The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Discussion

  • Free and Easy

    Opinion

    There are things to enjoy in Free and Easy, but it is a film whose final shot is heartbreaking, and not for the hoaky reasons intended by the filmmakers. Buster Keaton’s character, Elmer Butts, has failed to get the girl he loves. Dressed in a ridiculous uniform and in Pagliacciesque clown makeup, Keaton gazes off-camera at Anita Page with a look of utter despondency, then raises his eyes to heaven. It is probably the most downbeat ending ever given to a musical, and that includes West Side Story (1961 and 2021).

    A tragic Buster Keaton is just wrong

    It has been suggested that Keaton is looking, not at his co-star, but at his life as one of the preeminent filmmakers in Hollywood (or anywhere else) disappearing in front of his eyes. It is as though the full implications of what he has given up by signing a contract with MGM is becoming clear for the first time in front of our eyes. Symbolically, Keaton loses the girl for the first time in his career, just as he has lost his independence and potential for creativity.

    Free and Easy was Keaton’s first talking picture, and the first since his earliest days when he had played no real part in its development. The opening titles claim the film as A Buster Keaton Production, but this would seem to have meant little in practice. The film was directed by Edward Sedgwick, a friend of Keaton’s and another comedy specialist who failed to find a settled place at Hollywood’s most successful studio.

    Keaton turns in a professional performance, but he is not playing a Buster Keaton character: in his own films he was never a loser. The finale suggests that Metro were under the impression they had signed Chaplin or Harry Langdon. Left to his own devices, Keaton would probably have made a successful transition to sound: his baritone voice is effective both speaking and singing, and would not have impeded his gag-based comedy.

    Ma Plunkett (Trixie Friganza) and Elmer (Buster Keaton) perform ‘Oh King, Oh Queen’

    The biggest revelation in Free and Easy is Trixie Friganza as the stage mother from hell, Ma Plunkett. Friganza had been a vaudeville star for many years and the film captures some of the talent that made her stage career such a success. 

    Anita Page and Robert Montgomery (who does get the girl) stand around looking attractive, and the film features cameos by a number of MGM luminaries. One of the more interesting aspects of Free and Easy is the glimpse it gives of the Metro studio during the transition to sound.

  • Montana Moon

    Opinion

    Several commentators on Montana Moon have focused on the inadequacy of its sound recording. Richard Barrios, for example, points out to “Joan Crawford singing on horseback zillions of feet away from the camera sounding just as loud as the cowboy chorus warbling in the foreground. This may, in part, be attributable to shooting many sequences away from the soundstage. The number cited by Barrios, ‘Montana Moon,’ was filmed on location, enabling the distance he mentions. The staging may have been decided weeks after the recording for playback was made, resulting in the dissonance of sound and image.

    Montana Moon gets little love from the few writers on early musicals. Edwin M Bradley goes so far as to claim that Joan Crawford “is not pleasingly photographed by the usually reliable William Daniels,” which is palpably untrue.

    Gay young thing Joan (Joan Crawford), backlit by William Daniels

    For my part, while the plot of Montana Moon is clearly nonsensical, I find it far more watchable than its immediate Metro musical predecessor, Lord Byron of Broadway. It is well-photographed (whatever Bradley says) and better-acted than many films of the period. And if Johnny Mack Brown is no great leading man, he is John Barrymore compared to Charles Kaley.

    The songs provided by Stothart-Grey and Freed-Brown are mediocre but inoffensive, and in a couple of cases difficult to attribute. Crawford, as always, does her best with the talent she has, but much of the singing is left to supporting player Cliff Edwards, the world’s most-unlikely cowboy until you look at Benny Rubin (check out Rubin in the closing shot, grinning away as if he lived on horseback).

    Larry (Johnny Mack Brown) carries off Joan, while Bloom (Benny Rubin) looks on

    Montana Moon, in addition to William Daniels, had some classy people working offscreen. Director Mal St Clair was past his best, but he and editor Carl Pierson pace the picture quite well, while costumes were provided by Adrian.

    Often cited as the first Singing Cowboy film, Montana Moon does not deserve a high reputation, but it does merit a better one than it has.

  • Lord Byron of Broadway

    The problem and the failure of Lord Byron of Broadway are epitomized by the central cast, whose acting is painfully bad. None of its three leading players–Charles Kaley, Marion Shilling and Ethelind Terry–had any experience of film acting. Kaley, in fact, was not an actor at all, but a singer and band leader. And the result of this bold (or foolhardy) casting by producer Harry Rapf was to bring the careers of Kaley and Terry to an abrupt halt, while Shilling, who continued acting for a few more years, was relegated to ‘B’ westerns. Lord Byron might have turned out very differently with the originally-announced leads, Bessie Love and William Haines, though it is unlikely Love would have thanked anyone for another dose of noble heartbreak.

    Roy (Charles Kaley) gives Bessie (Gwen Lee) the go by. Kaley is using facial expression #1 (serious), rather than #2 (grinning)

    The lack of substance in the lead players (though Terry does her best) meant that much of the heavy lifting, in terms of light and shade, and of humour, was left to supporting players Cliff Edwards and Benny Rubin. Both were affable players, but neither was capable of holding a picture together.

    The problem with the performances was exacerbated by Rapf’s equally bizarre decision to assign the picture to William Nigh, a third-tier action director attempting to punch above his weight at Hollywood’s biggest studio. Harry Beaumont, of Broadway Melody fame, was brought in to undertake significant reshooting, but was unable to save the film, which drags painfully even though only 80 minutes long. Anne Bauchens, the highly-respected editor of Cecil B DeMille’s films, must have despaired at the material she was given to work with.

    Lord Byron of Broadway is further undermined by an inferior Freed-Brown score. The stand-out song, ‘Should I?,’ is familiar to most musical fans from the snatch of it heard in Singin’ in the Rain. 

    Choreographer Sammy Lee is Berkeleyesque before Berkeley

    The film has the Technicolor sequences that seemed obligatory at the time. The ‘Blue Daughter of Heaven’ number was presumably shot by Beaumont, and does show significant development from his first musical. The camera moves in and out of the stage space, and Sammy Lee’s choreography is even captured in Berkeleyesque overhead shots filmed some months before Berkeley himself came to Hollywood. The geometric patterns are simple and lack Berkeley’s firm control, but they are a brave attempt. 

  • They Learned About Women

    Opinion

    They Learned About Women is a contender for the worst title ever given to a film musical. ‘Playing the Field’ and ‘Take It Big’ were other suggested titles, but undoubtedly lend themselves to innuendo. The other contender, ‘The Pennant-Winning Battery’ would arguably have been worse.

    Van and Schickel were very popular entertainers, and their musical performances give an inkling of why they were so liked. But they were no great shakes as actors and it seems likely they would have gone the same way as the Duncan Sisters after It’s a Great Life, if Schickel’s untimely death had no rendered the matter moot.  

    Sam (Benny Rubin), Jack (Joe Schickel) and Tim (Tom Dugan) at the start of a new season. Jerry (Gus Van) is AWOL.

    They Learned About Women was the second Metro musical outing for the songwriting team of Milton Ager and Jack Yellen, and is notable for being the first of the studio’s musicals with a score entirely written by one team. These remained a rarity for the next forty years. It’s a fairly average set of numbers, though ‘Ten Sweet Mamas’ is notable for several reasons. It is a very early integrated number, in two senses: it is sung by Gus Van not on a stage, but in a shower room, with the chorus engaged in their ablutions while singing; Van washes himself then lies face down on a massage table. 

    The song is also integrated in the way it comments on the themes and plot

    Jerry tells the other players all about his Ten Sweet Mamas

    of the film. ‘Ten Sweet Mamas’ is a variation on ‘Ten Green Bottles,’ with the number of mamas reducing throughout the song; in fact, Van starts singing at the seven point. The song’s subject is unfaithfulness, ostensibly female (“Can’t trust a woman/I have found”), though in fact the blame swings both ways (he loses his last mama because she catches him with his wife). The lyrics foreshadow Jack’s fickleness and Daisy’s duplicity. The shower room setting, coyly shot though it is, positions the film as pre-code, as does the lyric “Had two sweet mamas for my jelly roll,” which was a euphemism for sexual intercourse. 

    The film’s other highpoint is its one production number, ‘Harlem Madness,’ which gave Nina Mae McKinney, the breakout star of Hallelujah, her second and final opportunity to shine. Her singing and dancing is joyously eccentric enough to merit the song’s title.

    Nina Mae McKinney gives it her all in ‘Harlem Madness’

    The direction in They Learned About Women is fairly lacklustre, even though it took two directors to achieve it. It was far from unusual at MGM, at that time, for one director to complete another’s film, but it seems unclear why, on this occasion, Conway and Wood were given a shared credit.

    Bessie Love works hard, as always, but there are diminishing returns for her third dose of heartbreak in a year. Frankly, Jerry is as big a chump as Terry in Chasing Rainbows; she would probably have been better off with Jerry.

  • Chasing Rainbows

    Opinion

    There are things to enjoy in Chasing Rainbows, Metro’s third backstage musical, but it must be said that the film struggles to overcome one thing: Charles King. 

    In The Broadway Melody, King gave an unsophisticated but largely unmannered performance as Eddie, the cocky songwriter and unlikely love interest of two women. In The Hollywood Revue of 1929, all King really had to do was sing, and he was pretty good at that. But in Chasing Rainbows he is required to act emotions that are simply beyond his abilities. 

    Terry (Charles King) is in despair, but Eddie (Jack Benny) just doesn’t care

    It does not help that King’s character, Terry Fay, is a mug and a cause of constant irritation to those around him. But we can never for a moment believe in his love or his despair. Especially his despair. Staring at the ground and frowning do not demonstrate any kind of believable anguish. It is true that his fellow actors in the company of Goodbye Broadway always ridicule Terry’s pain, but it should at least appear that he believes in it himself, if only for the moment. It is unsurprising that King’s acting career faded so quickly.

    The two performers in MGM’s first musicals who could always make a film watchable were Bessie Love and Marie Dressler. Love is as natural and believable as ever, even when acting off the blank wall that was King, and despite the flagrant attempt by the filmmakers to replicate the emotion of the dressing room scene in The Broadway Melody.

    Polly (Polly Moran) and Bonnie (Marie Dressler), having resolved their feud, become tired and emotional

    Dressler had no great respect for these musicals, and advised Bessie Love to stop letting the studio force her into unworthy material. But her scenes with Polly Moran stand out comedically, as does her rendition of ‘Poor But Honest’. It is regrettable that Dressler’s second number, ‘My Dynamic Personality,’ was in one of the two Technicolor sequences lost during the 1965 MGM fire (though the audio has survived). The earlier Technicolor section featured Bessie Love performing ‘Everybody Tap,’ which she presumably did with her usual winning lack of finesse. 

    That sequence also contained an early example of plot progression during a musical performance. While Terry sings ‘Love Ain’t Nothing But the Blues,’ Carlie overhears Daphne explaining to Cordova her plan to exploit Terry.

    Carlie (Bessie Love) in the lost ‘Everybody Tap’ number

    Chasing Rainbows could not be said to have a great or memorable score, with one exception. ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ became the anthem of the Roosevelt administration and a standard, featured frequently as incidental scoring in many other pictures.

  • Marianne (1929)

    William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures was essentially a vanity project for the production of films starring Marion Davies. That films like Marianne are far more than vanity projects is largely owing to Davies’s talents as a comic performer.

    Marianne is a sound remake of a silent film, also starring Davies, that had been made only a few months earlier. Apart from her brief appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 , it was Davies’s talking debut and, whatever the merits of the film, it is a small triumph for her personally. She overcame the stammer which had made her fearful of speaking on screen. More than that, she uses a French accent, sings, and shares screen time with a pig. She even demonstrates her skills as a mimic, impersonating Maurice Chevalier and Sarah Bernhardt.

    “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise” Marianne (Marion Davies) does Maurice Chevalier

    The film itself is overlong at approaching two hours, but technically more proficient than many contemporaneous talkies. It is also the first Metro musical to combine a non-backstage setting with a bespoke songlist. (Hallelujah was intended by King Vidor to include only traditional songs and its two Irving Berlin numbers were included against his wishes.)  Three songwriting partnerships contributed these songs: Ahlert and Turk (four numbers), Klages and Greer (two), and Freed and Brown (one).

    Marianne is not an integrated musical in the sophisticated sense of the Freed unit’s output in the 1950s, but its musical numbers do arise naturally from the action. The title song, ‘Marianne,’ is performed three times. André sings it in French and the words specifically relate to his departure and his wish that Marianne remain faithful to him. Later, the words are spoken in English by Marianne herself, to explain why she cannot go with Stagg. Finally, Stagg sings to Marianne, saying “The words could be mine as well as his, couldn’t they?”. This is a sophisticated use of a song to develop the story.

    Similarly, ‘Just You, Just Me’ has lyrics appropriate to Stagg’s final attempt to persuade Marianne to go with him. He sings the love song to her alone, but while surrounded by dancing couples singing a completely different song. Again, director Robert Z Leonard is employing a sophisticated technique for the period, utilizing sound rather than simply recording it and incorporating a song to move the story forward.

    Stagg (Lawrence Gray) sings ‘Just You, Just Me’ to Marianne

    Elsewhere, Cliff Edwards and Benny Rubin make the first of their many appearances as vocal and comic support to a musical’s star players. Edwards subsequently had a chart hit with a recording of ‘Just You, Just Me’.

  • Hallelujah (1929)

    King Vidor directed one of the most iconic sequences in any film musical, when Judy Garland sings ‘Over the Rainbow’ in The Wizard of Oz, though his work on the film was uncredited. Ten years earlier Vidor had made his only other, more extended, contribution to the genre when he devised and directed Hallelujah, Metro’s first all-Black musical.

    Daniel J Haynes as Zeke, picking cotton in the opening scene of Hallelujah

    Most of the MGM directors who excelled in film musicals–Vincente Minnelli, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Charles Walters–were inextricably linked to the genre, even if they later or occasionally branched out into other areas. Even Rouben Mamoulian had a background in film and stage musicals before undertaking Summer Holiday. King Vidor is the only director of prestige dramas to have made a substantial contribution to Metro’s musical tradition.

    Hallelujah could not, as Ethan Mordden suggests in The Hollywood Musical, have been less like a musical in the Broadway Melody tradition. Set in and around the cotton plantations of the American South, it is a story of sin and redemption, intended by Vidor to say something serious about, and present an accurate picture of, “the Negro race”. Inevitably, stereotypes and racist tropes of the time are not absent from a film written and made by white people, but Hallelujah is generally acknowledged as a sincere effort to show Black characters as people rather than types, especially in their experience of grief and passion (Donald Bogle,Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, 1984). 

    It is also, in Rick Altman’s view, the first masterpiece of the folk musical genre, with its focus on togetherness and community (The American Film Musical, 1987). Unlike its predecessor, The Broadway Melody, Vidor’s film presents characters in everyday settings, rather than the showbiz world that lends itself to song and dance; it is an attempt to tell a story through the music of the community represented. Most of the songs are spiritual in nature, less concerned with performance than with the spontaneous expression of religious faith. Song expresses emotions that cannot be enunciated any other way.

    A repentant Zeke sings ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’

    Vidor’s vision was compromised by the studio’s insistence on incorporating two numbers written by Irving Berlin, to improve the picture’s commercial potential. ‘Waiting at the End of the Road’ is a pseudo-spiritual, sung by Zeke and Spunk when they set off to sell the cotton, and reprised when Zeke preaches. ‘Swanee Shuffle’ is sung by Nina Mae McKinney and is at least appropriate to her character’s character. 

    Dance is also character-driven in Hallelujah. ‘Dance 1’ is a tap dance performed as a spontaneous outburst of joy by children at a family gathering, while McKinney’s ‘Dance 2’ reveals Chick’s inner nature, as well as performing the narrative function of enticing Zeke.   

    Much of Hallelujah was filmed on location in Tennessee and Arkansas, giving it a sense of space and fluidity very different from most of its contemporaries. This was achieved by the decision to film the location sequences without sound, and to add the songs and dialogue later, Back in Hollywood. The price of freeing the camera in this way was a torturous six-month post-production period in which an approach to synchronizing sound and image had to be improvised on the hoof.

    Bogle is right in calling Hallelujah‘s story akin to “operatic absurdity” and it can never be more than a white humanist’s vision of a culture known only from the outside. It is, nonetheless, one of the first Hollywood masterpieces of the sound era and the first musical film of real substance.       

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