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Warner Bros charts the rise of an unpromising film studio from its shaky beginnings in the early twentieth century through its ascent to the pinnacle of Hollywood influence and popularity. The Warner Brothers--Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack--arrived in America as unschooled Jewish immigrants, yet they founded a studio that became the smartest, toughest, and most radical in all of Hollywood. David Thomson provides fascinating and original interpretations of Warner Brothers pictures from the pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer through black-and-white musicals, gangster movies, and such dramatic romances as Casablanca , East of Eden , and Bonnie and Clyde . He recounts the storied exploits of the studio's larger-than-life stars, among them Al Jolson, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Doris Day, and Bugs Bunny. The Warner brothers' cultural impact was so profound, Thomson writes, that their studio became "one of the enterprises that helped us see there might be an American dream out there." About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award. Warner Bros : The Making of an American Movie Studio. Warner Bros charts the rise of an unpromising film studio from its shaky beginnings in the early twentieth century through its ascent to the pinnacle of Hollywood influence and popularity. The Warner Brothers--Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack--arrived in America as unschooled Jewish immigrants, yet they founded a studio that became the smartest, toughest, and most radical in all of Hollywood. David Thomson provides fascinating and original interpretations of Warner Brothers pictures from the pioneering talkie The Jazz Singer through black-and-white musicals, gangster movies, and such dramatic romances as Casablanca , East of Eden , and Bonnie and Clyde . He recounts the storied exploits of the studio's larger-than-life stars, among them Al Jolson, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Doris Day, and Bugs Bunny. The Warner brothers' cultural impact was so profound, Thomson writes, that their studio became "one of the enterprises that helped us see there might be an American dream out there." David Thomson’s ‘Warner Bros,’ a History of the Studio and the Family. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Aug. 31, 2017. Warner Bros The Making of an American Movie Studio By David Thomson Illustrated. 220 pp. Yale University Press. $25. To whom do we owe “Casablanca”? The much beloved Oscar winner of 1942 has long posed a problem for strict auteurists, for whom the director Michael Curtiz is too indistinguishable from the next guy to cut it as a full-fledged auteur; Andrew Sarris put him in the “Lightly Likable” category. The writing of the movie splits somewhere between four and forty, while the cast resembled a roll call for the League of Nations, with a Swede (Ingrid Bergman), an American (Humphrey Bogart) and two Englishmen (Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet) rubbing shoulders with a Hungarian (Peter Lorre), an Austrian (Paul Henreid) and a German (Conrad Veidt). The guy who played the croupier was a Jew who had fled Nazi-occupied France, the barman a Russian who had left Russia after the revolution, while the actor who played the headwaiter, S. Z. Sakall — nicknamed Cuddles — was a Hungarian whose three sisters died in the concentration camps. All of which was perfect for “Casablanca” — that most poignant of serenades to love, exile and international friendship. “A big element in the charm of ‘Casablanca,’” David Thomson writes in his new history of Warner Brothers, the studio that rushed the film into production to make the most of the war effort, “is that underlying air of comradeship, and of an international cast coming together at a moment when everyone was appreciating how the war was turning strangers into allies.” A little luck? Cunning? In Thomson’s view, the film could have come to fruition only at Warner Brothers, a studio run by a family of Jewish émigrés, headed by the irresistible Jack Warner, “not just a clown, a singer and a show-off, but a modern showman who was going to end up telling the family story and smiling at America.” Under his stewardship, the studio gave the country gangsters in great suits, dames, gunfire, wisecracks and above all a tone — “wry, fond of sentiment yet hard-boiled, as if to say we’re Americans, we can take it and dish it out” — that was a direct distillation of the restless, propulsive energies that had brought the Warners to America in the first place. This is a fascinating idea — that the creative forces behind large portions of classical Hollywood might be not the writers or the directors but those misunderstood vulgarians, the studio heads themselves — but it is not new to Thomson. “Warner Bros” owes a debt to Neal Gabler’s 1988 book, “An Empire of Their Own,” one of the great works of film scholarship in the last 30 years, which fleshed out a remarkable portrait of Hollywood as the invention of second-generation Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, who painted an idealized, super-patriotic portrait of the America they were otherwise excluded from. The brash energy of Warner Brothers pictures, the extravagant unreality of MGM’s, the exotic shimmer of Paramount’s, the screwball fizz of Columbia’s — all were identifiable enough to reveal the moguls as the true creative arbiters. Call it Auteur Theory 2.0, with Montecristo cigars and streams of colorful obscenity. The question hovering over Thomson’s book is thus: Does the thesis gain strength for being narrower in focus? Thomson’s book is part of Yale’s excellent Jewish Lives series, which has Gabler himself on Barbra Streisand and Molly Haskell on Steven Spielberg. Thomson is a British critic whose powers of thumbnail portraiture and plush, velveteen critical judgment — his “Biographical Dictionary of Film” is a must for film fans — are on vivid display as he brings the brothers to life. Three of them are born in a small village 50 miles north of Warsaw, when Poland is part of the Russian empire, to a shoemaker father who sails from Hamburg to Liverpool to Baltimore, resting for a time in Ontario, where Jack is born Jacob. “How do you tell a child his name has changed without setting free a kind of actor?” asks Thomson, who writes movie history as if it were a kind of movie, training the camera on two of the brothers, Harry and Jack, as if scripting “East of Eden” or “The Searchers” or any other of the studio’s films about sibling rivalry. Harry is the elder, more conscientious bean counter, conscious of the old country, honest and devout, the self-appointed guardian of family morals. Jack is the showman, shameless and volatile, fired up on “patriotism and publicity,” with an eye for the women. “People marveled at his bright teeth, and his habit of telephoning while sitting on the john.” Guess which one Thomson prefers. In his telling, Jack emerges as one of those boisterous devils whose personalities have, for better or worse, helped shape the way we see America. “Don’t rule this out as simple heresy, but America might have been happier without the pursuit of happiness.” That is Thomson’s signature note: a mixture of excitement and rue wrapped up in a sweeping paradox that leapfrogs into the gnomic-philosophical realm. Chop it up into lines of dialogue and it’s exactly the kind of sardonic wisecrack you might have found in the mouth of Bette Davis in any of the pictures she shot for Warner Brothers — “Jezebel,” “Dark Victory,” “Now, Voyager” — or Bogart in his films for the studio: “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca,” “The Big Sleep .” How much credit for these films lies with Jack Warner is unquantifiable; at times the implicit thesis of the book — interpreting the entirety of a studio’s output as the creative oeuvre of its owner — courts tendentiousness. There are large sections in which the brothers are either absent or stitched in as an afterthought. The climax of “White Heat” has word of Ma’s death relayed down a chain of prisoners in a mess hall until it reaches James Cagney. Jack wanted it “in a chapel with just a few extras.” The director, Raoul Walsh, argued for the studio’s machine shop as the setting and got it. “It may be that that pressure stimulated everyone in one of the essential moments in Warners history.” Hmm. It may. Or it may just have been a colossal pain in the ass. I’m not sure the auteur tag is really sticking if a film achieves greatness by the skill with which it ignores your interference. Thomson may be too good a movie critic to be more than an adequate historian. He bubbles with ideas and writes as if drunk on movies, strongest when discarding chronology to embark on some digressive riff — a comparison of the “brazen amorality” of the gangster films “Little Caesar” and “The Public Enemy” to the sense of abandon in the earliest rock ’n’ roll, or a mischievous comparison of Busby Berkeley musicals to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” He is less willing to submit his plumed brilliance to the cause of scholarly rigor. “To pretend to history,” he writes at the top of a paragraph summarizing the studio’s early days, which may come as a shock to those readers who pick the book up in the Film History section, but fair warning for those new to Thomson’s magic-carpet rides: Sit back, hold on and enjoy the view. For those wanting a more thorough unpacking of the Warners’ complex relationship with their Jewish heritage, Gabler’s is the more impressive achievement. But if you want to toast a scoundrel — “maybe the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series,” in Thomson’s estimation — this book’s portrait of Jack Warner is as vividly inked as one of the studio’s cartoons: Yosemite Sam meets the Tasmanian Devil. “Many of his victories feel like defeats, too, because of his suspect character,” Thomson writes, approvingly, identifying the same quixotic mix that animated his portraits of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles. These modern-day Hollywood Icaruses, conflagrating in their own greatness, are very dear to him, and for good reason, for their stories are distinctly American. By the light of their rise and fall can be traced the outlines of the country itself, like night terrain glimpsed via flares. Book review: Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio by David Thomson. The poisonous sibling rivalry that drove one of America’s most dynamic studios. I n 1966, shortly after Jack Warner finally sold his shares in Warner Bros, the film studio that he and his three brothers launched to Hollywood glory in 1923, Warren Beatty went to the mogul’s mansion to show him Bonnie and Clyde, the studio’s latest production. The 74-year-old was not impressed, disappearing to the bathroom during the first reel and irritably asking the film’s star what it was all about. “It’s an hommage to Warner’s gangster films,” replied Beatty, invoking Little Caesar or The Public Enemy, the studio’s genre-defining 1930s hits. “What the hell is an hommage ?” snapped Jack. Sponsored. As film critic and historian David Thomson argues in this crackling instalment of Yale University’s Jewish Lives series, neither the Warner Bros studio nor the siblings,