Warner bros, p.14
Warner Bros, page 14
There were also people at the studio who did the actual work, like Robert Lord and William Wellman, like Joan Blondell and Richard Barthelmess, who wanted to believe in their material. Barthelmess had been a big star in the silent era, a classical hero who helped found Inspiration Pictures, and he became a very good actor—you can see that in Heroes for Sale and Only Angels Have Wings. But he lost his status and at the age of forty-six he gave up acting to enter the naval reserve. He faded away.
Or is that just the film fan slipping into the scenario of legend? It is fascinating to trace the history of social and political responsibility at Warners, in the era that went from Depression to war. In many respects, this is an honorable story that goes above and beyond the record of other studios. But Warners could also be mean-spirited, hypocritical, and eager to make a buck on patriotism. For Jack Warner himself, the war was an opportunity to become an honorary colonel and wear a uniform at the studio.
Warners made plenty of froth and nonsense in the thirties, like anyone else. It indulged in the costume romance of Anthony Adverse and Jezebel; it did all the Torchy Blane B pictures with Glenda Farrell as the spunky reporter; it played the gangster picture through the decade for fantasy violence and macho posturing. But there was often an undertone in those films that said, look, this is what becomes of poor people in our cities.
And Warners made Black Legion (1937). This started as a story by Robert Lord, who would also produce the picture, though the script was credited to Abem Finkel and William Wister Haines. It was prompted by a real outrage in Detroit when a WPA administrator was kidnapped and murdered by a fascist, racist organization claiming to be vigilantes. Lord’s story offered Frank Taylor, as an ordinary, none-too-intelligent factory worker who is passed over for promotion in favor of “a foreigner,” a Pole. In resentment, he joins the Black Legion (a Ku Klux Klan outfit in black robes). He becomes a racist activist in a story that exposes the Legion and ends in Taylor informing on others as he goes off to prison. The role of Taylor was taken by Humphrey Bogart, who had just had a breakthrough playing the vicious gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936). At that time, Bogart was steadily cast as a villain, and there was a grim side to his screen personality well suited to Taylor, a guy without redeeming features. As directed by Archie Mayo, Black Legion is an earnest, unrelenting picture, more valuable for its admission about certain realities in America than as drama, or entertainment. Lord was nominated for his story and the film was acclaimed by the National Board of Review, but it did not do well at the box office. It may not have helped that Warners used this selling line: “There’s no Paul Muni in Black Legion, but there’s Humphrey Bogart.”3
The following year Jack Warner took a special interest in They Won’t Forget, written by Robert Rossen and Aben Kandel, directed and produced by Mervyn LeRoy. In an unnamed southern town, a teacher is accused of killing a pretty female student (the debut of Lana Turner, aged sixteen). A trial follows, led by a flamboyant and conniving district attorney (played by Claude Rains). The teacher is convicted (wrongly), but the state governor commutes the death sentence, whereupon the teacher is dragged out of jail by a mob and lynched. This was based on a real case (the Leo Frank–Mary Phagan story from 1913), though the film is a freewheeling melodrama. But once again, the awareness of real life in America comes through, and nothing other than the essential movie audience is being indicted. We can always tell ourselves that the real target of the lesson is “other people,” and no one knows how to measure the reforming effect of such works. But in many respects, large and small, Hollywood could guide the way people were thinking, and what they were noticing about themselves.
In the late thirties, Warners began to make a number of films that were not ostensibly about the developing crisis in Europe, but which deserve to be interpreted in that light. So it’s intriguing to wonder, were they brave, or business as usual?
Paul Muni was regarded as a “great actor,” and he was under contract at Warners.4 His deal allowed him to veto pictures that didn’t impress him, without incurring suspensions or penalties. As a consequence, Muni was inclined to prolong his own deliberations and doubts in a way that irritated Jack Warner. More than that, Muni liked to have his wife give comments on the rushes on his own pictures. But uneasiness over Muni had been averted when he was cast in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), a serious if not solemn celebratory biopic, directed by William Dieterle and produced by Henry Blanke, another of the good supervisors at Warners. The nobility of Pasteur, and the value of his work, could not be questioned. Muni took the role carefully and slowly, and he won the acting Oscar for it.
The studio drew confidence from this and launched into The Life of Emile Zola (1937), directed and produced by the same team. This time, the movie won the Oscar for Best Picture—the first time Warners had had such a victory. The picture had not taken great pains over historical accuracy. Hal Wallis had urged the makeup department to let Muni look like Muni, and not Zola—for no one knew or cared what Emile looked like. As it was made, the film was a Muni vehicle, and its success helped confirm the actor’s own opinion of how conscientious and sincere he was. In fact, it drags now and seems burdened with an excessively pious respect for History and its Great Men.
The treatment of Zola’s life didn’t spend too much time on his literary process. Instead, it fixed on the Dreyfus case, with which Zola was surely identified—he wrote the “J’Accuse” letter against the antisemitic conspiracy that had victimized Captain Alfred Dreyfus (well played by Joseph Schildkraut, who won the Supporting Actor Oscar). The feeling has grown over the decades that the picture was a tacit attack on Hitler and Nazism. But contemporary reviews did not seem to notice that. The New York Times said it was “rich, dignified, honest and strong,” which is not exactly the language of excitement or urgency.5 Nor did Warners blur or distract from the esteem in which the film was held—and esteem is seldom close to troublemaking.
But so much history is established in hindsight. Writing long after the war, Jack Warner related that in the mid-thirties he and his wife had been in Europe and had learned that Warners’ representative in Berlin, “Joe Kauffman,” had been murdered by Nazis in Berlin. “Like many another outnumbered Jew,” wrote Jack, “he was trapped in an alley. They hit him with fists and clubs, and kicked the life out of him with their boots, and left him lying there.”6
It sounds a grisly scene, such as Jack might have put in one of his own pictures. But in fact, as historian Ben Urwand has established, “Joe” was actually “Phil.” He was attacked, in 1934, but he survived and left Germany to live in Sweden. Yet Warner made the claim that this murder had prompted him to close down the company office in Berlin.7 In truth that action had been taken by the German government, in 1934, when it decided that Warner Bros was unsympathetic and a likely source of trouble. Warners still did business in Germany: it was reluctant to lose any foreign market. Moreover, the German consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, regularly urged Hollywood studios to be considerate of German feelings. When The Life of Emile Zola was still in the script stage, Gyssling called the studio and was so insistent that Jack Warner himself cut any line in the film that referred to Dreyfus as a Jew.
Then critical ennobling overtook some of the Errol Flynn pictures. Born in Tasmania in 1909, Flynn had made an amateur film about the voyage of the Bounty. He had then gone to England and done a few things on stage, as well as a movie. Warners heard about him, offered him $125 a week, and shipped him to the United States. Against an early wish to use Robert Donat, the studio tried Flynn as Captain Blood (1935). It turned out the camera loved him: his deal rose to $750 a week. Then add a mustache?
What followed testified to the whole theory of stars. As Jack put it, “I knew we had grabbed the brass ring in our thousand-to-one shot spin with Flynn. When you see a meteor stab in the sky, or a bomb explode, or a fire sweep across a dry hillside, the picture is vivid and remains alive in your mind. So it was with Errol Flynn.”8 A few years later, Jack was ready to retire that meteor because Flynn was so often drunk on set, and in the habit of alienating his best directors. Hal Wallis decided that Flynn had little interest in filmmaking and often forgot his lines.
For a while, however, the actor was handsome, well spoken, breezy, athletic, fine-tuned to romance, and simply likable. In considering Flynn, one realizes how many Warners actors had an edge of darkness, a brooding quality that made their spirits seem higher. That is how Flynn and Olivia de Havilland were such a tonic together. Flynn was at his best in costume, preferably with long hair and a rapier in his hand. He needed unequivocal enemies—scoundrels of the seas, the French, the Spanish, the Turks, the Sioux, or even the Sheriff of Nottingham. By the early forties, he was at $7,000 a week.
He had a constancy on screen that women in his life despaired of. But that’s fair enough: in the 1930s, people wanted actors to save their dull souls. The Adventures of Robin Hood is a burnished adventure romance for boys and girls, graced with color, an exhilarating score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and a parade of supporting actors such as Warners commanded: Claude Rains as Prince John, Basil Rathbone as Sir Guy of Gisbourne, Eugene Pallette as Friar Tuck, Alan Hale as Little John, Una O’Connor as Marian’s maid. But is that film really a warning against tyranny and a plea for the socialist paradise of those merry men in the forest? I don’t think Jack Warner or his people were in the habit of seeing the allegory in their films. (If you did, Sherwood might have looked gay.) They trusted the immediate story, and putting it across so that the sophistication of 1938 technology prettified the legend of England in the fourteenth century. Sherwood was in Chico.
The Sea Hawk came later, in July 1940, when much of the world was at war already. This one is in black and white, directed by Michael Curtiz on a budget of $1.7 million—expensive for then and a measure of the film’s spectacle. Howard Koch wrote it with Seton Miller, and Koch would later be blacklisted for Communist associations. But is this story of an English privateer (a Drake-like hero) seeking to harass the assembling Armada really a fable about the threat of fascism? Are Don Álvarez (Claude Rains) and Philip of Spain (Montagu Love) meant to be Hitler figures? Or was the film preoccupied with trying to get Henry Daniell to fence without falling over in the duel scene, while wondering why Flynn was late on set day after day and often so fatigued? It did have Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth I delivering a speech intended to inspire the English audience (and clearly influenced by the 1937 British film Fire over England). It had Korngold again, and it seems like a picture made six thousand miles and many levels of consciousness away from the experience of war.
You can’t expect allegory or subtlety in a film to be called Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and that’s what Warners opened in May 1939.9 This venture was actively promoted by Harry Warner, and it reflects his earnestness. It was directed by Anatole Litvak, with a script by Milton Krims and John Wexley; and it was produced by the reliable Robert Lord. Krims was sent to New York in disguise to infiltrate Bund meetings. The project was then kept secret as Storm over America. Wexley loved the collaborative mood at Warners among writers and producers, though he said Hal Wallis was “a cold icicle, impenetrable,” while Jack Warner was often “a clown.”10
Confessions was based on the memoir of the former FBI officer who had been responsible for uncovering a Nazi plot in America. Warners moved on this project, ahead of any other studio, but it was at pains to be accurate with it. So the story is an espionage thriller in which a determined FBI man (Edward G. Robinson) uncovers an extensive plot that involves Nazis played by Francis Lederer, George Sanders, and several German actors who had recently fled to America.
The German government was offended. Members of the Bund tried to sue Warners and break up screenings. But the New York Times film critic Frank Nugent went to the heart of the matter: “Hitler won’t like it; neither will Goebbels. Frankly, we were not too favorably impressed either.”11 It’s not very good, which always tends to compromise courage and relevance. In 1940, the biopic tendency came back with Robinson in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, about the man who had found a cure for syphilis—though Warners chose Ehrlich more because he was German and Jewish than because of the malady he targeted.
Robinson then opened in The Sea Wolf in the spring of 1941, a parable of Nazi tyranny—if you were inclined to read it that way. Wolf Larson commands a ship by dint of cruel power and an intimidated crew. The story came from Jack London, for a sea adventure staged in the studio tank, and a film noir with a jaundiced view of male togetherness. Robinson’s Larson is unsure whether he loathes mankind or himself the more. There are expert supporting performances from John Garfield, Alexander Knox, Barry Fitzgerald, and Gene Raymond, and Ida Lupino does one of her nasty waifs, with mist and sea salt hanging on her lips. Who directed it? Michael Curtiz—again—and he hardly puts a foot wrong. But the mix of gloomy adventure and political undertones is something no other studio would have attempted.
Warners’ official war films would talk about courage, but they don’t always achieve the right level of fearful experience. Sergeant York was a very big picture for Warners, with Gary Cooper playing Alvin York, the hero from the Great War (done with York’s blessing). It opened in September 1941 and earned $16 million on a budget of $1.4 million. As a Howard Hawks film, it ought to be sharp and wry, but it’s so much more ponderous and complacent than To Have and Have Not, which only flirts with combat and war—but flirtation was Hawks’s abiding subject.
There were people at Warners who had an understanding of what was going on in Europe in the late thirties, and what the war was about. They more or less shared hopes for social reform and liberal enlightenment, and they were able to push some of that into their pictures. In time, that effort would be foolishly rebuked for being pro-Communist, no matter that during the war the Soviet Union had been an official ally.
In that brief season, the government prevailed upon Warners to make a film called Mission to Moscow, about the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies. (The company had prospered with ambassadors in the past.) Jack said FDR pressured him personally to do this picture. Michael Curtiz directed and Howard Koch wrote it—against his instinct that it was going to be dull. The film uses a lot of Soviet newsreel; it presents Stalin as an admirable character; but it has little story, and it asks Walter Huston, as Davies, to move through various tableaux as if they were back projections. But Davies’s book had been a best-seller, and the film did well enough because for that moment Americans wanted to think well of their Soviet brothers. It opened in May 1943, and took more than two hours to express its uncertain sense of occasion. The film protests its own truthfulness, but the critic Manny Farber was alert to the problem: “We didn’t deserve that Mr. Davies should have met the Warner Brothers.”12
By 1947, this climate had changed. Jack Warner testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He said Mission to Moscow had been made in a bad moment, not for posterity—as if any picture had any other impulse. He said he was aghast at the menace of reds in the picture business, and was pleased to name them. But in his cross-examination by Robert Stripling, he gave away other truths. Stripling was eager to get Jack to admit that Mission to Moscow was a pack of lies and half-truths designed as propaganda. This was a fair estimate of the picture, but Jack was shy about admitting that Warners might have been taken advantage of and made a boring movie. So Stripling put it to him, “Well, do you suppose that your picture influenced the people who saw it in this country, the millions of people who saw it in this country?”13 In other words, what did movies actually do to people?
Jack considered a moment and said what was expected of any mogul in the picture business, then or now: “In my opinion, I can’t see how it would influence anyone. We were in war and when you are in a fight you don’t ask who the fellow is who is helping you.”14
This wisdom did not sink in too far. Howard Koch and many others were victimized for having shared in socialist sentiments. Warners was always better at seeing the place for courage in domestic situations, and as a female characteristic.
So I’d like to urge an unlikely candidate in this chapter, The Hard Way, also made for 1943. It’s the story of two sisters, played by Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie, in which the older one uses the younger one not just to make a living but to have an emotional life for herself. Directed by Vincent Sherman, produced by Jerry Wald, it was written by two distinguished writers—Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel. It took bravery for Ida Lupino to play an unpleasant, manipulative woman, often without makeup. She was as scared as any beautiful actress fearful of risking her gold. But it turned out the best film she ever made and one of the finest Warner pictures about bitter truths in ordinary life.15
Lasting value was more likely there than in anything as epic or boastful as Objective, Burma! (1945), a view of Errol Flynn winning that jungle war, so blind to British and Australian efforts that the film had to be withdrawn in Britain for a year. The film also had this bloodthirsty recommendation: “The Japanese should be wiped off the face of the earth.”16
Since I started this chapter with Robert Lord, let me close by updating his story. A graduate of Harvard, he had been a stalwart at the studio throughout the thirties, urging radical ideas into many stories. Then he went off to war for nearly four years. When he was discharged he wrote to Jack Warner, in August 1945, and offered himself as production head at the studio—the post that his supporter Hal Wallis had relinquished a year before.
Lord wrote, “I think that I can be instrumental in helping to produce some pictures of high quality and strong box-office appeal. I think I can administer the studio quietly, politely, efficiently and without attempts to become a God, as several of your previous Executive Producers have attempted.”17 He proposed himself on a five-year contract at $250,000 a year, which was not unreasonable, just as the tone of his letter was calm enough to promise a useful appointment.
