PEARSON: Warner Bros. made movies, legends

By Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 22, 2008 at 6 p.m.

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You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story

* When and where: 8 p.m. today-Thursday, KRMA-Channel 6

Whether you're a scholar or simply a fan of movies, You Must Remember This unspools a fascinating trip down memory lane.

This five-hour history of the Warner Bros. studio packages 85 years of movie lore over three nights as part of PBS' American Masters series.

Part 1 travels to 1923, when the four Warner brothers of Ohio took over the First National studio lot in California and began churning out movies. Their first star was Rin Tin Tin, the German Shepard whom Henry Warner once called "the mortgage lifter" because he kept the studio from bankruptcy.

By 1927 Warner had developed another strategy, one that would revolutionize the industry: sound. In that year, it released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie. It took several years to earn back its cost because there were only 200 theaters in America equipped for sound.

Subsequent years found the studio developing (or hiring away) a stable of stars: James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart.

The ensuing decades also brought the production of countless classics, among them Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson, White Heat, Mildred Pierce, Jezebel and Now, Voyager. With the addition of Errol Flynn, Warner got a bona fide swashbuckler action hero.

You Must Remember This was directed by former Time movie critic Richard Schickel, and executive produced and narrated by Clint Eastwood, perhaps the dullest narrator in the history of documentaries.

His vocal inflection borders on the bored, whether he's talking about Warner's depiction of gangsters during The Depression or its dealings with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

The exception: when he talks about his own films (Bird, Unforgiven) and what drove him to make them.

Where this documentary excels, aside from terrific archival movie clips, is its interview footage of Hollywood legends talking about their craft. Busby Berkeley, Mervyn LeRoy, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Martin Scorsese - these are some of the most storied men ever to occupy a director's chair.

There's plenty of familiar gossip (Bette Davis suing the studio to get out of her contract; she lost), but also some intriguing tidbits.

Robinson recalls making gangster movies in the days before "squibs" (tiny explosive charges). In the old days, the studio would hire sharpshooters to fire real bullets at a brick wall so that chunks flew off.

The studio was also big on "message" movies, though they weren't called that. Whether taking onscreen jabs at Adolf Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan, many Warner films had a stark tone of the underdog being oppressed.

Surprisingly, before the Hayes Code was enacted, Warner was among the studios that pushed the moral envelope the most with scantily clad women and risque dialogue.

For all the lesser known movies discussed here (The Black Legion, Confessions of a Nazi Spy), Schickel also showcases many a classic: The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Bonnie and Clyde, Goodfellas, The Matrix and the Harry Potter series.

MGM, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Columbia have compelling stories to tell. But perhaps no other studio rivals Warner Bros. for the breadth of its output and the cantankerous way it achieved its celluloid success.

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