Samuel Goldwyn

One of the most distinguished of the old Hollywood movie moguls, Samuel Goldwyn probably rose the farthest of them all from the humblest of beginnings. Born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Poland, in 1879 (some sources say 1882), he grew up in a life of dire poverty. At age 16, he left home on foot, headed west, and ended up in England, where he lived for two years. He adopted the name Samuel Goldfish, worked, begged, and perhaps also stole to survive, and then got passage on a ship to Nova Scotia. He headed south to New York, again on foot, in 1898. He arrived without a penny to his name and got a job sweeping floors at a glove company, later becoming a glove maker's apprentice and also attending night school to further his education. Goldfish became a salesman for the company and was good enough to earn a five-figure annual income at the opening of the 20th century, extraordinary for a working man. [Note: Goldwyn's background with the glove company was referred to obliquely in a sight gag in one 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon, in which part of an underwater tableau includes a goldfish with a pushcart selling gloves]. In the process of living a middle-class American life, he developed one special cultural love and fixation -- the movies, which were just becoming a vehicle for serious entertainment. In 1913, Goldfish and his brother-in-law, the vaudeville producer Jesse L. Lasky, went into business together, forming the Jesse Lasky Feature Photoplay Company; their debut release, The Squaw Man (1914), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, was an enormous hit. Their company had a good three years before it merged with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players studio, thus forming the nucleus of what became Paramount Pictures. Soon after, Goldfish went into partnership with Edgar Selwyn in a company called the Goldwyn Pictures Corp., which took its name from the first syllable of Goldfish's name and the last one of Selwyn's -- Samuel Goldfish himself soon adopted Goldwyn as his own legal name.
The original Goldwyn company merged with Metro Studios and Louis B. Mayer's production company in the early '20s to form Metro Goldwyn Mayer, but Samuel Goldwyn wasn't long in that partnership. He exited in 1923, leaving the Goldwyn corporate name as part of MGM -- a fact that would cause him some mild distress in later years, owing to the public's confusion -- and formed Samuel Goldwyn Productions, the company that he was to run for the next four decades. Goldwyn's philosophy, in contrast to that of the other major studios, was to make one picture at a time, but make it very well, sparing no expense in bringing the best actors, directors, designers, composers, and writers together to create only the finest in feature films -- Goldwyn never made B-pictures, and every Samuel Goldwyn production was an important film, getting the full devotion of its producer's resources and attention. In its heyday, at any given moment the company had one film at the pre-production stage, one movie in the process of being completed, and one film in release.
The company came into its own with the arrival of sound. The thriller Bulldog Drummond (1929), the searing adaptation of Elmer Rice's stage drama Street Scene (1931), and Arrowsmith, adapted by John Ford from Sinclair Lewis' book, were all huge successes in their time, and Street Scene, in particular, still holds up today. Goldwyn also exerted a profound influence on the development of movie music during the sound era through his hiring of Alfred Newman, a young New York-based conductor and arranger, to work as music director on the 1930 Eddie Cantor musical Whoopee! -- Newman proved to be an inspired choice for that film (one of the earliest genuinely watchable and entertaining movie musicals by modern standards) and went on (beginning with Goldwyn's Street Scene) to become one of the most influential composers of movie music over the next 35 years. Goldwyn's one-film-at-a-time approach proved completely competitive with the more factory-like methods of production utilized by his ex-partners at MGM and Paramount, and he became one of Hollywood's great success stories -- indeed, to this day, more than a quarter century after his death and four decades since his last new film went into release, Samuel Goldwyn is the most successful independent producer in the history of Hollywood. Included in the Goldwyn company's illustrious talent pool at various times were Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, David Niven, Will Rogers, Walter Huston, Susan Hayward, and Joel McCrea; director William Wyler; the composers Alfred Newman and George and Ira Gershwin; choreographer Busby Berkeley; and the authors Lillian Hellman, Sinclair Lewis, and Robert Sherwood. Goldwyn's films, whether serious dramas like These Three (1936) (a partly censored version of Hellman's play The Children's Hour), Dodsworth (1936), Wuthering Heights (1939), and The Little Foxes (1941), or comedies like Ball of Fire (1941), were all quality entertainment -- indeed, his family films such as Hans Christian Andersen (1952) rivaled the best live-action movies that Disney created, while his musicals, from the early Eddie Cantor vehicles (Whoopee! [1930], Palmy Days [1931], and Roman Scandals [1933]) up through Guys and Dolls (1955), starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, were more than a match for any contemporary releases by Warner Bros. or MGM.
Goldwyn's focus on quality allowed him to transcend his own limitations. The perfect example is The Pride of the Yankees (1942), which is generally regarded as the best movie biography of a sports figure ever done, despite the fact that neither Goldwyn nor the film's star, Gary Cooper, knew anything about baseball; the film was also a last fond look back at the pre-WWII American persona, which may make it representative of Goldwyn's true gift. As an immigrant with an uncommonly perceptive mind where people were concerned (which may also explain his success as a salesman), Goldwyn appreciated the United States and its people, and their most noble and benevolent characteristics in ways that native-born citizens usually take for granted and often overlook; but he also recognized the need and had the in-born aesthetic skills (despite his seeming lack of education) to find the best writers, artists, and technicians to capture that vision onscreen. In that regard, he succeeded equally well with comedy and drama. During WWII, his film output was weighted decidedly toward comedy and he delighted audiences by the millions with a pair of films, Up in Arms (1944) and Wonder Man (1945) (the latter with some reassuring notions about life-after-death, which audiences seemed to respond to as the war wound down), both showcasing a new comic discovery, Danny Kaye; and he generated one of the funniest spoofs ever to come out of Hollywood in the form of The Princess and the Pirate (1944), starring Bob Hope and Virginia Mayo. Goldwyn reached his peak as a producer, however, with his best and most serious film -- The Best Years of Our Lives, a 181-minute drama about returning servicemen and their families that not only won eight Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director for William Wyler), but has endured as perhaps the best and most watchable of all of Hollywood's old-style dramatic epics.
The man also had his flaws and quirks, to be sure. Goldwyn was known for a mean temper -- only the verbal intervention of his wife prevented him from pursuing a costly, purposeless lawsuit against his English co-producers over the troubled production of The Elusive Pimpernel. And he could also be miserly at what seemed like inappropriate moments -- Billy Wilder and his writing partner Charles Brackett's were cheated out of modest bonuses promised them by Goldwyn for their work on Ball of Fire, which was one of his biggest hits, for no other reason then that he decided not to pay them what he had promised. Apart from his success as a producer, by the same token, he was also celebrated for his turn of a phrase, often referred to as "Goldwynisms." These were partly an outgrowth of his limited education and skills with English, but also reflected a cleverness that was unique among his class, and which added new wrinkles to the English language. Among the most famous of the phrases attributed to him are: "Gentlemen, include me out"; "Never make forecasts, especially about the future"; "Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day"; "They stayed away in droves"; "An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on"; and the observation that "anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."
Like many of the other moguls, Goldwyn's judgment and business fortunes faltered in the years after WWII, as audiences and American popular culture began changing rapidly. He had a hit with the fantasy film The Bishop's Wife (1947), but the romantic drama Enchantment (1948) was a failure, and his Technicolor, musicalized remake of Ball of Fire, A Song Is Born (1948), was only a modest success and never as highly regarded as the original, despite the presence of Benny Goodman, Mel Powell, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Barnet in its cast; My Foolish Heart (1949), a rather sappy romantic drama adapted from J.D. Salinger's short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," was a fair box-office success, but so outraged Salinger that he never permitted another one of his works to be licensed for filming. The costume swashbuckler The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) was an unabashed flop, and Goldwyn's attempts at capturing a vision of slice-of-life America with the dramas Our Very Own (1950) and I Want You (1951) weren't received nearly as well as The Best Years of Our Lives had been. Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and Guys and Dolls (1955) were major hits, but Goldwyn's film of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1959), plagued by production problems (including a fire that destroyed its expensive sets), was a failure despite winning three Oscars. To add insult to injury in the movie's star-crossed history, the George Gershwin estate disliked Porgy And Bess sufficiently to withdraw it from circulation as soon as the term of Goldwyn's license on the original operatic work had expired and hasn't permitted it to be shown since the 1970s, apart from allowing clips of co-star Sammy Davis Jr. to be used in broadcast obituaries on the occasion of the actor's death.
As a man who arrived in America during the 1890s and whose entertainment sensibilities were formed in vaudeville, Goldwyn seemed unable to cope with a fast-paced postwar world fueled by television and rock & roll as major cultural forces. There were opportunities that he missed as events seemed to outpace him -- for instance, Goldwyn, as easily as Mort Briskin and United Artists, could have made The Jackie Robinson Story, a tale every bit as compelling (and compellingly American) as Lou Gehrig's story, but he didn't make it and they did; as the 1940s drifted into the 1950s, he lost touch with the tastes of the American people. He ceased production in 1959 following the release of Porgy and Bess, the first time since 1913 that Goldwyn had been out of the movie business. Because his company owned virtually every picture it ever produced, however, Goldwyn's films continued to enjoy prestige presentations on television and in theatrical presentation well past his retirement, and Samuel Goldwyn was still a well-known, beloved name in moviemaking when he died 15 years after retiring. His movies have continued to be shown only in the best broadcast and cable venues, and to receive the most respectful home video treatment in the decades since. Indeed, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, run by Samuel Goldwyn Jr., experienced a major expansion of its own in the 1980s when it bought the American distribution rights to the library of Alexander Korda's London Film Productions, and also financed a reissue of Tony Richardson's 1963 hit Tom Jones. The combined Goldwyn and Korda libraries reached a new high point of presentation when they were licensed by HBO Home Video in the early '90s, which invested money heavily in the remastering and upgrading of their film materials and shot excellent supplementary wrap-around and commentaries for the laser disc releases of movies such as The Best Years of Our Lives (which was available for a time at the end of the 1990s on DVD from HBO with those extra materials). Additionally, Samuel Goldwyn's knack for finding or approving properties with enduring appeal to the public was borne out in 1996, 22 years after his death, when The Bishop's Wife was remade successfully by Penny Marshall as The Preacher's Wife.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide