The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Discussion

  • The Prodigal

    Some Thoughts

    Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released fifteen musicals in 1930, but by the end of the year, musicals were falling out of favour with the general public. The studio had already abandoned one major production, The March of Time, and only put out three musicals in the whole of 1931.

    Stepin Fetchit doing his thing as Hokey, in conversation with the returning Jeff (Lawrence Tibbett)
    Stepin Fetchit doing his thing as Hokey, in conversation with the returning Jeff (Lawrence Tibbett)

    All three suffered as a result of the public’s growing aversion to singing actors, but none more so than The Prodigal. MGM was still keeping faith with opera star Lawrence Tibbett, and his singing in this latest picture was outstanding, especially in ‘Without a Song’, performed to Vincent Youmans’s beautiful melody and with only slightly racist lyrics. But two other numbers–Jacques Wolfe’s ‘De Glory Road’ and ‘Life is a Dream’, written by Oscar Straus and Arthur Freed–were filmed but then deleted from the final cut. Studios thought they could make musicals more palatable to the public by having less music in them, which made little sense when your star was one of the world’s greatest singers.

    Hobo Jeff is given a bath by his mother (Emma Dunn), in a scene some commentators find slightly disturbing
    Hobo Jeff is given a bath by his mother (Emma Dunn), in a scene some commentators find slightly disturbing

    At the same time, The Prodigal was an attempt at presenting Tibbett in a non-operetta, and he does quite well in the more low-key dramatic scenes. Comic relief is provided by Roland Young (in the last of his three MGM musicals–he even gets to sing a few notes in this one) and Cliff Edwards.

    Esther Ralston, as Toni, is a fetching female lead in the typically pre-code story, with its easy-going, non-judgemental attitude to divorce. Her mother-in-law, Cynthia, swoops in as a deus ex machina, blithely instructing one son to get a divorce and the other to come back and claim Toni when it is all over, in one of the most hastily-arranged climaxes in 30s’ cinema. 

    Jeff explains the nature of chitlins to Doc (Roland Young) and Snipe (Cliff Edwards)
    Jeff explains the nature of chitlins to Doc (Roland Young) and Snipe (Cliff Edwards)

    Harry Pollard was obscure enough not even to rate a mention in Quinlan’s Film Directors, but he does not do a bad job on The Prodigal. He keeps it simple, with the only busy sequence being the barbeque with its mass of singers. Sadly, the sequence is painful in its racial stereotyping and Tibbett’s condescending serenade to the ever-smiling crowd of unnamed Black performers.

  • New Moon (1930)

    Some Thoughts

    The 1930 version of New Moon is unmistakably a pre-code picture, the two lovers having sex within the first fifteen minutes but remaining unmarried until almost the end. Even more strikingly, the sexual relationship is engineered, not by the philandering Lawrence Tibbett, but by Grace Moore, knowingly having fun with no intention of taking it seriously. 

    Tanya (Grace Moore) reveals to Michael (Lawrence Tibbett) that she knows a dirty song when she hears one

    Moore was, by her own admission, no great shakes as an actor (she described herself as “like a singing Mae West with long hair”), but she is much more effective here than in A Lady’s Morals, where the virginal Jenny Lind gave her little scope to do anything but sing. Her Princess Tanya is bold, promiscuous and, at least in the first half, a cold-hearted opportunist, conspiring with her uncle and aunt to marry wealth. Moore’s performance is playful; notice the subtle  reaction when Adolphe Menjou’s wandering hand finds her outstanding derrière.

    Tanya reacts as Boris (Adolphe Menjou) cops a feel

    Lawrence Tibbett gives a solid performance, the highlight being his fully-integrated rendition of the beautiful ‘Lover Come Back to Me’. He is also suitably vituperative when singing ‘What is Your Price Madam?’, a number by Stothart and Grey which holds its own with the songs retained from the original Romberg-Hammerstein score.

    New Moon benefits from having two outstanding supporting players in Roland Young and Adolphe Menjou. Young, as the easygoing uncle, seems much more comfortable here than in the frenzy of Madam Satan and steals all his scenes. Menjou, as always, personifies debonair sophistication as ‘Bedroom Boris’. Gus Shy, the only member of the original stage cast to feature in the film version, was always an acquired taste, but he does, at least, get to die a noble death.

    Tanya has driven an unfeasibly long distance, into dangerous country, for the pleasure of horse-whipping Michael

    Jack Conway’s direction is above-average for Metro’s earliest musicals, especially in the first, boudoir comedy section.  The second half, set in the fortress, is less interesting, though it features some excellent photography by Oliver T Marsh and impressive process shots. There is also a well-staged battle sequence that is quite unexpected in a musical. Apparently the effort of wrangling two Metropolitan Opera stars wore out Conway and Sam Wood completed the picture, which may explain some dropping off in the quality of the staging.

    Nonetheless, while New Moon creaks like the ship the characters sail on, it remains eminently watchable.

  • A Lady’s Morals

    Some ThoughtsNo thesaurus is needed to find the best word to describe A Lady’s Morals. ‘Dull’ is the obvious choice. 

    Jenny Lind (Grace Moore) is affronted by the ardour of stalker Paul Brandt (Reginald Denny)

    Grace Moore was the second star of the Metropolitan Opera signed up by MGM but, unlike Lawrence Tibbett, she has no onscreen charisma. In real life–and judging from her enjoyable autobiography–Moore was lively and vivacious, but none of that comes across in her film debut. Her performance is far too weak to carry the picture, and no one knew that better than Moore herself, who wrote scathingly about it. 

    She is not helped by the fact that the film’s subject, Jenny Lind, lived a stainless and uneventful life, reflected in the fact that the only moment of drama in A Lady’s Morals is a bout of stage fright.

    Reginald Denny’s mannered performance aonly adequate support. In his first scenes he seems to be continuing his irritating performance as Bob in Madam Satan; later, he is self-sacrificing. Wallace Beery makes nothing of his brief appearance as P T Barnum, because he is given nothing to do. He was given another, and better, stab at the role in The Mighty Barnum (1934).

    Jenny Lind is about to be overwhelmed by stage fright

    Sidney Franklin’s direction and George Barnes’s cinematography are workmanlike, but it is the screenplay that really disappoints. Dorothy Farnum was forced to fictionalize Jenny Lind’s unexciting life, but produces only a hackneyed tale involving blindness brought on by being hit on the head with a bottle. 

    MGM scored something of a coup by persuading the venerable Carrie Jacobs-Bond to contribute the song ostensibly written by Denny’s character, but otherwise the newly-written score is workaday. This is in contrast to the songs by Donizetti and Bellini. The studio had put a toe in the water of Grand Opera in Call of the Flesh, and continues the experiment here. Further steps were curtailed, however, by the 1932 moratorium. 

    Jenny and Paul are reunited in a happy ending that would have surprised the real Jenny Lind’s husband

    By all accounts, Jenny Lind (1931), the French remake of A Lady’s Morals, was a better film. Running slightly longer, it was directed by the talented Arthur Robison and playwright Jacques Deval worked on the screenplay.

  • Madam Satan

    Some Thoughts

    Madam Satan is a fascinating film. Fascinating in the sense that, while it is really not very good at all, it is almost impossible to look away from. And the nagging thought, while watching it, is: what were they thinking?

    Angela (Kay Johnson) as Madam Satan, vamps it up for an unsuspecting Bob (Reginal Denny in a miniskirt)

    This only applies to the second half, of course, because Madam Satan is a little like two different films spliced together. The first fifty minutes or so are the kind of sex comedy which had been so successful for Cecil B DeMille earlier in his career; films like Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). This is nowhere as good as those earlier films, but DeMille was seeking to find his feet in the sound era, following the melodrama of his first talkie, Dynamite (1929), by reverting to familiar territory.

    The second part of Madam Satan is something else entirely, the strangest musical made at MGM before Yolanda and the Thief came along fifteen years later to give it some competition. But while Yolanda is an extremely well-made oddity, Madam Satan is a farrago directed by someone who did not know one end of a musical from the other.

    Trixie (Lillian Roth) parachutes into a men’s sauna and doesn’t seem too put out

    Madam Satan is, considering the money spent on it and the records of the people involved in making it, largely incompetent. For example, the film was edited by DeMille regular Anne Bauchens, who cut all of his greatest films. But Madam Satan is filled empty space, a screen where nothing happens. And there is a moment during the sequence in Trixie’s apartment where Angela goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind her. After three seconds, the door clearly starts to reopen, but there is a cut to a shot inside the bedroom, showing Angela looking out with the door wide open. It is a jarring moment.

    Reginald Denny was a perfectly competent actor, but his line readings in Madam Satan are laboured, especially alongside the manic overacting of Roland Young, who gives the impression of being somewhere he would rather not be and desperately trying to act his way out of it.

    But it is in the extended party scene aboard the zeppelin that Madam Satan achieves genuine lunacy. The entrance of the revellers, the Ballet Mecanique, the auction–none of it makes any sense, and is clumsily staged, with choreography that is saved from looking as poor only because it is so badly photographed by, of all people, Hal Rosson.

    The sex comedy is picks up again at 1500 feet, only to be interrupted as almost the entire cast parachutes to earth, and the death of the Jazz Age is delivered in heavy-handed symbolism.

    The zeppelin awaits the arrival of the revellers, in one of Madam Satan‘s more interesting shots

    And yet, I have watched Madam Satan four times and will probably do so again. Its special effects are genuinely impressive, and its overall effect is mesmerizing. At its heart lie the puzzles of why Angela is wasting her time on an idiot like Bob, and why DeMille did not just try a musical version of The Squaw Man. Oh, the humanity.

  • Love in the Rough

    Some Thoughts

    The 1925 play Spring Fever was made into a silent film comedy in 1927. Three years later it became the first film musical about golf, just beating Paramount’s Follow Thru (1930) into cinemas.

    Perhaps a more significant first for Charles F Reisner’s film is the fact that it contains a production number, admittedly quite a small-scale one, shot out of doors on a real location. MGM had made musicals with location sequences before. Hallelujah, for example, opens with characters singing in a genuine cotton field. And in Montana Moon, Joan Crawford sings to some real trees while on horseback. But in Love in the Rough, Dorothy Jordan and the Biltmore Trio deliver a full song-and-dance number filmed on location at California’s Lake Norconian Club.

    Earl ‘Snakehips’ Tucker, doing his thing

    Dorothy Jordan had made three period musicals with Ramon Novarro in the previous twelve months, becoming increasingly virginal and irritating in each one. She is clearly much happier in a modern setting, and gives a much more engaging performance. The dance skills she had honed in Broadway shows come to the fore in the aforementioned ‘I’m Doing that Thing (Falling in Love)’ routine, before giving way to a brief display by Earl ‘Snakehip’ Turner.

    ‘I’m Learning a Lot from You’ is an interesting number. Performed by two romantic couples–one serious, one comic–it represents an early example of the courtship-through-dance trope that musicals would use so effectively later on; think, for example, of Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen singing and dancing ‘Main Street in On the Town.

    Benny (Benny Rubin) and Virgie (Penny Singleton) parody the courtship dance of the two leads

    Love in the Rough, despite being about golf, remains an enjoyable eighty-four minutes. Benny Rubin’s ethnic schtick (Russian-Jewish this time) is pretty good, aided by a pairing with bit-part player Jack Raymond as another caddy from the Old Country and some sparkling Yiddish patter. It is also fascinating to watch veteran J C Nugent as Mr Waters, the protagonist’s boss. In the early scenes in particular, he genuinely seems to be making up his dialogue as he goes along. Either that, or no one had thought to show him the script until just before saying Action.

    Benny and C Wesley Rappaport (Jack Raymond), discuss the finer points of golf in Yiddish

    But Love in the Rough also points towards one of the problems that contributed to the public tiring of musicals. Robert Montgomery and Dorothy Jordan are pleasant enough singing ‘Go Home and Tell Your Mother’, but they are still giving the performances of amateur singers. MGM had not yet learnt that the musical was a form that required professionals who could really dance and sing (or be dubbed to make it appear they could sing). 

  • 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. 

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!