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for October 1932
59
Thank Him for the Talkies!
Pen portrait of H. M. Warner, whose company gave a voice to the films
By Lynde Denig
Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer," the first talkie. Presented by Warners as a pioneering move, it has made movie history which continues to be written to this day.
THE Warners came out of Russia when The Little White Father ruled right smartly with a Cossack whip and Siberia was a finishing school for dissenters. There was plenty of gold in Russia at that time, but it was difficult to chip nuggets from the frozen assets. Warner, Sr., understood that conditions were brighter in America, a land of milk and money. He decided that the Warner clan would thrive on the milk and money, also a bit of the cream from the top of the bottle. Unfortunately, he did not live to see how thoroughly the cream agreed with his offspring.
Kindly Providence guided the Warner patriarch to Baltimore where the gentlefolk, in common with those of other cities, wore out their shoes on stone pavements. Shoes, as he knew from his own experience, for he was on his way to becoming the father of a family of twelve, were a basic necessity. He would serve the needs of the public, as well as those of his immediate dependents, by way of a shoe-repairing shop. Provided no one else wanted the leather, he could rely upon home consumption.
If only the far-sighted Baltimorean could have a peep into the closets of his sons, Harry, Jack, and Albert, today ! They have the shoes, so to speak, with never a patch nor a rundown heel to mar them. But the Warner boys have worn out a lot of pairs on their climb from the cobbler's shop to the crest of the motion picture mountain. One of them, the stout-hearted and muchbeloved Sam, who marked the path in the earlier days,
Close-up of a big man behind some of your favorite motion pictures : Harry M. Warner. His company has given you such stars as George Arliss, Richard Barthelmess, James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
died before the summit had been reached.
Harry M. Warner, who shouldered the responsibilities laid down by Sam, in addition to those he already carried, is the electrifying energy behind the names of Warner, Vitaphone, First National, wherever you may see them : sparkling in lights on the marquees of theatres, flashing from screens, catching your eye from billboards as you spin along concrete highways. He is president of so many corporations and a director in so many more that there is no need to name them.
Harry has held the money-bag when it was light as a balloon and when it was heavy with coin. In the transitory life of the motion picture, it has filled and emptied with the rapidity of an hour-glass. But heavy or light. Harry has stepped briskly along, living in the present and the future and tingling with the joy of the struggle.
Seated in his New York office, a sort of conning tower from which he surveys and directs a wide variety of interests, there is a touch of the Wall Street broker about his alert personality that expresses a new type in the amusement and commercial world : an international showman, a sort of three-in-one combination : showmanrealtor-banker.
Harry knows the show business from the BroadwavHollywood angle: but that is (Con finned on page °0)