Christopher Silvester
Jack the Cad
Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio
By David Thomson
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 Noah Isenberg
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.
Thomson gives a reasonable account of the family dynamics and of Jack’s appalling character. Jack was a monster who resented Harry and also his own son, Jack Jr. In 1956 he engineered a bogus sale of his stock in the studio to a banking chum and persuaded his brothers to
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