in particular, whose films McCarten regularly panned.
[4] The screenplay for the 1956 British romantic comedy film The Silken Affair was adapted from an idea by McCarten.