Band of bickering brothers

There aren’t many downsides to being a film critic, but one of them is being asked to name your favourite movie. You bluster and bluff, and then cop out by saying the answer changes from year to year and sometimes from day to day.

Then you read David Thomson’s new book and realise that from now on you’re going to say that while you’ll probably never have a definitive favourite film, you do have a favourite film factory. Any movie that starts with kettledrums and a blare of brass, and a black and white escutcheon (in later years, gold and blue) emblazoned with the initials WB is likely to be a cut above: intelligent, liberal and seriously amusing. As Thomson says at the end of this brief, bracing, not-quite biography, Warner Brothers is ‘the best studio there ever was’.

It was the brainchild of a family of Ashkenazi Jews. Moses, Aaron and Szmul Wonskolasor were young children when their shoemaker father, Benjamin, brought them and their mother, Pearl, to America from Poland in the late 1880s. (The boys were renamed Harry, Albert and Sam Warner in the process.) Then, in 1892, with the family now living in Ontario, another son — Itzhak, or Jack — came along.

Largely because we know least about him, Sam seems like the most approachable of the bunch. He died young, in 1927, the day before the mid-shoot magic he had worked to transform The Jazz Singer from a silent to a talkie took America by storm. Albert was a businesslike bruiser whom nobody crossed and nobody dissed. Harry, the eldest, fancied himself the moral conscience of the family. Eleven years senior to Jack, he cleaved to the old morality of the shtetl. He never forgave the baby of the family for having gone native — for getting married more than once, and for the afternoon ritual on the office sofa with the latest chorus-line hopeful.