Individual Agency and the Studio System: Don Siegel, Montage, and Warner Bros

Introduction

Within the pantheon of American directors, Don Siegel is famous for transcending limitations of genre and budget to create such arresting films as The Big Steal (1949), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Dirty Harry (1971), The Shootist (1976) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979). Siegel’s early career in Hollywood is no less interesting. Through a combination of luck, skill, charisma, and hutzpah, Siegel played a major role in codifying the use of montage at Warner Bros. from 1934 to 1945. His montage work appears in several Warner Bros. pictures from that time period, including Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939), The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939), Knute Rockne (Lloyd Bacon, 1940), Blues in the Night (Anatole Litvak, 1941), Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), Gentlemen Jim (Raoul Walsh, 1942), Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943), and The Adventures of Mark Twain (Irving Rapper, 1944).

Siegel’s entré into Warner Bros. in the mid-Thirties coincided with a larger trend within the industry, namely, a shift from the central producer to the unit-producer system. At Warner, this transition occurred in 1933 when Hal B. Wallis was made associate executive in charge of production under Jack L. Warner.¹ As Tino Balio articulates, “the shift to unit production resulted in greater specialization in the design and execution of motion pictures as studios attempted to satisfy a cross section of audience tastes, particularly interest in big-budget prestige pictures.”² This reliance on greater specialization enabled Siegel to eventually establish a stand-alone montage department housed within special effects.

The adoption of montage at Warner epitomizes how the classical studio system, tethered to an industrial form of production, readily absorbed new technologies. However, without Siegel actively leveraging montage to gain responsibility and recognition, the department within Warner Bros. would never have flourished as a discrete part of the production process. Siegel’s role in ushering in this change complicates our understanding of how individual agency during this period collided with the studio system.

The Roaring Thirties

Siegel was perfectly situated to institutionalize montage due to his early trajectory through the Warner film library, editing room, and insert department. A familiarity with the personalities and inner-workings of all those departments would serve Siegel well when he started assembling montages. When he first arrived in Los Angeles, in 1934, he had only one contact, his uncle Jack Saper, a film editor for Warner Bros. Saper introduced his nephew to Wallis, who, despite Siegel’s inexperience, gave him a job assembling, marking, and organizing the stock shots used in various pictures, the same stock shots Siegel would later include in various montages. And yet, as soon as the ambitious Siegel landed in the film library, he had an eye towards escaping it. He finally convinced his boss, DeLeon Anthony, to recommend him for an Assistant Editor position with Warren Lowe.

In editing, despite spending most of his time “chasing women, playing ping-pong, and acting with the Contemporary Theater,”³ Siegel segued into a position as the Assistant Head of the insert department in Special Effects. At the time, Byron Haskin, Head of Special Effects, was looking for someone to shoot close-up inserts.⁴ Siegel felt it would be “great to have control of a camera unit, no matter how small.”⁵ When a director needed an insert, Siegel and his camera operator, Archie Dalzell, would film it on Stage 5.⁶ Siegel quickly learned how to manipulate directors into bestowing him with more responsibility. He would simply emphasize the timesaving dexterity of the insert department regardless of whether the shot was technically an “insert.”⁷ Shooting close-ups, working with stars, and overseeing a camera crew within the Special Effects department galvanized Siegel’s desire for further creative control. It also enabled him to challenge the studio’s strict division of labor. More often than not, he was severely reprimanded by Tenny Wright, production manager of the studio, for his rogue second-unit shooting.⁸

The Thirties were a busy...