The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Discussion

  • Call of the Flesh

    Some Thoughts

    Call of the Flesh is the first musical at MGM to combine popular songs with extracts from Grand Opera, in the way so beloved of producer Joe Pasternak in the 40s and 50s. Sadly, the three Stothart-Grey numbers are instantly forgettable. Ramon Novarro was no Lauritz Melchior, but his renditions of Donizetti and Massenet at least deserve an A for effort.

    Juan (Ramon Novarro) sings ‘Ah! fuyez, douce image’ from Manon

    Tonally, the film shifts from being the light-hearted story of an arrogant young singer and his growing love for an innocent novice from the local convent, to a near-tragic final twenty minutes. It all works thanks to the acting of Raomon Novarro and Renée Adorée, and in spite of that of Dorothy Jordan. Jordan was not a bad actor, but her performance here is very laboured and one-note. She leaves inexplicable pauses before picking up her cues and relies too much on looking innocent.

    Novarro, however, gives one of his best performances in a sound picture. The scene in which he heartlessly rejects Jordan because her brother has persuaded him she should return to the convent, is genuinely touching. Elsewhere, he succeeds in the difficult task of making a conceited, unlikeable character likeable and amusing.

    Renée Adorée is also very good as Jordan’s jealous rival, but her performance is quite painful to watch. She was very ill with tuberculosis during the making of the film, to the extent that her friend Novarro tried to persuade her to stand down. She declined, but is visibly unwell. It was her final film, and she died a couple of years later. 

    Adorée does, however, combine with Novarro to deliver the MGM musicals’ first genuinely entertaining dance number. Both had worked as dancers when young, and it shows in the comic routine they deliver in the cantina.

    Juan and Lola (Renée Adorée) perform the first entertaining dance in an MGM musical

    The Technicolor sequences have not survived, but Call of the Flesh looks really good without them. Cedric Gibbons’s design is excellent and well photographed by Merritt B Gerstad. The scene in a church that looks like a cathedral is particularly impressive. There are even one or two stylistic flourishes from director Charles Brabin (or editor Conrad Nervig, perhaps). For example, the scene where the brother is persuading Juan to give up Maria Consuelo is truncated with dissolves, to force home the sense that Juan is being worn down. 

    Overall, Call of the Flesh–its terrible sexed-up title notwithstanding–is much more entertaining than might be expected.

  • The Florodora Girl

    Some Thoughts

    My grandpa saw the girly shows

    And told me of one special pearl,

    He said the hottest show in town

    Was called the Florodora Girl

    So sings Chip in On the Town, reading from his forty-year-old New York guidebook. He has to miss out, unfortunately, but a glimpse of the show can be caught in The Florodora Girl, a fictional tale about one of the original six chorus girls in the Broadway production of Owen Hall and Leslie Stuart’s Florodora.

    The show opened on Broadway in 1900 the film, as its subtitle ‘A Story of the Gay Nineties’ makes clear, is set in the late-Victorian period. This is certainly the period of most of The Florodora Girl’s songs. The then-ubiquitous Stothart-Grey partnership only wrote two numbers for the picture, with the assistance of Andy Rice. The rest are popular songs from the period. But the new songs blend in comfortably as pseudo-Victorian, especially ‘Pass the Beer and Pretzels’, which is part of a three-minute medley performed by Marion Davies and chorus. 

    Daisy (Marion Davies) throws herself into a performance of ‘Pass the Beer and Pretzels’

    Robert Barrios suggests that the film’s music is “present less for its own sake than to provide atmospheric upholstery”. There is a degree of truth in this, but it is not the whole story. For example, ‘Don’t Wake Me Up, I’m Dreaming’ (which may have a third set of lyrics by Clifford Grey or Andy Rice), is sung over, and mirrors, Daisy’s yearning looks at Jack after she refuses his flowers. And ‘Tell Me Pretty Maiden’ not only involves Jack’s intrusion into the on-stage performance, but the lyrics and movements of the singers are utilized to become Daisy’s half of their conversation.

    This reflects Harry Beaumont’s growing comfort with the musical. His staging and framing is much more inventive than in his earlier efforts, especially in the sequence at the Bowery slumming ball.

    Dancers at the Bowery slumming ball

    Marion Davies is clearly more comfortable as Daisy than she had been as Marianne, and her lively performance won deserved praise from critics. And as the film’s producer, she benefited from having a star who happened to own a private beach suitable for shooting a lengthy portion of the first half. Davies’s staff were able to provide catering that was a cut above what the cast and crew were used to in Culver City.   

  • In Gay Madrid

    In Gay Madrid is a strange title for a film that is almost entirely set in Santiago, over 300 miles from Madrid, typical of MGM’s cavalier attitude to naming its earliest musicals. It is a campus musical with a Spanish setting, like Good News with duelling. 

    The film reunited Ramon Novarro and Dorothy Jordan immediately after Devil-May-Care (they would work together once more in Call of the Flesh). Novarro was by now proving himself a very competent actor in talking pictures, though his accent sometimes throws off his line readings. His early scene with Claude King, playing his father, is nicely underplayed to comedic effect.

    Ricardo (Ramon Novarro) enquires why Carmina (Dorothy Jordan) does not like him

    Jordan’s performance is less satisfying, all played on one note and with long pauses. But then most of her scenes are stolen by the much lovelier performances of Novarro and Beryl Mercer, playing her aunt.

    The worst piece of casting is Lottice Howell as Goyita. Howell’s voice is okay, but she is nobody’s idea of a seductive nightclub singer. It is unsurprising that this was her last musical outing for MGM.

    Robert Z Leonard’s direction is much more confident than it was in Marianne, with a less static camera. He continues the tendency, begun in Devil-My-Care, for Ramon Novarro’s musical films to be integrated. With the exception of Lotice Howell’s opening nightclub number, all of the songs are performed in non-theatrical settings to non-diegetic music, and arise naturally from the actions of the characters. All have lyrics that reflect on or develop the narrative.

    One of the best sequences is the garden scene where Ricardo helps his friend (a large young man with the unlikely name of Corpulento) to serenade a girl. The action takes place within a large three-dimensional space and Leonard’s camera placement ensures that we always know where we are and whose point of view we are seeing.

    Ricardo sings and plays while Corpulento (Bruce Coleman) mimes

    The Ahlert-Turk and Stothart-Grey partnerships provided the words and music, with the latter pair being joined by Xavier Cugat, who would later make a successful series of appearances in front of the camera.

  • The Rogue Song

    Opinion

    It is impossible to give an opinion on the merits of The Rogue Song, a film no one has seen in its entirety for many years. Its status as the only ‘lost’ MGM musical, combined with its status as Laurel and Hardy’s only colour picture, has made it one of the holy grails of lost films. To date, about 22 minutes of footage has been unearthed around the world, less than a quarter of the total 103 minutes. Fortunately, the audiotrack has survived in its entirety. This, combined with the continuity script, has enabled YouTube provider Unreeled8 to produce a quasi-restoration of The Rogue Song, combining the soundtrack, surviving footage, stills, posters and AI  into a simulacrum of the original film. 

    Yegor (Lawrence Tibbett) sings to Princess Vera (Catherine Dale Owen) in surviving Technicolor footage

    The loss of The Rogue Song is sad for many reasons, not the least because it was the first all-Technicolor musical made at the studio now synonymous with Technicolor musicals. It was also the first to feature a great singer, rather than crooners like Charles King and Lawrence Gray. Edwin M Bradley has described the challenge posed to Douglas Shearer’s sound department by the power of Tibbett’s voice. The engineers found they had to put the microphone fifteen feet away from Tibbett in order to capture his singing voice correctly. (As a sidenote, when Tibbett recorded the medley for the flogging sequence [see below], he was stripped to the waist and tied to posts in the recording studio.)

    The available evidence suggests that The Rogue Song was a rummy sort of musical. Not many musicals, for example, have rape and suicide as significant plot elements, or a scene in which the hero sings a medley of songs while being publicly whipped (“The lash cries for blood!”).  It may have been these melodramatic aspects that led Irving Thalberg to assign the direction of this important picture to the otherwise entirely unsuitable Lionel Barrymore.

    The flamboyantly-coiffed Yegor takes his revenge on Prince Serge (Ulrich Haupt)

    The melodrama, combined with plodding direction, raised alarm bells after four weeks’ shooting, prompting the producers to inject some comic relief. This came in the form of Laurel and Hardy, the most unlikely of all Caucasian bandits. They feature in nine sequences, all directed by Hal Roach and separately from the rest of the picture (Stan and Ollie only worked for two days with the other actors).

    Ostensibly based on Franz Lehár’s operetta Gypsy Love (1910), the plot has been completely changed and very little of Lehár’s music retained. The new songs are by Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey.

    Murza-Bek (Oliver Hardy) and Ali-Bek (Stan Laurel) get back to work after their failed attempt to take over as leaders of the bandits

    The Rogue Song got good reviews and grossed over $1.1 million worldwide, but turning only a small profit because of its high production costs. Lawrence Tibbett, who sings all the film’s eight songs, appears to give a good performance by the standards of the day; he was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.

  • Children of Pleasure

    Opinion

    Harry Beaumont directed the first MGM musical, The Broadway Melody. He was brought in to save the unsaveable Lord Byron of Broadway, but Children of Pleasure should be treated as his second genuine effort (he appears to have been a last-minute replacement for Marshall Neilan). It makes an interesting contrast with the earlier film.

    Danny Regan (Lawrence Gray) jokes with ‘Ukelele Ike’ (Cliff Edwards)

    There are broad areas of similarity: both pictures are about a singer-songwriter who is too stupid to recognize the girl [sic] who really loves him. In Broadway Melody, Eddie ploughs right on and marries the wrong girl, leaving Hank with a broken heart and the film with a slightly downbeat ending. In Children, however, Danny realizes his mistake at the last minute and chases after self-sacrificing Emma. Result: an upbeat ending. 

    In Broadway Melody, ‘You Were Meant for Me’ was the first example of a song performed without a diegetic musical source, specifically to develop the narrative. A number of songs in Children comment on the narrative but, interestingly, none is set as boldly in a non-performance space as in the earlier film. Danny is usually performing for a diegetic audience, though sometimes with non-diegetic accompaniment. 

    Fanny Kaye (May Boley) struts her stuff with the chorus line

    The production numbers ‘A Couple of Birds with the Same Thing in Mind’ and ‘Dust’ both feature May Boley and the MGM chorus line, led by Ann Dvorak. Their presentation is perhaps a little tighter than in Broadway Melody, perhaps because the great Blanche Sewell was responsible for the editing, but the staging of Beaumont and choreographer Sammy Lee has not made any great progress. The camera resolutely stays outside the playing area, varied only by a change of camera angle. In ‘Dust,’ May Boley is featured entirely in full-length and extreme long shots, while the camera gets no closer than medium full for the chorus. (Although the surviving Technicolor version, which was an alternative take, does include some brief and rather clumsy medium close ups.)

    Harry Beaumont’s framing encapsulates the love triangle at the heart of Children of Pleasure

    The acting in Children of Pleasure is no great shakes, though Wynne Gibson is pretty good in the type of role Bessie Love must have been tired of by this stage. Benny Rubin lays on his schtick with a trowel, but plays effectively with May Boley.

    Children of Pleasure is based on a Crane Wilbur stage play that was inspired by Irving Berlin’s marriage to society heiress Ellin Mackay. In the film, Danny’s Jewishness may be inferred, but is not stated explicitly. 

  • 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.

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