Warner bros, p.3
Warner Bros, page 3
Because he had to be on loan from MGM, Veidt earned $5,000 a week, nearly twice Bogart’s salary. Such ironies ran through the supporting cast. Peter Lorre, born Laszlo Lowenstein in Hungary, has the modest role of Ugarte. He had become a star playing the murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, so the movie business took it for granted that he must always be a villain or a madman. In America, Lorre had played the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in eight B pictures in the space of three years—an escape, but a prison, too. He had been Joel Cairo (with Bogart, Greenstreet, and Mary Astor) in The Maltese Falcon. He was friendly with Bogart, but that meant he had to realize that he would never be a star and was usually cast as a disturbed person with wicked or craven designs.
There is a croupier at Rick’s Café Américain. It’s a small role, filled by Marcel Dalio, who had served Jean Renoir as one of the escaping prisoners in La Grande Illusion and then played the marquis in La Règle du Jeu. That is one of the great performances in French cinema, a superb creation of uneasy nobility, the master of the house but a kid with his elaborate toys, a guilty husband and avid womanizer. Marcel Dalio was an exceptional actor. But he was Jewish (born Israel Moshe Blauschild), and in 1940 he left France for America. He was welcomed by studios who may not have seen his Renoir films and could not see how he was fit to play lead roles. And so here he is a croupier who can magic his roulette wheel and turn up 22 when Rick gives him the nod. That nod is an insiders’ sentimental expression of understanding and loyalty between the two men, as beautiful but unspoken a friendship as that between Rick and Sam. In life, after Dalio had left France, the Germans posted close-up posters of him on Parisian streets saying, “This is what a Jew looks like.”
The good turn that Dalio’s croupier manages in the film is so that a pretty young woman can purchase liberty for herself and her husband, instead of having to sell herself for a night or two to Captain Renault. That actress was Joy Page (born Paige), and it seems that she got the sentimental part on her own. But her stepfather was Jack Warner, who wanted to do nothing to encourage or mislead her, so he made sure she was paid less than any other speaking-part actor in the film. And that Joy Page never made another film for Warners. You may think that’s because she was the child of Jack’s second wife from an earlier marriage. Not at all; Jack also did whatever he could to discourage his own son, Jack Jr., the kid who shouldn’t really have had that name if he was meant to be a regular Jewish son.
Elsewhere in Casablanca, you will find S. Z. Sakall, Jewish and born in Hungary. Sakall had worked in German cinema until 1933, when he chose to return to Hungary. By 1940, he thought it wise to move on to America. Wallis picked him to play the headwaiter at Rick’s, and he did a fine job. It led to another fifteen years’ work as a supporting player in Hollywood. He was known as “Cuddles.” But most of his immediate family, including three sisters, had died in concentration camps.
Do you remember the singer, Yvonne, who has had an affair with Rick? She was played by Madeleine Lebeau, who had fled from France in 1940 with Marcel Dalio. They had married in 1939. They managed to get to Lisbon and with forged papers (or letters of transit), they sailed to Chile and made their way north to Hollywood and Casablanca. It sounds like a romantic story—it sounds like Casablanca itself, where Yvonne leads the singing of La Marseillaise with shiny tears in her eyes—but the couple divorced before the film opened. Lebeau died only in May 2016, the last survivor from the picture.
Then there’s the barman at the café. His role had been cast. Leo Mostovoy was playing the part, until he struck observers as too earnest or lacking in a natural comedic sense. Curtiz and Wallis sought a strain of sardonic humor whenever possible. So Mostovoy was replaced with Leonid Kinskey, born in St. Petersburg in 1903 and compelled to leave his country because he was no supporter of the Revolution. He found small parts as an actor, but he got the barman role because he was one of the entourage Bogart liked to drink with.
So there was a ganglike air on the film, and Warner Brothers in the 1930s had made some of the best gang films ever done. No one involved on the picture could miss the unusual league of nations and refugees that had been enlisted. And whatever the uncertainty over the script, everyone could guess that Max Steiner (a Viennese Jew) would come in at the end with a score so adept at romance, suspense, and sheer swagger that the film would soar. Steiner was at Warners for thirty years, and he wrote music for 140 films. It was his stuff that played over the opening WB logo. He is vital to the atmosphere of the studio, whether we call the result slick shit or inspiring entertainment.
There was no mistaking Casablanca as a Warners production, but to what extent was it a Jewish film? That’s a question to bear in mind while understanding that Warners were anxious not to seem like a Jewish business. They wanted to be American, and hoped that role existed. So it was a film that addressed the justice and necessity of the war, and was pledged to the idea of America as a proper part of the Allied effort. But the Jewish experience of the war was not emphasized. There is a flashback to Rick and Ilsa in Paris that is fair enough, though not the best scene in the picture and not quite necessary. But there is no glimpse of Laszlo in a concentration camp. It’s more to the point, and closer to the theme of this book, that the film was liberal in its sentiments, brilliant and appealing in its screen decisiveness, wry, fond of sentiment yet hardboiled, as if to say we’re Americans, we can take it and dish it out, we’re the best, tough and soft at the same time. So much of that crazed package of attractive attitudes came from the movies and passed into the nervous system of the country.
I should add that I am not Jewish (or quite American). Some things ameliorate that and may serve as credentials (or letters of transit). When I was four, in London, my grannie showed me newspaper pictures of the relief of concentration camps, and tried to explain those images. I was filled with awe and terror, and I know that the Holocaust (which I could not grasp then) has been the most important cultural event in my life. It still is; it ensures that a child’s horror persists.
Some of us know what Sylvia Plath meant in her poem “Daddy,” when she said, “I think I may well be a Jew.”10 But here’s a dilemma: Sylvia Plath was a rage for a while in the years after she died. That was fifty-four years ago. It won’t be long before the last survivors of the concentration camps are gone, too. Then history takes its rest: the outrages of the Hundred Years’ War are merely notional now. What century was that? We have to accept that the hard facts of 1939–45 will go into soft focus. I know, that’s regrettable, or deplorable. Trickier by far is the way Casablanca endures and becomes a passive, fraudulent version of what happened in the war. Yet the loyalists of movies still tell ourselves that that second war was the climax and the vindication of the history of cinema.
3
What Are Brothers For?
ONE OF THE MOST disconcerting films about brothers ever made in America came from Warner Brothers. There is something indecent in its fable, it is so nakedly revealing of an eternal sibling hostility that responds to no moral code. And I am not surprised it came from Warners. Sibling rivalry was their thing.
The film is East of Eden (1955), drawn from the John Steinbeck novel, and before that from the mythic contest of the first two children on earth, Cain and Abel. In that Bible story, the two sons of Adam and Eve fall out, without any clear reason being offered. Is it that brothers are driven by nature to tend that way? The Lord looks upon Abel with respect, but he has no similar feeling for Cain, which prompted “wroth” in that brother, and then murder. Why is Cain regarded so unfairly? Just because he is not Abel?—or was God trying to be a scriptwriter?
When the director Elia Kazan proposed East of Eden to Jack Warner as a film project, he found that Warner “hadn’t read the book, didn’t propose to, didn’t even ask what it was about, and didn’t ask whom I was going to cast. What he did ask was: ‘What’ll it cost?’ ‘About one six,’ I said. ‘You’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Cast who you want. Come and have lunch with me.’ ”1
If the picture had an agenda, that had more to do with Kazan’s sense of himself as an ugly, resentful Anatolian life force determined to assert himself in America. If you read his great book, A Life, you can’t help being thrilled by the chutzpah of Kazan against the world, and his frightening urge to betray others before they betrayed him.
In the Steinbeck novel, Charles and Adam Trask are deeply opposed half-brothers. They encounter a young woman, Cathy, who is as close to evil as Steinbeck or the American novel ever came. And Steinbeck was of German descent, Episcopalian. Cathy has killed her own parents and become a prostitute. The half-brothers rescue her, and Adam marries Cathy, without realizing that Charles has had her sexually. Cathy will give birth to twin sons, though the possibility is left hanging in the novel that the two sons come from the half-brothers.
Once she has delivered her twins, Cathy shoots Adam and leaves him with the new sons. Adam makes a ranch in Salinas, and Cathy goes away to Monterey. Those two places are only twenty miles apart, but in the biblical mood of the novel they are distant, so that Adam and his sons do not know that Cathy is alive still. Twinning in the novel is elemental and philosophical, and suited to the rivalry of brothers torn between some old order and new ways ahead. East of Eden may be the best Bible story Hollywood ever made, so compelling that it shrugs off any conventional attempt to be moral.
In the movie, Adam (Raymond Massey) has two sons who live with him on his farm in Salinas. They are named Aaron (Dick Davalos) and Cal ( James Dean). Aaron is upright, handsome and polite to others; he is a good boy. But Cal is more crouched; he may be alluring, but he is not what movies of the early fifties called good-looking. He is shy, secretive, full of troubled thoughts; he feels wronged because there is a more trusting bond between his father and his brother than he can ever enjoy. In Dean’s performance, Cal is the epitome of every bruised outsider kid in Warners history. His envy fixes on what seems like Adam’s disapproving and withheld affection, and on the way a young woman, Abra ( Julie Harris), is regarded as the natural fiancée for Aaron.
The narrative of the film (using a fraction of Steinbeck’s story) has Cal farming beans to pay his father back the money lost on a pioneering refrigeration project. The bean business thrives as America’s entry into the Great War comes closer. But when Aaron senses Cal’s plan, he trumps his darker brother by giving their father a greater gift—news of his engagement to Abra. Adam rejects Cal’s gift—of cash, $15,000, wrapped up as a birthday present—because Adam is agonized at being on the draft board, sending young men off to the war on which Cal is a profiteer.
The film is placed tenderly in the California of 1915–17, but it is myth and fairytale. In cruel revenge, Cal insists on taking Aaron to see their mother ( Jo Van Fleet). She was thought to be dead, long ago, but in fact she keeps a brothel in Monterey. Aaron is so devastated he rushes off to enlist in the army. So Cal is left at home, to look after his invalid father (he has been shocked into a stroke), with Abra as his mate and beloved.
East of Eden is hideously unfair special pleading. Aaron is a prig, but no worse, and the action removes him from the arena, leaving the melancholy, self-centered Cal not just in charge but as the focus of attention. Dean’s performance helped crystallize the new psychic yearning of teenagers as much as Elvis Presley would a year later. This rapturous male weepie is driven by the neediness of its director, Elia Kazan, a self-conscious outsider who sought revenge for himself.2 Kazan was a magician with actors, and that shows in the stealthy, emerging feelings of James Dean. But I don’t know another film anywhere that so directly understands the way one brother might need to vanquish the other. And the censors let it pass—but Warner Brothers had a good record at finessing censorship.
You can say this is mere coincidence and too little as a basis for any theory that might be applied to Warner Brothers, the company that insisted on sibling status in its very name. Still, Cain and Abel is the first murder story in the Bible, and this film came at a crucial moment in the story of Harry and Jack Warner.
East of Eden (which was very successful) could have come from other studios. But that is just a way of suggesting how so many movie stories have a persisting pattern of mythic emotional forces acting out family antagonisms. The Warner Brothers were like other studios in that instinct, but they did not want to escape a vein of fraternal opposition, the good and the bad working themselves out. The Searchers does not seem to be a Jewish film, but it begins in a smothered rivalry between brothers. More to the point (just because the antagonism is so much less emphatic), The Jazz Singer (the historic turning point for Warner Brothers) is about the struggle in one character to be both Jewish and American, a cantor’s son and a sensational entertainer in vaudeville.
Not that all show business brothers were dogs prepared to fight. Joel and Ethan Coen have got on very well now for decades. George and Ira Gershwin are proverbial for the harmony of male siblings. The Epstein brothers, Philip and Julius, wrote together—they did a lot of Casablanca as a team, and that is a film in which ostensible rivals, Rick and Laszlo, become brothers in the fight for freedom, just as Rick and Louis Renault stroll off into the fog at “the start of a beautiful friendship.”
On the other hand, Joseph L. Mankiewicz once told me that it was only possible to understand his life by grasping the ceaseless rivalry he had felt with his beloved brother Herman. David and Myron Selznick—producer and agent—were locked in a similar competition. Myron held on to a share of Gone With the Wind just to prove his brother had been a chump in selling out. Two sisters, Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, hardly liked to be reminded of each other.
You may say that these anecdotes are just natural struggles for power, comparable with feuds or skirmishes in any walk of life. After all, we may resent, rival, and hate the people we are related to (where else are we going to go?)—it’s the same impulse that’s involved in love. But the movie business of its own great days was uncommonly affected by these competitions just because they told the stories.
The family history of so many Jewish families who had come from eastern Europe to North America was confused, not always certain in the minds of the people themselves, and subject to the memory, the eloquence, or the scenario of elders. Jack didn’t know the world that had produced him, or want to be tied to it. So the power to cast the story was vital, and subject to argument. Late in life, Jack Warner said he had forgotten what the family name had been. In 1965, he wrote, “I have never been to Poland. And it looks now as though I’ll never go there.”3
Of course, it wasn’t even Poland. In the years that counted, this was Russia. But if you want to start the story, then you have to say that Benjamin Wonsal or Wonskolasor was living in Krasnoshilt or Krasnosielc in the middle of the nineteenth century. That was a village about fifty miles north of Warsaw. We learned to call it Poland after the Great War, but it had been part of the Russian Empire, and far more influenced by tsarist oppression. It was an area with a large Jewish population, and soon after German occupation in 1939 it would be the site of massacres at the hands of the Nazis just as it had been subject to Russian pogroms for several hundred years. It was a place where many people were in the clothing business. And where children got no official education and depended on family teaching.4
Little is certain, but Benjamin (born in 1857) lived with and was married to Pearl Leah Eichelbaum (born a year later), also from Krasnosielc. People married neighbors. He was apparently a shoemaker, though that does not mean he had no other occupations when need or opportunity arose. He and Pearl had children in Poland: a girl, Cecilia, the first, and dead at four; Moses, or Hirsch, or Hirz, born in 1881; Aaron in 1884; and Szmul in 1887. There was another son who died aged four, and another who made it to twenty. There would be five daughters, and if you think sons had to struggle, just imagine the girls, who were so much more thoroughly overlooked. But twelve children in all.
What happened next is subject to shipping lists and possible errors in the inventory of passengers. But it was common for the man to make such journeys first, with a wife and children coming on later. So it is said—with the energy of story attempting to settle confusion (and we must imagine this as the version told to young children)—that Benjamin sailed from Hamburg to Liverpool on the Chester in January 1888. Almost immediately, he took another ship from Liverpool to Baltimore. More than a year later, in October 1889, Pearl sailed from Bremen to Baltimore on the Hermann, with several children, including Moses, Aaron, and Szmul. The family was reunited, and it was around this time that Benjamin adopted the name Warner for all of them, and Moses became Harry, Aaron became Albert, and Szmul became Sam. Their ages in 1889 ranged from eight to two, so they can be forgiven for settling on one story or script that everyone could stick with. How do you tell a child his name has changed without setting free a kind of actor?
As the new Warner family made its way in North America, it rested for a time in Canada. Several other children were born (and survived), all girls except for Itzhak or Jacob, born in Ontario in 1892, and set to be Jack. So Jack was the North American boy, the kid, eleven years younger than Harry, and sooner or later not just the most inventive, ambitious, charismatic, and treacherous, but trouble. The family had spoken Yiddish. They had observed even if they had not directly suffered from Cossack cruelty. They had been so oppressed that they had sought to escape to the New World. That is part of the classic scenario of tales told to kids, and it surely had substance. But many who were poor and beaten did not risk wild dreams of something better. The Wonsals had been able to buy passage on ships for great voyages. They were never indigent. The real poor remained in eastern Europe, and in time, one way or another, they passed into the ground. But these guys became the Warner Brothers. In Youngstown, Ohio—one of the most dangerous places in America at that time—and then in Los Angeles, they made a point of sticking together.
