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George Groves and Warner Bros. (1931 - 1956)

Including the 1st Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force (FMPU), Teddington Studios, Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy

I look back on my association with Alfred Hitchcock as one of the great privileges of my tenure of office at Warner Bros.  I really loved Alfred Hitchcock    -   [George Groves]

Warner Bros. switched to sound-on-film in March 1930, just five years after adopting sound-on-disc. However, theatre owners, who had invested heavily in Vitaphone equipment only a short time earlier, were unwilling to abandon their disc systems quite as quickly. So until 1937 Warners made their films available for exhibition in both formats. The Vitaphone name was, however, kept alive for many more years and in the 1950s Warners record label used it as their brand for high-fidelity recording. However despite the name's longevity, Vitaphone will always be strongly associated with the early sound films that George Groves played such a major role in recording.

Adapting to sound-on-film did not cause George any problems. Much of his work involved pre-scoring artistes for playback on sets, so he was heavily involved in disc recording for many more years.

In September 1931 George was surprised to learn that Warners, who in 1926 had relocated him from New York to Hollywood, were sending him on his travels once again. This time, however, it was back to his homeland for a period of almost two years.

George was assigned to Warners' newly acquired studios at Teddington in London which he described as a "very beautiful country estate on the banks of the Thames".

Warners' intention was to make Teddington their European base for the production of dual versions of pictures which could be sold to both French and English markets. Many would be 'quota quickies', made to fulfill the production requirements of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act.

However, George had become acclimatised to the Californian climate and a cold British winter was a shock to his system:

It was so cold that in order to look at dailies, we had stoves in front of us to keep ourselves warm and we were wrapped up in mufflers and overcoats.

Film production equipment was shipped to London from Burbank but was incompatible with the British mains frequency so it all had to be converted. The British technicians were quite inexperienced at sound film production and George found the set-up rather primitive compared to what he'd been used to in Hollywood. They had no scoring stage as such. Orchestras were instead squeezed into the 'carriage house', as George called it, which was adjacent to the main country house where they also reviewed dailies.

When George returned to Hollywood in early 1933, it was the beginning of the big musicals era and he worked on Busby Berkeley films 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of '33. In Footlight Parade, he said some of the girls on the waterfall sets - who were enduring lengthy waits for camera set ups - fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts. George enjoyed working with Berkeley immensely:

I have the greatest admiration for Buzz…He was an extremely well organised man. Wonderful ideas of course…He’s a great guy to work with, Buzz was, extremely talented, just marvellous.

Between November and December 1933 George Groves was reunited with Al Jolson (pictured right with Kay Francis) in the making of Wonder Bar. Although pre-scoring numbers (pre-recording them in advance of the film shoot) and then filming performers singing or miming to recorded playbacks, was now standard practice, exceptions were being made at the insistence of directors and even premier acting talent like Al Jolson.

The fourteen minute song, Going to Heaven on a Mule, was an example of this. The black-face Jolson and large chorus and out-of-shot orchestra were 'standard recorded' by George:

Rather than have him [Jolson] tied down to a playback, it was standard recorded...It was all scored in the same location not on the scoring stage but on stage 2, so the sound of the orchestra stayed uniform throughout.

Standard recording was also used in Gold Diggers of 1935, directed by Busby Berkeley. However there was a practical reason for its use, rather than a director or actor's whim. In the lengthy Lullaby of Broadway sequence, when long rows of dancers faced one another and tap danced (pictured left), they "shook the stage floor", according to George. It was considered impossible to control a group of dancers that large and keep them in rhythm with a low level orchestral playback, so an orchestra played at one side of the stage and microphones down the lines of the dancers picked up the taps. This was all recoded live by George on just one track who said that was "an example of standard recording by necessity".

In 1936 George was promoted to the post of chief sound mixer reporting to Colonel Nathan Levinson, who was Director of Sound at Warner Bros. Technical improvements were being made throughout the decade and by mid-1937 Warners had migrated from Western Electric variable density sound recordings to RCA variable area. The main advantage was in improvements to the volume range,

George worked on numerous Warners' films prior to his involvement in the Second World War. One of his most notable pictures was Casablanca in 1942. As well as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, the film also starred Claude Rains who played Captain Renault (pictured right).

George became great friends with Claude Rains and told him that he felt his accent in Casablanca was inappropriate for the role. He was a London-born actor playing a French military officer, but during rehearsals he had decided to adopt an American accent:

I talked to Claude about it. I said I hope you don’t think I’m out of line but any Frenchman who was at that rank and who’d learnt to speak English would learn to speak it with an English accent...why don’t you speak normally? He said “By gosh, I’m sure glad you drew my attention to that George, it was absolutely wrong”. And from them on he talked like Claude Rains. Casablanca was interesting to work on, it was a great show.

The other notable picture of 1942 was Yankee Doodle Dandy starring James Cagney for which Warner's Sound Department won the Best Sound Oscar at the Academy Award of 1943. Some of the big numbers were standard recorded, not on the scoring stage but on production stages, "with a lot of marching people and flags waving", said George.

On November 28th 1942, George Groves, just days away from his 41st birthday, enlisted in the Army Air Force and was given the rank of Captain. He joined The 1st Motion Picture Unit (F.M.P.U.) which was a nickname for the 18th Air Force Base Unit of the Army Air Force.

F.M.P.U. was the first unit of the U.S. military to be composed entirely of motion picture personnel and George joined as head of the sound department. Jack Warner had been instrumental in setting up the unit which initially was based at his Vitagraph studios in East Hollywood. By the time George enlisted they were based at the Hal Roach studios in Culver City, where many Laurel and Hardy comedies had been shot.

F.M.P.U. made over 400 training and educational films with over 1,000 personnel. Some of their more notable films were William Wyler's The Memphis Belle and Frank Capra's Why We Fight series. The stars based there with George included Ronald Reagan, Alan Ladd, George Montgomery, William Holden and Lee Cobb and a "very fine staff of writers"  from the motion picture industry were also located there. On 6th December 1943, George was promoted to the rank of Major.

A top secret project was a training film which prepared flight crews for the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 as George remembered:

" One whole stage was occupied with a miniature of the approach to Tokyo harbour and that was photographed duplicating the altitude of the planes, the speed of the planes, the whole bombing run on the approach. It was shown to the crews before they left as to what would be seen on their radar scopes ".

He was also involved in training film crews to go overseas into battle zones as combat camera units. The workload was very intense and at one point he suffered bronchial pneumonia after working almost 24 hours a day to get dubbing work for a film completed.

George also acted as court martials officer and summary court officer adjudicating on minor offences such as AWOL, and petty theft.

It was good training as far as I was concerned. I think it helped me develop a sense of fair play in later years with regard to the personnel that I had working for me.

This picture taken in 1946 shows the playback system with turntable in use at Warners

After three years service in Culver City, George returned to Warner Bros. in Burbank in December 1945 in time to work on Humoresque with Joan Crawford and John Garfield and the Cole Porter bio-pic Night and Day starring Cary Grant.

In early 1947 George returned to the UK for few months. Two years earlier, Warners had become the majority shareholder in the Associated British Picture Corporation and George was charged with monitoring the rebuilding of their studios at Elstree. He wrote lengthy reports to Colonel Levinson, the Director of Warners' Sound Department, on the progress being made. These also included a survey of the condition of British cinemas and an assessment of the extent to which television was developing. George was very impressed with the set-up at Elstree:

It was a very, very efficient and very well engineered and designed and well-built complex...It was a very gratifying assignment as far as I was concerned.

Back in Hollywood, George worked on classic films Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart and Alfred Hitcock's Rope, both released in 1948. An early use of magnetic tape recording was made in Rope which was filmed with continuous ten minute sequences using a whole reel at a time. These required two weeks of rehearsals which were tape recorded by George so the cast and Hitchcock (pictured above with Joan Chandler) could hear the actors' performances and make corrections. George got on famously with 'Hitch' and had great respect for him:

I look back on my association with Alfred Hitchcock as one of the great privileges of my tenure of office at Warner Brothers. He’s an absolute delight. He knew what he wanted, knew how to get it and got it with the minimum of fuss and was courteous and gentlemanly to everybody concerned.  I really loved Alfred Hitchcock.

George Groves pictured with Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Romberg

In June 1949 George co-wrote a paper for the Society of Motion Picture Engineers on the uses of magnetic recording in motion picture studios. Although great strides were being made in improving the technology, it was still in its infancy and not yet being used in film production. But George could see the future.

On December 27th 1951, George Groves married Jane Blackman at the home of Warners' Assistant Director of Sound, William Mueller. Both George and Jane were divorcees and would have one child together.

With the death of Nathan Levinson in 1952, Bill Mueller took up the stewardship of the Sound Department with George serving as his Assistant Director.

For twenty-five years the soundtracks to Warners' films were single track, monaural. Then in 1951 they changed to magnetic recording and a three track scoring installation was introduced. Although the release of the House of Wax in 1953 is more renowned for being the first 3D film, it was also Warner's first stereo production (Fox's 'The Robe' was the first picture with stereo).

Three track stereo exhibition did have its problems, however, as it required special sprocket holes in the films and corresponding sprockets in theatre's projectors. George commented how film damage was often caused when films were shown with projectors using the wrong sprockets. This was particularly a problem with The Music Man where reprint rates, especially in Canada, were extremely high.

The release of the House of Wax in 3D and stereo was partly motivated by a desire to arrest the decline in audiences by providing compelling entertainment that theatre-goers would want to see. Television was proving stiff competition but was totally anathema to Jack Warner:

Mr. Warner was the arch-enemy of television. He was so against this intruder that he wouldn’t even allow a television set on a motion picture set as a prop. He was against it wholeheartedly until he, and I think the rest of the industry realised, that you couldn’t kill it, you had to join it...[Jack Warner] said “alright we’ll make ‘em. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em."

This picture is taken from an article George Groves wrote for International Sound
Technician Magazine in June 1953 on the practice of pre-recording musical scenes.
In the photo George is demonstrating one of the earliest playback reproducers.

Early in 1954 George supervised the scoring on the classic picture, A Star is Born starring Judy Garland. He remembered it as a happy time when even Jack Warner would come down to the scoring stage and hug her:

It was a wonderful experience to pre-record her numbers. She was a love to work with...Our experience with her was a joy. She seemed to be very, very happy with what she heard from the recordings and they were good...She was on time and loved the performance of the crew and everybody.

In June 1955 Warners bit the bullet and became television producers and were soon making 10 hours of programmes per week. George considered TV to be a "godsend" as the number of feature films that were being made on their lot was diminishing each year.

At their production peak, Warners had been making fifty pictures a year in Burbank, but it was now down to only a dozen or so. Consequently George was having to lay off long-standing sound production staff. However, television shows tended to be shot during the summer months for the upcoming fall season and this was when feature production was at a low ebb:

It worked out very well as far as we were concerned. Personnel got more like a full year’s work instead of six months...although we were constantly fighting deadlines.

NEXT PAGE - George Groves and Warner Bros. (1957-62)