In Warner Bros, David Thomson—a widely known film critic with a long list of books chronicling the careers of such Hollywood stars as Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Orson Welles, and so many others to his credit—turns his sights on the four brothers Warner, née Wonsal, who hailed from a small backwater in Russian Poland. These four—particularly Jack, the youngest—played a pivotal role in the making of the business of movies and in making the movies one of America's most enduring cultural contributions to world civilization. This book, a recent addition to the ever expanding “Jewish Lives” series of Yale University Press, links the history of these four siblings—Moses, who in America became Harry; Aaron, transformed into Albert; Szmuel, then renamed Sam; and Jack, the only one born in America, who had originally been named Itzhak (or, according to Thomson, maybe Jacob)—with the interconnected world of American enterprise, the movies, and, for lack of a better term, the soul of America.
This story has been told many times and it stands out as a singular tale. The brothers Warner joined other Jewish immigrants in the trek to the United States, participating in a great migration from central and eastern Europe. They headed to a land that offered them robust economic possibilities. The move allowed them to dabble in a range of businesses and to use family and communal networks to take incremental steps from their humble working-class beginnings to relatively greater wealth.
Few made it as big as the Warner brothers did, but many, despite limited means upon arrival, inched up into the middle class in one generation. Others, like the subjects of this book, elbowed their way into great wealth and public prominence. Neither Thomson nor, in fact, any historian who has pondered this matter can accurately and fully account for the reasons why some catapulted to fame and riches while others did not, but the story of this generation of Jewish immigrants and their immediate progeny cannot be disassociated from the business world of American capitalism.
Their story also involves a journey from their uncomfortable start as cultural outsiders to their achievement of insider status. Those who, after trying out a variety of business ventures, decided that the surest path to economic success lay in the wide-open world of popular entertainment, the movies in particular, not only experienced mobility and captured public prominence, but also redefined American vernacular culture in the process. The movies they made became synonymous with twentieth-century America, as they projected images and sounds on to the screens of so many theaters around the nation, and indeed the world.
Thomson makes clear that the brothers Warner entered into this enterprise with no love of the arts, no aesthetic sensibilities, and no feelings about cinema as a revolutionary new way to create culture. They saw making movies as a good way to get on the road to riches, and over the course of their decades perfecting that path, in the powerful studio they created, they gave substance to the statement that “there is no business like show business.”
This intertwined narrative of business as America's lure to Jewish immigrants (and one that paid off handsomely for so many of them), the birth of the movies as big business, and the shaping of twentieth-century American life provides Thomson with the core theme in Warner Bros. By and large, this book has relatively little to say about the theme of the series, “Jewish Lives.” It takes an approach shared by some of the other volumes in the series, essentially maintaining that so long as the subject happens to be Jewish (or of Jewish background), it fits. What “Jewish” did or did not mean in the subject's life, or how the subject left her or his mark on Jewish history, matters less than the drama, importance, or impact of the individual.
A historian of the Jewish past might quibble with this as adequate to the task of studying Jewish lives and placing them in their historical contexts, but a historian of twentieth-century American culture could find no fault with it. The Warner brothers, for the most part untroubled by the legacy of their birth, provided the backdrop for much of went on in America in the twentieth century. Jack Warner, the most significant of the brothers, took charge of the studio. The films it made, from during the Depression era into the world of the late 1960s, simultaneously defined, and were defined by, Americans’ hopes, dreams, and anxieties. The movies became integral to the quotidian lives of Americans, across lines of race, ethnicity, geography, and class. Women, men, children, and teenagers found on a regular basis, in darkened theaters, moving images of war, romance, generational conflict, crime and punishment, violence, and love. Accompanied by sounds, spoken and musical, which by the late 1920s had become integrated into the pictures, the world of the Warner brothers provided Americans with both the American West and its iconic imagery and the American city, inhabited by the gangsters produced by its streets. Regardless of where Americans lived, and whatever their income levels, going to the movies entered their cultural repertoire along with—or maybe even surpassing in importance—going to church or going to school as something they did in staggering numbers.
Thomson convincingly argues for the Warner brothers as the outstanding figures who most decidedly shaped Hollywood and who made this business possible. Although he builds the book more around the actors who peopled the movies and the genres in which they acted, Thomson's emphasis on the Warner brothers as individuals who came from a particular place, who sought out the most attractive and feasible ways of making money, and who brilliantly sensed the moods and tastes of their essentially adopted country seems right for this book.
