You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story by Richard Schickel and George Perry

I saw this documentary on PBS last year, and it is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in film history and the history of the most successful entertainment empire today – Warner Brothers. It’s much better than “Here’s Looking At You”, the documentary made in the 90’s on the studio. For one, there is one consistent narrator – Clint Eastwood, rather than a series of personalities as there was in “Here’s Looking at You”. In “Here’s Looking at You” it seems like these series of narrators are there to show themselves off rather than talk about studio history. Eastwood keeps the focus on the studio, its product, and its strategy.

Of course, as the studio moves into the era of special effects the documentary can’t help but show off a little bit with some of their superhero and fantasy films, but I’ll grant them that. Because so many of the directors that were around when Warners transformed from an upstart playing with sound to a major studio have passed on, they have interviews from the 60’s and 70’s with directors such as Mervin Le Roy talking about what it was like in the early days. Of course, there is a big focus on Jack Warner who turned out to be much a much shrewder studio head than his nemesis Louis B. Mayer over at MGM. It shows how Warner made the decisions that got the studio through the depression, the war, and the competition of television.

I might have missed it, but I don’t think the documentary talked too much about a very bad move that Jack Warner made that only the good fortune of the future managed to rectify. At one point Jack Warner sold the pre-1949 Warner film library to raise capital. Warner Bros. would today remain a studio with the finest part of its legacy no longer under its control had it not been for Ted Turner purchasing the RKO/pre-1949 WB/pre-1986 MGM film library in the 80’s and then reuniting it under Warner Bros. control at the turn of the century when Ted Turner sold his interests in his cable network and film library back to Time-Warner. This is mentioned in “When the Lion Roared”, the sister documentary on MGM.

In conclusion, this is a very good documentary on the history of Warner Bros. and its lasting film legacy. Highly recommended.

If you enjoy the history of the studio system, this dvd was done very well. Great documentary.

Any fan of movies and studio history would enjoy this DVD set. Lot of great history about one of Hollywood’s greatest studios.

A must for all movie fans, comprehensive documentary of the great WB! Very rare now to find on DVD.

The story of Warner Brothers is great, and most of the best films are included in this five chapters anthology, narrated by Clint Eastwood. Many of the big names that made Warners one of the major studios in Hollywood make their mark: Cagney, Robinson, Bogart, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, directors like Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh and John Huston, the gangsters era, the Busby Berkeley musicals, the war years, the film noir with Lauren Bacall and Joan Crawford, the post war nonsenses with Doris Day, the new faces (Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman) and the Elia Kazan films, the controversial sixties, the caothic seventies and the blockbusters of the eighties, Spielberg and Eastwood, Superman, Batman, Matrix and Harry Potter, it’s all there, well documented, fully explained and related by most of the people that made the films. That’s good. But there’s something missing, too. In the war years we don’t see any clip from WATCH ON THE RHINE (with Bette Davis and an Oscar winning performance by Paul Lukas), in the post war years there’s not one word about JOHNNY BELINDA, and the Oscar to Jane Wyman. What about A STAR IS BORN in 1954, with the glorious come back of Judy Garland? And what about the romantic dramas, very popular in their time, with Troy Donahue and the direction of Delmer Daves (A SUMMER PLACE, PARRISH, SUSAN SLADE, ROME ADVENTURE)? I enjoy very much these kind of anthologies. It’s much better than read the same story on books, because you simply can’t explain a movie in printed words instead of showing it on the screen, just like it must be seen. How can you explain the face of Bette Davis without seeing it, the way she opens her eyes, the way she moves? And the voice of Humphrey Bogart, the kaleidoscopic choreographies of Busby Berkeley and the way that Lauren Bacall says “If you need something, just whistle”? Great fun, and an unforgettable experience!