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Peter Bart: Jack Warner Presaged Trump, Hated Roosevelt, And Might Have Voted For ‘Oppenheimer’ At The Oscars
In his heyday, Jack Warner was a Donald Trump pre-clone in terms of temperament and rhetoric, Peter Bart writes.
A career maverick, Warner promoted gangster movies like Public Enemy or Little Caesar to his Depression-era ticket audience and fostered Casablanca in 1942 when moviegoers wanted to forget war. A stalwart Republican, Jack Warner often quarreled with President Franklin Roosevelt, called Winston Churchill “foolish” and cheerfully put up $40,000 in lawyers’ fees to rescue Errol Flynn (star of Captain Blood) of rape charges. Warner fought bitterly with rival studio chiefs, yet now and then supported their aberrant decisions, as when Columbia’s Harry Cohn paid gangsters to suppress a strike that the union never intended to launch.
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