Is there such a thing as “Warner Bros. DNA”? Clint Eastwood, one of the studio’s most loyal and prolific filmmakers, says so, in his foreword to this oversized and bountifully-illustrated coffee-table book, which casts a sweeping gaze over Warner Bros. productions going back to its Rin-Tin-Tin days and its breakthrough with “The Jazz Singer” (1927). The book is the companion to a PBS series airing Sept. 23-25.
The Warner Bros. DNA is scrappy, working-class, rough-edged, socially-concerned, its most representative stars being Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. Unlike, say, Paramount movies, which had a Park Avenue drawing-room feel, or MGM’s epics and musicals, the classic Warners productions had dirt under their fingernails, and you can draw a line, as Schickel and Perry do, from “Little Ceasar” to “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang” to “Casablanca” to “Mildred Pierce” to “Rebel Without a Cause” to “Cool Hand Luke” to “Bonnie and Clyde” to “Dog Day Afternoon” to “GoodFellas.” Even Hitchcock, when he was working for Warners, made films “about plain, ordinary folks, not the wealthy and glamorous people Hitch generally portrayed.”
In the 1970s, though, the Warner brand became fuzzier. Over a 30-year period, the two kinds of pictures that have taken over Warner Bros’ imagination are action spectaculars engineered to spawn sequels (“The Matrix,” Harry Potter, Batman and Superman franchises) and dramas engineered to spawn Oscars. Eastwood and George Clooney, another Warners loyalist since he shot “ER” on the Burbank lot, think they’re flying the Warners flag, but their socially conscious films instead mirror the changes in the Democratic party.
When the party starred lunchpail-toting union members, the studio made films about dirty-faced desperadoes. Now Warners gives top billing to lawyers having pangs of conscience (“Michael Clayton”), impoverished Africans being victimized by American trade (“Blood Diamond”), and Hirohito’s soldiers (“Letters from Iwo Jima”). The Warner Bros story, today, is a Tale of Two Clooneys – breezy moneymakers like “Ocean’s 11” and esoteric films for white collar elites like “Syriana.” Schickel and Perry do not quite grasp this, trumpeting these films as “maintaining a certain grittiness, a certain lack of easy sentiment,” which may be true in comparison to insipid Disney fare, but is not quite the point. In the iron triangle of art-house audiences, socially aware filmmakers and critics, there is no easier, more predictable sentiment than the idea that American institutions are fundamentally corrupt. In a way, Warners is Disney for NPR listeners.
The book is a set of thoughtful essays on each decade, broken up with extended captions that accompany hundreds of publicity stills, posters (many from overseas markets) and images of filmmakers at work. Thanks to poor editing, the captions, which recap storylines or relate amusing on-set anecdotes, often repeat and occasionally even contradict the essays, particularly when the authors are trying to make a half-hearted political point. For instance, Howard Koch, screenwriter of the infamous pro-Soviet propaganda piece “Mission to Moscow” – which was “covertly urged by Roosevelt himself” to prop up American support for the WWII alliance of necessity with Stalin – is seen as unfairly tarnished by the film on one page (Koch “was denounced as a fellow traveler and hung out to dry”) but bluntly dispatched as “a fellow traveler” (that is, communist sympathizer) on another. So which is it? (Answer: the latter.)
At their best, Schickel and Perry rewrite some of the gospels of film history. In Schickel’s ’70s essay, he writes that “Dirty Harry” became (quote marks his) ” ‘controversial,’ largely on the strength of a review by Pauline Kael, the influential New Yorker reviewer, who called it an example of ‘fascist medievalism.’ She insisted that the motivelessly malign Scorpio, the serial killer Harry pursues, ought to have been given more explicable, sociological motives for his depredations . . . not perhaps noticing that that sort of thing had gone out with ‘White Heat’ in 1949. She also found that his crimes had been ‘sexualized’ (which they rather obviously had not been).” Wicked stuff.
Even more surprisingly, and delightfully, Schickel muses about the relative importance of Marlon Brando and . . . Doris Day?
“In terms of popularity it was no contest. Doris Day was ten times listed by Quigley Publications among the most popular movie stars of the year in the fifties and sixties. Marlon Brando made the list only twice.” Moreover, “she sometimes participated in edgier Warner Bros. dramas (‘Young Man with a Horn,’ ‘Storm Warning’)” and some of her films had “a gentle feminist subtext.”
Schickel and Perry manage to squeeze in a still from “The Dark Knight,” which they obviously hadn’t seen yet, but had this book been delayed a bit the film might have led to an ironic coda. The highest-grossing picture in Warners history is a special effects-extravaganza, but in the finest tradition of its studio it is a gritty, socially aware story about an embattled loner oppressed by the system. And it makes a feverishly urgent case for the need to take extreme steps to fight terrorists. Here’s looking at you, Batman.
You Must Remember This
The Warner Bros. Story
by Richard Schickel and George Perry
Running Press