Book Review: Warner Bros

Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio

by David Thomson

Yale University Press, 2017

“What do we expect of a Jewish life?” asks film historian David Thomson at the beginning of his new book, the latest entry in the Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” series. It's the kind of basic-yet-disruptive question Thomson has been asking throughout his entire career as a film critic and historian, and it's especially pointed in the case of his latest subjects, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner and the movie studio they shaped into one of the defining factors in the way 20th century America thought about itself. The brothers so thoroughly sank themselves into the studio that Thomson's slim book works as a biography of them and it, and of all the things – some wobbly, some wonderful – that Thomson claims the two represent. “In Warner Bros,” he writes, “we face an attempt – organic but crazy, yearning yet hardly planned – by early-twentieth-century Jews to be American.”

As readers might expect from the author of that mammoth bazaar of cantankerous erudition, The Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is eager in these pages to get down to cases. Warner Bros gave movie-going audiences such classics as The Jazz Singer, East of Eden, and Casablanca and such stars as Jimmy Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, and Bugs Bunny, and in nearly a century of operation, the studio and its stars and players have generated a lavish mythology of tall tales, poolside gossip, backstage machinations, and well-documented enormities. Thomson knows every last detail of this mythology, and in Warner Bros he's as eager to relate it as he is to deflate it, as in the story of how Jazz Singer star Al Jolson was said to have met his future wife Ruby Keeler:

Two days after The Singing Fool opened, on September 21, 1928, Jolson married Ruby Keeler. She was still only eighteen, from Nova Scotia, though she had been a spectacular tap dancer at Tex Guinan's clubs since her early teens. He was forty-two (he said; others said plus four), married and divorced twice already. Jolson saw Keeler playing on stage in Show Girl and – apparently – joined in with her, singing from his seat (who needed scriptwriters?). The audience was dazzled, and Al was co-opted into the show. No, I don't believe it, either.

And as always when reading Thomson, there's the thrill of being reminded that he is still, somehow, an unabashed true believer in the magic of movies. He can turn from dispassionately relating cutthroat business deals that would frighten the worst Wall Street psychopath to talking about the wonder of the movies those deals created, and the tone of knowing appreciation simply adapts to the new terrain. Thomson writes beautifully, for instance, about Casablanca, and then moves on smoothly to 1946's The Big Sleep:

It's not so much that The Big Sleep is an exceptional picture. It's rather more that an ecstatic state of pure and daft movie has been achieved , and it stretches out like a desert or an ocean. In its entire history Hollywood got to this prospect only a very few times – a dozen seems generous – and two of those films were made, back to back, at Warner Brothers.

Ultimately, Thomson's Warner Bros ends up being the story not of a studio or a group of immigrant brothers but of one man, one smart, eruptive, thoroughly horrible man – Jack Warner, who spent the whole length of his entire career betraying virtually everybody who came into any degree of trusting contact with him. His writers, his directors, his shareholders, his stars, even his own brothers – plenty of people got rich and famous from knowing Jack Warner, but nobody, not one single person in a career of nearly 50 years, was better for having known him. This is the hard, black kernel at the heart of Thomson's book, and you can tell it occasionally makes him nervous by the unconvincing speed with which he sometimes reaches for platitudes:

I cannot tell you Jack was a hero, or that many who knew him made that claim on his behalf. But being less than Einstein, Proust,or even Babra Streisand didn't stop Jack and Warner Bros from having an impact on our culture and dreams, on us, that is alarming because it's enormous. Warner Bros was one of the enterprises that helped us see there might be an American dream out there, a mix of patriotism and publicity, and it was open to Poles, Hispanics, and British and Chinese, whomever, as much as to the few Americans who had been here from the start. Even women might get it. That sense of a dream and immigrants – enormous, impersonal, climatic forces – is not easily worked out because we're still attached to the hope that fine and talented people shape our history. Or very bad people?

Any publisher that embarks on a series like “Jewish Lives,” where books are independently commissioned rather than written in-house, is naturally taking a risk that some entries in the series will be weaker than others. The reverse is also true, thankfully: the combination of subject and author can, with luck, produce a gem. This is true in every series like this one – the old “Penguin Lives” series had Larry McMurtry's book on Crazy Horse, for example, or Elizabeth Hardwick's on Herman Melville – and it's true with “Jewish Lives” as well, where standout volumes like Saul Friedländer's on Kafka, David Wolpe's on King David, and Francine Prose's on Peggy Guggenheim must now make room for another. Like those other little masterpieces, David Thomson's Warner Bros is compacted of wisdom and woolgathering, a perfect overview of its subject because it somehow manages to leave out nothing important while also leaving the reader wanting to everything.