The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: A Night at the Opera

  • Purnell Pratt

    Purnell Busch Pratt (1885-1951) had a strong bass singing voice and ambitions to perform in opera. This didn’t work out for him, which must have given him mixed feelings when he appeared alongside Lawrence Tibbett in The Prodigal. 

    Pratt did, however, appear on the Broadway stage, including as a regular member of George M Cohan’s troupe. He made a couple of films for New York companies before his career was interrupted by the First World War, but began his run of well over a hundred appearances in 1925. He was always a supporting player, normally in a credited role. He was the focus of the interpolated scene in Scarface (1932), in which, as a newspaper publisher, he makes a censor-required speech condemning gangsterism. He also played Captain Wood in DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936).

    In addition to his featured role as the loathsome Rodman in The Prodigal, Pratt was uncredited in two other Metro musicals: A Night at the Opera, as the mayor welcoming the ‘aviators’, and Rosalie.

  • James Brock

    James Kendall Brock (1901-63) was a sound recording engineer who spent most of his career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and worked on sixteen musicals during that time.

    Brock began, under the supervision of Douglas Shearer, on A Lady’s Morals. Here, as for most pictures, he was uncredited.

    Barnes was the sound mixer on The Merry Widow and A Night at the Opera, then sound engineer on The Great Ziegfeld, Maytime, The Girl of the Golden West, Du Barry Was a Lady, On an Island With You, Easter Parade, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Band Wagon, Easy to Love, The Student Prince, Interrupted Melody, Merry Andrew and Gigi.

  • Alphonse Martell

    French-born Alphonse Martell (1890-1976) had a forty-year career as a character actor in Hollywood, making over 250 films and many television appearances.

    In 1933, Martell became a Poverty Row auteur when he wrote and directed Tarnished Youth (also known as Gigolettes of Paris). 

    Martell played a variety of parts, but his speciality was waiters, in which role he made at least 80 appearances, as well as cropping up many times as a maitre d’. 

    Alphonse acted in twelve Metro musicals across three decades. A Lady’s Morals was followed by Student Tour, A Night at the Opera, Everybody Sing, Broadway Melody of 1940, I Married an Angel, Bathing Beauty, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Rich, Young and Pretty, Show Boat, Lovely To Look At and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

  • Bud Geary

    Sigsbee Maine Geary (1898-1946) was a character who made over 250 screen appearances, almost all without credit. His credited roles were at the start of his career, and included Will Scarlett in Robin Hood (1922), where he was billed as Maine Geary.

    During the sound era, Geary played in mostly low-budget pictures and serials (including many westerns), and maintained a parallel career as a stunt performer. Geary was the prison guard escorting James Cagney to the electric chair in Angels with Dirty Faces (1939), and a storm trooper in The Great Dictator (1940).

    Bud Geary had uncredited roles in seven MGM musicals: Madam Satan, Flying High, Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco and Ship Ahoy. 

  • Rita and Rubin

    Dancer Jessie K Bailey (1913-??) and her husband, Ernest Benjamin Harris Rubins (1905-84), were what Variety called a “class adagio routine” under the name Rita and Rubin.

    They married in 1929, when Rita was sixteen, and appeared in a number of films during the 1930s and early 40s. Two of these were Madam Satan, in which they were part of the ‘Ballet Mécanique’, and A Night at the Opera.

  • Wilbur Mack

    George Frear Runyon (1873-1964) made his stage debut aged 16 and achieved success in vaudeville doing comedy double acts with both his first and second wives. The act can be seen in a Vitaphone short called An Everyday Occurrence (1929).

    Mack made his first film in 1925 and racked up well over 400 appearances. He started out in featured supporting roles, but the quality of his parts declined in the talking era. 

    Nonetheless, Mack made uncredited appearances in no fewer than twenty-two MGM musicals between 1930 and 1956: Love in the Rough, Going Hollywood, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Broadway Rhythm, Two Girls and a Sailor, Thrill of a Romance, Ziegfeld Follies, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Nancy Goes to Rio, The Great Caruso, The Band Wagon, Kiss Me Kate, Easy to Love, Athena, The Glass Slipper and The Opposite Sex. 

  • Paul Lamkoff

    Composer Paul Lambkovitz (1888-1953) was born either in Poland or Russia, and trained at the Petrograd Conservatory before working as both a conductor and cantor. He emigrated to America in 1922.

    Lamkoff was qualified by both his professions to work as a vocal coach and choral arranger for the ‘Kol Nidre’ sequence of The Jazz Singer (1927), roles he also carried out for the 1952 remake.

    He then had a sporadic career in the film industry, working as composer, orchestrator and vocal coach on a dozen or so pictures. These included Call of the Flesh, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie and San Francisco.  Alongside this he pursued his work as a cantor and expert on Jewish music.

  • Frank Yaconelli

    No one would claim that Italian-born Francesco Yaconelli (1898-1965) had a distinguished film career, yet after his death a Senate resolution described him as “devoting a lifetime to unselfish service and entertainment to people all over the world”. 

    Yaconelli could most often be seen in cheap westerns, frequently as a Mexican, and sometimes playing the accordion, at which he was proficient. In the mid-twenties he and his brother set up their own studio, for which he both produced and directed a handful of pictures before it was wiped out by the Depression.

    Yaconelli had served in a US aero squadron during the First World War. In the Second World War, he worked as a USO tour director, also performing his vaudeville act. He did the same during the Korean War. It was these activities that secured the citation from the Senate.

    Yaconelli was in four 1930s MGM musicals: Call of the Flesh, A Lady’s Morals, A Night at the Opera and The Firefly. 

  • Julia Griffith

    Julia Griffith (1880-1961) started out in the theatre, but became a perennial bit-part player in Hollywood, from her debut as ‘town gossip’ in 1923 to her last appearance as ‘committee woman’ twenty years later. She was usually uncredited.

    Griffith can be spotted in four MGM musicals. She was an audience member at the opera in Call of the Flesh, and then a party guest in Hollywood Party. She was back in the audience for A Night at the Opera and later played a committee woman in Girl Crazy.

  • Sidney D’Albrook

    Sidney D’Albrook (1886-1948) notched up over 170 film appearances. He started making shorts in 1914, but his first feature was The Gilded Cage (1916). (I draw the last-named film to attention only because it features a character called Lesbia the Goose Girl.) He also appeared as Ambrose, the brother-in-law, in Hal Roach’s series of shorts about the Spat family.

    When the silent period came to a close, most of D’Albrook’s appearances were uncredited. These included five Metro musicals: Call of the Flesh, A Night at the Opera, The Great Waltz, I Married an Angel and The Unfinished Dance.

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