A History of Warner Brothers: "The Working Class Studio"

(NYTimes) - ... “It’s perfectly obvious to everyone that in Hollywood’s classic age, the 1930s and 1940s, Warner Brothers was the working-class studio,” Richard Schickel writes in his introduction to “You Must Remember This.” “You can see that most obviously in its famously ‘tragic’ gangsters, machine-gunning their way to power only to be gunned down not so much for their depredations but for their hubris, for daring to challenge the respectable and the law-abiding.” Schickel goes on to explain that through the ’30s and ’40s and beyond, the studio provided a context (and a haven) for pictures with a degree of social consciousness, or at least for stories whose endings weren’t always happy. Continued