The Warner Brothers by Chris Yogerst
Producer Hal Wallis rose from his seat to accept the Best Picture Oscar for Casablanca, but was beaten to the stage by his boss, Jack Warner. The mogul grabbed the spotlight and the statue for himself.
Among the four brothers who founded Warner Bros., Jack was the one who “liked to see his name in the papers,” according to Chris Yogerst’s new history, simply titled The Warner Brothers. “More self-centered” than his siblings, “Jack enjoyed being a celebrity. He was a performer at heart, but not a very good one.”
Jack’s older brother Harry is the hero of The Warner Brothers, “Unlike other studio heads, Harry was not a philanderer. He was the staunchest defender of his industry on national platforms throughout his career and had a way of promoting nonideological patriotism that can teach a great deal to readers in the twenty-first century.”
Albert Warner was the quiet, likeable brother. Sam was keen on advancing the technology of filmmaking. But Jack was the brother with his hands on the buttons that set the studio’s assembly line in motion. “Jack Warner was many things and his goofy public persona made it easy to underestimate him, but he was also a natural editor who loved the cutting room and had a spectacular feel for the pacing of a film.”
In balance, Jack’s accomplishments were positive, allowing Warner Bros. to be the studio where something like gritty realism could be staged in the 1930s, becoming a natural home for film noir in the ‘40s. Unlike other moguls, Jack wasn’t afraid to pull out of the lucrative German market once the Nazis took charge and was willing to address difficult subjects in the ‘30s such as union activism and white supremacist terror groups. Jack was instrumental in founding the Motion Picture Relief Fund to care for veterans of the movie industry. But during the McCarthy era hunt for Reds in Hollywood and the accompanying Blacklist of suspected Communists, Jack lost his nerve and spoke from both sides of his mouth.
Yogerst identifies Jack’s fear of a government investigation’s impact on his industry and proposes, with good reason, that Harry would have been a better spokesperson under the hot lights of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
Chris Yogerst is associate professor of communications in UW-Milwaukee’s Department of Arts and Humanities. The Warner Brothers is published by University Press of Kentucky.
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