PBS's Warner Bros. Documercial

Funding credits for "You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story," an "American Masters" special that debuts tonight on public television, include "People Like You," the standard public-TV way of saying viewer donations went toward production costs.

It's fair to ask whether people like us should help foot the bill for a U.S. corporation's five-hour testimonial to itself -- especially when the credits begin with "Warner Bros. Presents" and the familiar, even beloved, Warner shield. The 85-year history of the company includes the present, a time when -- according to publicity for the production -- "studio collaborations with George Clooney and more new talents pave the way to a future as fabled as the past."

Five hours is a long, long time, but those with an insatiable curiosity about Hollywood history will probably find the documentary miniseries absorbing and the clip parade to be made up of marvelously memorable moments. But painting a rosy picture of the company as it exists now, and envisioning a "fabled" future for it, contribute to the impression that this is part documentary, part infomercial.

Of course, if "You Must Remember This" were airing on a commercial network, or were it to pop up where it really belongs, on Turner Classic Movies -- cable's indispensable horn of plenty -- nobody would have to raise propriety questions. Since it is playing on PBS stations, however, it's inevitable that Warner Presents Warner should raise an eyebrow or two.

The words "You Must Remember This" come from "As Time Goes By," a song that was already a sentimental standard by the time it was interpolated into "Casablanca" in 1942; it's now been co-opted for use in the muted, modernized fanfare that opens Warner Bros. films. The funding arrangement is a little complicated, but wouldn't be if Warner had paid the production costs in addition to throwing open the archives and files to the producers.

Those producers include film critic and author Richard Schickel; we are thus told at the outset that this is "A Richard Schickel Film." Past the irksome credits, the experience awaiting viewers amounts to five hours of enjoyable enchantment, a movie-lover's delight even when contentions are shaky or interpretations iffy. Wafting along with Busby Berkeley's neon violins, fighting back tears beside a heartbroken Bogie, shocked to hear a handsome and panic-stricken Ronald Reagan ask, "Where's the rest of me?" we travel through a mythic past that defies time and fashion. What a trip it is.

Things get a bit less certain when Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry Callahan stands sadistically on a criminal's bleeding leg, or when Eastwood is congratulating himself, as well as Warner, for having made "Million Dollar Baby" and "Bird," or when Eastwood extols such other Eastwood films as "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Bronco Billy." The narrator of the documentary? Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood doesn't really have a five-hour voice; it isn't commanding or stentorian or pleasant to listen to. But he's certainly a big marquee name, and his presence adds latter-day glamour to the film. He's also one of dozens of authorities who contribute reminiscences about what differentiates Warner Bros. from other studios. One thing that does is a hint of consistency through the years, even when management and ownership changed; from the beginning, Warner films tackled troubling topical issues, often with a bare minimum of flinching.

It's still shocking to see a fictionalized Leo Frank, his name changed in the film, being dragged from a train by a lynch mob in "They Won't Forget" (1937) for supposedly murdering a young girl but really for being a Jew; or to watch as Ginger Rogers, of all people, is whipped by a Ku Klux Klan pooh-bah in "Storm Warning" (1951), or to watch Paul Muni disappear into nothingness as the wrongly convicted and mercilessly persecuted hero of "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932).

In Hollywood's Golden Age, Warner Bros. was considered Democratic and MGM was Republican; Warner explored social injustice, and MGM pretended it didn't exist. Perhaps if the documentary had confined itself to the first three or four decades of Warner films, it might have been more successfully evocative. At some point, this film turns into a list -- or a series of lists: the films of Stanley Kubrick, the films of Clint Eastwood and so on.

More arresting by far, no matter how familiar the material, are the films of Joan Crawford, the films of Bette Davis, the films of James Cagney, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and, yes, the seven-minute films of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. Credit is thoughtfully given to Chuck Jones, brilliant animator and director, and to the gang at "Termite Terrace," where Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies were made.

Schickel recycles some of the filmed interviews he did for his series "The Men Who Made the Movies" more than three decades ago -- Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, etc. -- but has also retrieved rare footage from many other sources, much of it valuable.