Samuel Bronston

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Samuel Bronston (26 March 1908 – 12 January 1994) was a Russian-born American film producer, and a nephew of socialist revolutionary figure, Leon Trotsky. He was also the petitioner in a U.S. Supreme Court case that set a major precedent for perjury prosecutions when it overturned his conviction.

Bronston was born in Bessarabia, Russian Empire (present day Moldova) and educated at the Sorbonne. He worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's French unit in Paris before setting up as an independent film producer by the 1940s. His first film for his new production company, Samuel Bronston Productions, was Jack London, (1943) followed by a series of epic films: John Paul Jones (1959), King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

He was a pioneer in the practice of locating epic-scale productions in Spain to reduce the massive costs involved. The success of his films inspired him to help build gigantic studios in Las Rozas near Madrid.

Bronston frequently worked with a regular team of creative artists: the director Anthony Mann, the screenwriters Philip Yordan and Jesse Lasky Jr., the composer Miklós Rózsa, the co-producers Jaime Prades, Alan Brown and Michal Waszynski, the cinematographer Robert Krasker and film editor Robert Lawrence. He also favoured Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren as his leading actors.

The cost of the construction of the film studios and the box-office failure of his last epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire combined to leave Bronston in financial difficulties and, in 1964, he had to stop all business activities. His company declared bankruptcy in June of that year.

Two years later, he was asked under oath by a lawyer for one of his creditors a series of questions about the many bank accounts the company had had in Europe. One of them concerned whether he had had an account in Switzerland. "The company had an account in Zurich for six months", he replied, and answered all other questions concerning Swiss bank accounts in the negative.

Later, it was discovered that he had indeed had a very active personal bank account in Geneva during the years he had been producing films in Europe. He was convicted of perjury by federal prosecutors who argued that his answer, while truthful in and of itself, was intended to mislead or evade. After the appeals court upheld the conviction, Bronston v. United States reached the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction on January 10, 1973. Its ruling, that literally truthful yet technically misleading answers cannot be prosecuted as perjury, has formed an important part of jurisprudence on the matter ever since, even being invoked by President Bill Clinton's attorneys when he was charged with perjury during his impeachment.

The bankruptcy and criminal prosecution devastated his film career. He completed the 1964 Circus World with John Wayne under the production company "Bronson", after which he made only three films, Savage Pampas (1966), filmed in Argentina with Robert Taylor, Doctor Coppelius (1966) and Fort Saganne (1984), a French film with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. A planned epic on the life of Isabella of Spain never materialised.