Cut-Rate Dreams

On a midsummer evening just 20 years ago this week, Warner Brothers decided--very cagily, as it turned out--that sound movies were here to stay.* When the public wholeheartedly agreed, the rest of Hollywood scrambled aboard the bandwagon.

"You Ain't Heard Nothin1 Yet." The four Warner boys--Harry, Jack, Abe and Sam (now dead)--were sons of a Polish immigrant who became an Ohio butcher. About 1905 the brothers got hold of a projection machine and began to pick up a few dollars exhibiting The Great Train Robbery. Then they acquired a nickelodeon in New Castle, Pa. By 1917 they had their own distributing company. By the mid-'20s they were making $1,000,000 a year on their own pictures, and they controlled two popular stars--John Barrymore and a talented dog named Rin-Tin-Tin.

Then the Warners took a flyer in Western Electric's experimental sound-film, which most Hollywood companies had already turned down. On Aug. 6. 1926, Warner's Manhattan theater screened Don Juan (John Barrymore, Mary Astor, Myrna Loy) with a fully synchronized musical background. On the same bill were eight sound shorts. Historians agree that the bell tolled that evening for silent pictures.

The following fall, Al Jolson, between recorded songs in Warner's The Jazz Singer, did some ad-lib talking: "You ain't heard nothin' yet, folks. Listen to this." Audiences were enchanted. After Warner's 1928 Lights of New York, the first all-talking feature, more than a thousand movie theaters throughout the U.S. hastily wired for sound. So did every major Hollywood studio.

Watch Those Lights! Many of filmdom's best people look down their snobbish noses at the Warners. The brothers are widely regarded as inartistic penny-pinchers. Their detractors claim that the Warners never buy a story if they can remake an old one or snatch a plot out of the newspapers. They discourage fussy, expensive retakes. They frown on temperament in anyone but themselves. As President Harry once said: "Listen, a picture, all it is is an expensive dream. Well, it's just as easy to dream for $700,000 as for $1,500,000."

Despite their inartistic preoccupation with profits, the Warners have managed to turn out some of Hollywood's most highly respected pictures. They have also launched many a Hollywood "trend": film biography with George Arliss' Disraeli (1929); a new gangster cycle with Little Caesar and Public Enemy (1930-31); social-consciousness movies with I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932); the first big backstage musical, 42nd Street (1933); the first attempt to sound-film Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935).

Combining penny-pinching and trail-blazing is no soft task. Jack, the jovial, flashily sport-coated Warner in charge of production, has spent years policing the 120-acre lot at Burbank, making certain that no unnecessary lights are burning and that everybody is at work. Insisting that even high-bracket writers check in every morning by 9:30, Jack also knows how to deal with unimaginative studio types. He dreaded having to explain to Warner salesmen in 1935 that he planned to film a tony biography of Louis Pasteur. Paul Muni, he announced tersely, would be starred in a picture called The Death Fighter. "You're casting Muni as a pug?" one salesman screamed, "You'll ruin him." "No, no," Jack said soothingly, "Muni plays the manager."

Through the Transom. This month, by way of not celebrating two decades of pioneering, Warner's offerings include an undistinguished musical-biography (Night and Day), a couple of tired remakes (Of Human Bondage, One More Tomorrow), two thin little comedies (Janie Gets Married, Two Guys from Milwaukee). Gone to other studios are Warner's oldtime skilled craftsmen Darryl Zanuck, Hal Wallis, Ernest Lubitsch, William Dieterle, Mervyn Le Roy.

But Jack views the future with equanimity. Last week he reared back in his plush, green leather upholstered office and mused: "I like Westerns best. . . . You know what a Western is, don't you? It's Rin-Tin-Tin climbing through the transom to rescue some beautiful broad. Only instead of Rin-Tin-Tin now, we've got Errol Flynn."

* Movies-with-sound, using a complex mixture of inventions by Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas A. Edison, Lee de Forest and others, are now some 57 years old.

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