"Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling” by Mark A.
Vieira (Running Press; $40) 368 Pages, Illustrated (B&W and color);
Hardback. ISBN: 9780762482375"
Review by Lee Pfeiffer
Running Press, in association with Turner Classic Movies,
has released a glorious tribute to a legendary studio with “Warner Bros.: 100
Years of Storytelling” by noted author and film historian Mark A. Vieira. The
book features an insightful foreword written by (appropriately enough) Ben
Mankiewicz, one of the popular hosts of TCM movie presentations and a member of
the Mankiewicz family of Hollywood legend. The studio introduced sound
to the movie-going experience with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927,
and as the press releases points out, would later “put the noir in film”
through countless crime classics that saw the rise of James Cagney, Edward G.
Robinson and Humphrey Bogart to legendary status.
The handsome coffee table
book is broken down by decade up through films released in 2021. Vieira
provides lengthy and informative introductions to each decade beginning with
the founding of the studio through the breakthroughs in new screen freedoms in
the 1960s and 1970s. However, this is a celebration of Warner Bros. that relies
primarily on photographs, reproduced in gorgeous B&W and color. There is a
photo and caption for every single film and simply flipping through the volume
is a marvelous trip down memory lane. Vieira completed the book before the studio
underwent a number of high-profile controversies in the last year that resulted
in layoffs that included the top staff of TCM itself- an act that saw major
filmmakers such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese go public
with a joint demand that TCM should remain the beloved jewel it has always
been. Whatever the future holds for WB, no one can change its monumental past
and this book is a fitting tribute to its legacy.
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