The article “Warner Brothers: ninety years of grit and greatness” was published by David Gritten in The Telegraph on April 4, 2013. It discusses the great event, as that day Warner Bros celebrated nine decades of individuality, big characters, and challenging realism on the big screen.
Speaking of Warner Bros, it’s necessary to remark that the world of film changed in 1927 with the premiere of The Jazz Singer in New York City. Starring Al Jolson, it launched the era of the “talkies”, and was the prototype of movies as we know them today: a synthesis of sound and vision. And as that film had then been in existence for just four years, undoubtedly Warners deserved a place in the pantheon of great Hollywood studios. And of course it’s an open secret that over the years there have been so many more reasons to celebrate Warners.
Analyzing the company’s career, it’s significant to emphasize that Warner Bros made its mark with big-screen realism. Thus from the early Thirties it generated a cycle of gangster films and crime dramas, that held up a mirror to Depression-era America, and appealed directly to ordinary people having financial troubles. And there is a general feeling to believe that all of them had the same themes regarding a house style: urban settings, snappy dialogue and a brisk pace, with scripts and performances that never strayed into sentimentality. What’s more notable that even the actors in these films distanced Warner Bros from the norm.
Giving appraisal of the situation, it’s necessary to point out that unlike Warner Bros, other studios relied on handsome young men to star in films that would transport audiences on clouds of escapism. Besides, the article draws the fact that two key directors created a house style for Warners around this time: Mervyn LeRoy specialised in social dramas with a bracing dose of reality, and Michael Curtiz, who made more than 100 Warners movies over 25 years. Of course not all were masterpieces, but nor were they frivolous; most of them were staged in a real world.
Without a doubt it’s hard to predict the course of events, but would another studio have done it differently? That’s why the article takes a fact that the values espoused by Warners in those early days has held good at the studio for a long time. It can be approved by Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough movie, Mean Streets (1973), which was made for Warners. And the careers of two very different film-makers, Clint Eastwood and Stanley Kubrick, also seem to confirm the notion. Both enjoyed long relationships with Warners; professionally, they regarded it as home.
Thus the author concludes by saying that even today, a distinctive film-maker like Christopher Nolan calls Warners home, and it’s hard to imagine him equally comfortable elsewhere. Of course, Warners’ output is as varied in quality as any other studio – but over 90 years it has created a legacy unlike any other in Hollywood.
So I think everybody will agree that Warner Bros is one of the major film studios, which has the largest collection of movies in the world. What is more important that the company, during the history of its existence, focuses on maximizing current and next-generation scenarios to make films available to audiences.
Excellent!
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