The dream factory
Another year, another David Thomson book. This time, it’s “Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio.” At this point in the film historian’s long career, one reads more for his quirky opinions than for the films themselves — tricky ground for any writer to walk on.
More than anything, “Warner Bros” allows the reader to bask in the glory of the hardnosed movie studio that, in the words of Andrew Sarris, “walked mostly on the shady side of the street.” It aims to remind us what made Warners great — and, in its touching melancholia, why that greatness will never come back.
“Warner Bros” is released as part of Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series. (Earlier this year, it published film critic Molly Haskell’s stellar analysis of Steven Spielberg’s career.) Thomson is well aware of his strange assignment in writing about the brothers Warner in this context — especially Jack, the de facto head of Warners for most of its 40-year reign, whom Thomson bluntly calls “maybe the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series.”
But his book makes the convincing case for why, in his words, “this subject is more important than respectability.” Some of the best popular artists (think Charlie Chaplin, Josef von Sternberg or Alfred Hitchcock) were notorious megalomaniacs, men of ill repute. Yet their art lasts. Thomson makes you see why Warners deserves to be at the top of the pile.
Maybe it’s exactly because Thomson spends less time on the brothers’ biographical personalities that his book works as an investigation into the American cultural psyche. It’s crucial, for instance, that the Warners were Polish Jewish working-class emigres whose films “represented all immigrants.” They were, as Thomson puts it, “storytellers who dramatized the vitality of instability and transformation. They were the actors who played the role of strangers in the land.”
The resolve of the marginalized — surviving, even when the odds are set overwhelmingly against them — is what goes into the working-class zip of early Warners, like the Busby Berkeley musicals or “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang” (1932). Over time, these ethnic points of pride are then absorbed into the cultural bloodstream — there and not there.
Thomson is best in the early parts of the book, when he takes a look at how the Jewish and folk values the Warners stood for manifested themselves in their socially conscious films. (Lest we forget, many of our great American filmmakers came from elsewhere — Italian Frank Capra, English Charlie Chaplin, Irish John Ford, German Ernst Lubitsch, Polish Jewish Billy Wilder.)
Temperamentally, Warners was the most politically radical of all the major studios. Their reputation as “the most leftist studio outside the Soviet Union” is cemented in films that Thomson highlights, like William Wellman’s feverish 1933 howls of pain “Heroes for Sale” and “Wild Boys of the Road.” They could cast tender, soft actors like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson as Chinese gangsters, dance directors, journalists, coldhearted killers and Nick Bottom. (Audiences both love and are repulsed by Cagney’s chipmunky untrustworthiness in Wellman’s “The Public Enemy” of 1931.)
One could also add Warners’ treatment of blackness in films like “The Petrified Forest” (1936) and “Footlight Parade” (1933), in which Cagney’s character literally invents film whitewashing while stopped on a Harlem street corner. Ditto the horrifying consequences of white Southern women’s privilege in the 1942 Bette Davis potboiler “In This Our Life,” directed by John Huston on the heels of “The Maltese Falcon.” (Though “In This Our Life” isn’t mentioned by Thomson, it it is pure Warners, wacky yet aware. In a drunken hit-andrun, Davis kills a girl and injures her mother, then blames the death on the town’s only black law student, who is arrested without question.)
Warners, Thomson tells us, was all about the now. It built immortal pop icons with bounce and pull. Those who got their start at Warners (Humphrey Bogart, Cagney, Olivia de Havilland) were brazen figures whom people consciously emulated. To learn more about “being human,” we studied and scrutinized their every movement. (Remember Jean-Paul Belmondo in JeanLuc Godard’s “Breathless” aping Bogart’s thumb-lip trace). Warners guided Americans’ moral values, sure — but more so their private pleasures, their private dreams out of an erotic Busby Berkeley showpiece or a fast and choppy car chase. God, how Warners loved middle-of-the-night car chases.
Thomson is best when he waxes lyrical on movies he unapologetically loves: “Chain Gang,” “Heroes for Sale” (1933), “The Letter” (1940), “To Have and Have Not” (1944), “The Big Sleep” (1946). As usual, some of his observations smack of brutal subjectivity but are grounded in uncomfortable truths. His assessment on “Casablanca” (1942) is withering: “The movie was a fantasy cobbled together that happened to work.” As harsh as that sounds, Thomson has a point when he writes that every new year, “‘Casablanca’ endures and becomes a passive, fraudulent version of what happened in the war.” We respect war history, but we love pop corruptions of war (“The African Queen,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Dunkirk”) even more.
“Remember My Forgotten Movie” could be this wistful book’s subtitle. In a section on the backstage Busby Berkeley musical “Gold Diggers of 1933,” Thomson is troubled by Joan Blondell singing the closing number “Remember My Forgotten Man”: “Seen today, she reminds us how far memory, or history, may be a lost cause.”
The best scenes from Warners films are shards we treasure in our frustratingly imperfect minds. Everyone who loves “Gold Diggers” is taken by moments like Berkeley’s finale, where “sometimes the whole of life could be expressed in a few moments from one routine picture.” It’s what Manny Farber called “the unheralded ripple of physical experience.” Thomson’s book testifies to that obsessive pursuit — like Ethan Edwards pursuing Debbie in “The Searchers” (1956), another Warners picture — of trying to pin down a beautiful past that one knows is gone. But never dead.