On Thomson's <em>Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio</em>

Abstract

On Thomson’s Warner Bros:The Making of an American Movie Studio Stephen J. Whitfield Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio. By David Thomson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 220 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-19760-0 (hardcover). US $25.00. This sprightly volume is titled Warner Bros, not Warner Brothers, and the distinction is important. Although David Thomson has submitted an entry for Jewish Lives series, his book traces the history of a company—Hollywood studio Warner Bros.—and the legacy it gave moviegoers. The collective biographical portrait of Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack is rather sketchy when contrasted with the author’s analysis of films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), or with his account of the contribution made by Darryl F. Zanuck (the chief of production in the 1920s and early 1930s—and incidentally a Gentile) to the success of the studio. Though commerce and art are entwined in all sorts of intriguing ways in the annals of American film, a paradox must be noted: Warner Bros is not—as the title hints—an addition to the field of business history. The careers and roles of stars like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland—all the way to Clint Eastwood—pique the author’s curiosity far more than front-office machinations or stockholder reports. Despite the rubric of Jewish Lives, the rationale for this lack of balance is obvious. Sam Warner died a few hours before the premiere of The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), the first sound movie, which made the studio’s reputation. [End Page 107] Sam basically disappears from the book by page 63. Treasurer Albert Warner was essentially a silent partner who lived uneventfully in New York. He died four decades after Sam, after spending the day at the race track (his chief pleasure) in Miami. That left Harry, the president of the company, an upright, solid citizen and a committed Jew, and Jack, who succeeded Zanuck and Hal B. Wallis as head of production. Jack Benny’s quip (“Jack Warner would rather make a bad joke than a good picture” [33]) isn’t quite fair; just think of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). But when Thomson conjectures that Jack may be “the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series” (2), his inclusion on a list made lustrous by Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Primo Levi, and Rabbi Akiva isn’t the only reason Warner Bros belongs uneasily on the shelf of new releases from Yale University Press. The exact relation between the accountants and the artists in the evolution of Warner Bros. is not a subject Thomson tackles directly. The bottom line certainly had primacy. It could not have escaped the brothers that in making a dog known as Rin Tin Tin (who starred in twenty-seven silent films between 1923 and 1925) famous, they were getting a star who “never complained or got a lawyer or an agent” (69). At virtually the same moment, the studio lost Ernst Lubitsch to Paramount; his comedies, Harry Warner told the émigré director, were “too subtle” (66). Hard bargaining and excessive demands provoked George Jessel to spurn the offer to reprise his Broadway role as Jack Robin—but can anyone besides Al Jolson be imagined as starring in The Jazz Singer? For large sections of this book, while Thomson covers gangster pictures, Busby Berkeley musicals, and forlorn tales of vulnerable women requiring toughness to survive, the brothers disappear entirely from the text. When they (mostly Jack) happen to reemerge, the episodes do not inspire confidence that the art was appreciated or understood. (None of the brothers graduated from high school, so they might be given some slack.) Although Jack Warner had sold the controlling interest in the studio to Seven Arts Productions in 1966, pocketing $32 million for himself, he wanted to have a hand in Bonnie and Clyde. Producer Warren Beatty showed him the film. But Warner apparently found the change in tone from jaunty comedy to bloody violence baffling. In a famous exchange...