Vintage Sand Episode 46: "The House that Jack Built": Warner Brothers at 100

Vintage Sand

It is one of the great wonders of American business that the same handful of companies have run the movies in Hollywood, almost since the beginning. After all, how many American industries of 2023 feature a power structure that would be familiar to someone from the late 1920’s? Yes, there were mergers then, like the ones that created MGM, Universal and Fox, and today there are yet more mergers, the challenges of adjusting to a streaming culture, and globalization. And yes, there is Dreamworks, but there’s still Paramount, and Columbia, and Universal, and Fox, and iterations of both MGM and UA, and of course the looming shadow of Disney. And while Warner Brothers is now part of Time Warner, which is part of Discovery (SO complicated), it’s still very much the powerful and influential studio that the eponymous brothers opened on April 4, 1923. After wars, depressions and recessions and other complete erasures and redrawings, those familiar logos that we and our grandparents saw as children remain. Therefore, since TCM seems to have stolen so many ideas from us (viz Episode 31 on best final films by great directors), we return the favor here by using this episode to celebrate Warners’ centennial. We thought it silly to try to come up with our three favorite films by the studio, so we each came up with three (warning, there are double entries) films for which the studio was either producer, the main distributor or both, that have had the most impact on us. We also tried to avoid films we’ve already discussed a lot, and strike out in some new directions. So come join us as among our many stops, we ride the rails with the wild boys of the road, make a stop in Ford Country, go as far afield as Bette Davis in Malaysia and Audrey Hepburn in the Congo, and end up in space with the Mercury astronauts. We promise an amazing trip, though, as Warners’ greatest star often said, we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque…