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.
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