Samuel Goldwyn

Film Producer

• Born: August 17, 1879
• Birthplace: Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire (now in Poland)
• Died: January 31, 1974
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

American filmmaker and producer

Working as an independent Hollywood producer with his own company and studio, Goldwyn made films that were known for their high quality and good taste.

Areas of achievement Film, business and industry

Early Life

Samuel Goldwyn (GOHL-dwihn) was born Schmuel Gelbfisz in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. His parents, Abraham and Hannah, were Orthodox Jews who lived in poverty. It is not known how they earned a living.

Goldwyn’s schooling stopped at age eleven, when he was put to work as an office boy in a Warsaw banking firm, earning five zlotys (one dollar) a week. An early encounter with anti-Semitism in which a police officer called him “a dirty little Jew,” assaulted him, and robbed him of his money impelled Goldwyn to escape from Warsaw at the age of twelve. He eventually made his way to the home of an aunt and uncle in England, where he worked at various jobs, until he was able to raise enough money to pay for a steerage ticket to the United States. By this time he was known by the last name Goldfisch.

Arriving in New York in 1896, where an immigration official changed the spelling of his name from Goldfisch to Goldfish, Goldwyn was recruited to work in a glove factory in Gloversville (near Albany), New York. He began by sweeping floors, then became a glove-cutter, often working at the same bench for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, until at the age of sixteen, he was able to convince his employers to let him travel on the road as a glove salesman.

Goldwyn enjoyed great success as a salesman. Although he never entirely lost his Polish-Yiddish accent, and although he was neither well read nor well educated, Goldwyn was a most convincing and energetic speaker who refused to take no for an answer. In addition, he had a winning smile and an impressive physical appearance about six feet tall, slim, and always proudly erect augmented by suits that were precisely tailored. In later years, Goldwyn became extremely vain about his wardrobe and appearance. He refused to carry anything money, keys, or pens in his pockets, so as not to mar the fit of his clothes.

As a result of Goldwyn’s charm and tenaciousness, he was soon earning close to fifteen thousand dollars a year as a glove salesman. He became a sales manager in 1909 but was eager to improve himself further. Seeking to marry the boss’s niece, Bessie Ginzberg, he lost out to Jesse L. Lasky, a vaudeville entrepreneur. Bessie, however, introduced Goldwyn to Lasky’s sister, Blanche, whom he married in 1910.

Following the 1912 election of Woodrow Wilson, who promised to repeal the restrictive tariffs on imported products, Goldwyn became afraid that American-made gloves would be threatened by cheaper foreign competition. Looking for a new line of work, he saw potential in motion pictures.

Life’s Work

At a time when most motion pictures were one- and two-reelers, lasting not much more than fifteen minutes, Goldwyn was one of a small group of people who believed that motion pictures had more to offer. Using his best salesmanship skills, Goldwyn convinced his brother-in-law, who had extensive contacts in show business, to establish the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Goldwyn hired the actor Dustin Farnum to play the title role in a film adaptation of The Squaw Man (1914), a popular play about an Englishman in the Wild West. Lasky knew a young playwright, Cecil B. DeMille, who was eager to direct.

After much trial and error, The Squaw Man was released in February, 1914, and was an immediate hit, making a profit of roughly $200,000. More successes followed for the Lasky Company, which merged in June, 1916, with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, to form the Famous Players-Lasky Company. Yet there was not room enough in the new company for both Goldwyn and Zukor. Lasky was forced to choose, and perhaps because his sister had divorced Goldwyn in 1915 he chose Zukor. Famous Players-Lasky went on to become Paramount Pictures: Goldwyn, with the $900,000 he received as a settlement, went on to start a new company with Edgar and Arch Selwyn, two Broadway producers.

Looking for a new company name, Goldwyn (whose name then was still Goldfish) and the Selwyns thought of combining their two surnames: “Sel-fish” was one possibility, but “Gold-wyn” was more practical. The result was the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, the sound of which was so pleasing to the company’s president and chief stockholder (Samuel Goldfish) that in 1918 he legally changed his own name to match it: one of the few instances in which an individual was named for a corporation, rather than vice versa.

The major reason that Goldwyn had been unable to work with Zukor and Lasky was that he was fiercely independent and accustomed to having things done his own way. It was inevitable, therefore, that Goldwyn would clash with his business partners in the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. In March, 1922, for the second time in six years, Goldwyn was forced to resign from a company he had helped establish. The Goldwyn Pictures Corporation went on to merge with Marcus Loew’s Metro Pictures Corporation in 1924, later becoming known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Samuel Goldwyn, having received one million dollars for his stock in Goldwyn Pictures, decided that he could not tolerate further partnerships and started his own company, known as Samuel Goldwyn Presents, in 1923.

Two years later, on April 23, 1925, Goldwyn married Frances Howard McLaughlin, a former actress, twenty-two years his junior. They moved from New York to Hollywood the next day, where they remained for the remainder of their lives. Goldwyn’s wife was the only person in whom he seemed to have complete trust and confidence. She became his unofficial assistant producer and story consultant. Their only child, Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., later became a motion-picture producer himself.

From 1923 to 1959, Goldwyn independently produced eighty motion pictures. This output may be divided into three stages: the first, from 1923 to 1935, when he produced forty-one pictures, more than half of his life’s work; the second, from 1936 to 1946, when he produced twenty-seven pictures, many of them enduring classics; and the third, from 1947 to 1959, when he produced only twelve pictures.

During the first period, from 1923 to 1935, Goldwyn’s productions ranged from love stories (Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky were his most successful screen couple) to musical comedies (six of which starred Eddie Cantor) to sophisticated dramas, such as Arrowsmith (1931) and Cynara (1932). None of these films is acclaimed as a classic, but as a group they established Goldwyn’s reputation in Hollywood as a producer who always aimed for top quality, regardless of cost.

The films produced during Goldwyn’s second period, from 1936 to 1946, include those for which he is best known. He worked with screenwriter Lillian Hellman to make These Three (1936), based on a Hellman play that had been thought not producible in Hollywood, and The Little Foxes (1941), nominated for eight Academy Awards. He adapted classic novels, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), in 1939, which helped make a star of Laurence Olivier, as well as more current literature, such as Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth (1929), in 1936, and Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End (1935), in 1937. As always, Goldwyn worked with many of Hollywood’s best directors, including Howard Hawks in Come and Get It (1936) and Ball of Fire (1942) and John Ford in The Hurricane (1937). His own favorite director seemed to be William Wyler. Wyler and Goldwyn worked together eight times, culminating in Goldwyn’s greatest success, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won seven Academy Awards and the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award for Goldwyn.

During Goldwyn’s final period, from 1947 (when he turned sixty-five) to 1959, fewer pictures were made, none of them particularly memorable. Included were several starring Danny Kaye, notably The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and Hans Christian Andersen (1952), and Goldwyn’s final two productions, both of them musicals adapted from successful stage shows, Guys and Dolls (1955) and Porgy and Bess (1959).

The failure of Porgy and Bess was a great disappointment to Goldwyn. After 1959, he ceased making pictures on his own and began renting his studio to other film and television producers. He suffered a stroke in 1969, which left him partially paralyzed. He died at his Beverly Hills home on January 31, 1974.

Significance

In spite of Goldwyn’s success as a producer of high-quality motion pictures, he may be best known for his fractured phrases, unintentionally humorous, which have become known as Goldwynisms. Goldwyn is even included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations for such memorable sayings as “Include me out” and “In two words: im-possible.”

However, Goldwyn’s real achievements are of a different order. Even if most Goldwynisms are not apocryphal and there is good reason to believe that many of them are he ought to be judged not by what he said, but by what he put on the screen: There, his talents are indisputable. At a time when the major Hollywood studios regularly filled their yearly quotas with films of low quality, Goldwyn insisted on producing nothing but the very best. He did not always succeed in doing so, but it was never for lack of trying.

From the 1920’s through the 1950’s, the motion-picture industry was controlled largely by a handful of Hollywood studio heads who oversaw all aspects of a film: from production to distribution to exhibition. As an independent, Goldwyn ran counter to this trend. In so doing, however, he pioneered the way for the independent producer of the post-1960’s New Hollywood.

For Goldwyn, being independent meant that he did not have to answer to anyone bankers, stockholders, company officers other than the public. It may sound peculiar that an uneducated, Jewish immigrant from Poland could have understood so well what the American public wanted to see. Goldwyn’s artistic instincts, however, combined with a shrewd business sense, made him one of the most successful creators of one of the most distinctively American enterprises: the Hollywood motion picture.

Bibliography

Aberbach, David. “The Mogul Who Loved Art.” Commentary 72 (September, 1981): 67-71. A balanced assessment of Goldwyn’s career, noting his unusual combination of artistic taste and business shrewdness. There is also an attempt by Aberbach at a psychological interpretation of Goldwyn’s accomplishments.

Berg, A. Scott. Goldwyn: A Biography. Reprint. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Comprehensive and balanced biography that portrays Goldwyn as a shrewd, ambitious, and often unscrupulous person and businessman.

Easton, Carol. The Search for Samuel Goldwyn. New York: William Morrow, 1976. This biography contends that Goldwyn, embarrassed by his humble origins, tried to hide them with elaborate (and deceitful) publicity.

Epstein, Lawrence J. Samuel Goldwyn. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Examines Goldwyn’s films in an analytic and thematic, rather than simply chronological manner. According to Epstein, Goldwyn deserves to be taken seriously as a film auteur.

Goldwyn, Samuel. Behind the Screen. New York: George H. Doran, 1923. These memoirs, surely ghostwritten, cover Goldwyn’s first ten years in the motion-picture business but have little to do with Goldwyn himself. There is no mention, for example, of his birth in Poland or his marriage. Instead, the focus is on Goldwyn’s famous Hollywood friends.

Griffith, Richard. Samuel Goldwyn: The Producer and His Films. New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1956. Reprint. New York: Garland, 1985. Published in conjunction with a series, “The Films of Samuel Goldwyn,” at the Museum of Modern Art, this book gives a quick overview of the “Goldwyn touch,” followed by a chronological examination of his work through 1955.

Johnston, Alva. The Great Goldwyn. New York: Random House, 1937. As indicated by the title, this is a flattering portrait of Goldwyn. The Goldwyn touch is defined, and Goldwyn’s search for quality is seen as comparable to that of Gustave Flaubert. Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post (May/June, 1937).

Marill, Alvin H. Samuel Goldwyn Presents. South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. This provides a detailed examination (with complete credits, plot summaries, and critical reception) for all eighty of Goldwyn’s independent productions, taken in chronological order.

Marx, Arthur. Goldwyn: A Biography of the Man Behind the Myth. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. As a Hollywood insider (Marx is the son of Groucho Marx), the author has written the most authoritative biography of Goldwyn. The book is especially good on Goldwyn’s career within the larger context of the American film industry.

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