Christopher Silvester

Jack the Cad

Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio

By

Yale University Press 220pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie

By

Faber & Faber 334pp £25 order from our bookshop

David Thomson’s Warner Bros is part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series. The four Warner brothers, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack, were born Jewish – their parents were Polish Jews who emigrated to North America in the late 1880s – and all except Jack remained more or less conventionally Jewish, and, indeed, dull. Jack, the protagonist in this drama of sibling rivalry, was different though: not exactly an apostate, but a convert to the secular religion of Americanism. Indeed, Jack’s was more of an American life than a Jewish life.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The characters in many of these stories are trapped in the obsessive present tense of their own thoughts; in the m… ,
    • 'Libraries, for much of their existence, have embodied in microcosm many of the characteristics of the totalitarian… ,
    • 'Moss and Cynthia buy several properties through which to launder their ill-gotten gains, take lots of drugs, have… ,
    • 'Never mind the imperial cult. This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?' From the LR archive:… ,
    • Thirty-two years ago this month, we published Muriel Spark's short story, 'A Playhouse Called Remarkable' Read it… ,
    • Time travel, bicycles and white horses populate @WomackPhilip's roundup of children's books by @marcussedgwick,… ,
    • RT : Joanna Kavenna’s ‘Cooking with Trotsky’s Frying Pan’ in June’s is the most well written and interesting… ,
    Follow Us