Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio

Film critic and historian Thomson (Television: A Biography) returns with a masterful look at one of early Hollywood’s preeminent families and the studio they built on their name. This story of Sam, Albert, Harry, and Jack Warner is the latest in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, and in it Thomson is just as at home writing biography as he is chronicling the institutional history of the Warner Bros. studio. He does an admirable job of using the studio’s films to examine the family’s internal dynamics, early in the text setting up a particularly trenchant comparison of the Warner siblings’ rivalries—which culminated in Jack seizing control of the company from his brothers, and possibly triggering Harry’s fatal heart attack—to that of Aaron and Cal in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Other characters beyond the Warners themselves float in and out of the text, the meatiest cameos going to two of the studio’s most famous contract players, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, both of whom fought the studio’s control tooth and nail. Thomson has an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, demonstrated here by the familiarity with which he relates his subject. Anything new from Thomson is worth taking notice of, and this book is no exception. (Aug.)