The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Babes in Arms

  • Edwin B Willis

    Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity. 

    After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).

    Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at  Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).

    Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures

    Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:

    Broadway to Hollywood

    Stage Mother (ID)

    Dancing Lady (ID)

    Going Hollywood (ID)

    The Cat and the Fiddle (ID)

    Hollywood Party (ID)

    Student Tour (AAD)

    The Merry Widow (AAD)

    The Night is Young (AAD/SD)

    Naughty Marietta (AAD)

    Reckless (AAD)

    Broadway Melody of 1936 (AAD)

    Here Comes the Band (AAD)

    A Night at the Opera (AAD)

    Rose Marie (AAD)

    The Great Ziegfeld (AAD)

    San Francisco (AAD)

    Born to Dance (AAD)

    Maytime (AAD)

    A Day at the Races (AAD)

    Broadway Melody of 1938 (AAD)

    The Firefly (AAD)

    Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (AAD)

    Rosalie (AAD)

    Everybody Sing (AAD)

    The Girl of the Golden West (AAD)

    Listen, Darling (AAD)

    The Great Waltz (AAD)

    Sweethearts

    Honolulu

    Let Freedom Ring

    Ice Follies of 1939

    The Wizard of Oz

    Babes in Arms

    At the Circus

    Balalaika

    Broadway Melody of 1940

    New Moon

    Strike Up the Band

    Hullabaloo (Associate Set Decorator, uncredited)

    Bitter Sweet

    Little Nellie Kelly

    Go West

    Free and Easy

    Ziegfeld Girl

    The Big Store

    Lady Be Good

    The Chocolate Soldier

    Smilin’ Through

    Babes on Broadway

    Born to Sing

    Ship Ahoy

    Rio Rita

    I Married an Angel

    Cairo

    Panama Hattie

    For Me and My Gal

    Seven Sweethearts

    Cabin in the Sky

    Presenting Lily Mars

    Du Barry was a Lady

    Best Foot Forward

    Thousands Cheer

    Swing Fever

    Girl Crazy

    Broadway Rhythm

    Two Girls and a Sailor

    Meet the People

    Bathing Beauty

    Meet Me in St Louis

    Music for Millions

    Thrill of a Romance

    Anchors Aweigh

    Ziegfeld Follies

    Yolanda and the Thief

    The Harvey Girls

    Two Sister from Boston

    Easy to Wed

    Holiday in Mexico

    No Leave, No Love

    Till the Clouds Roll By

    It Happened in Brooklyn

    Living in a Big Way

    Fiesta

    The Unfinished Dance

    Good News

    Summer Holiday

    On an Island With You

    The Pirate

    Easter Parade

    A Date with Judy

    Luxury Liner

    The Kissing Bandit

    Words and Music

    Take Me Out to the Ball Game

    The Barkeleys of Broadway

    Neptune’s Daughter

    In the Good Old Summertime

    That Midnight Kiss

    On the Town

    Nancy Goes to Rio

    Annie Get Your Gun

    Three Little Words

    Duchess of Idaho

    The Toast of New Orleans

    Summer Stock

    Two Weeks with Love

    Pagan Love Song

    Grounds for Marriage

    Royal Wedding

    The Great Caruso

    Excuse My Dust

    Rich, Young and Pretty

    Show Boat

    An American in Paris (winning an Oscar)

    The Strip

    Texas Carnival

    The Belle of New York

    Singin’ in the Rain

    Skirts Ahoy

    Lovely to Look At

    The Merry Widow

    Because You’re Mine

    Everything I Have is Yours

    Lili

    I Love Melvin

    Small Town Girl

    Dangerous When Wet

    The Band Wagon

    Latin Lovers

    The Affairs of Dobie Gillis

    Torch Song

    Kiss Me Kate

    Easy to  Love

    Rose Marie

    The Student Prince

    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

    Brigadoon

    Athena 

    Deep in My Heart

    Jupiter’s Darling

    Hit the Deck

    The Glass Slipper

    Interrupted Melody

    Love Me or Leave Me

    It’s Always Fair Weather

    Kismet

    Meet Me in Las Vegas

    High Society

    The Opposite Sex

    Ten Thousand Bedrooms

    Silk Stockings

    Les Girls

  • Edgar Allan Woolf

    Edgar Allan Woolf (1881-1943) was a successful screenwriter, dramatist and songwriter whose fame now rests firmly on being co-writer of the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. He and regular collaborator Florence Ryerson developed a draft produced by Noel Langley, introducing the character of Professor Marvel into the Kansas scenes.

    After graduating from university, Woolf was briefly an actor before turning to writing material for vaudeville performers. He also wrote the book for the 1906 musical comedy Mam’zelle Champagne, which became infamous when a performance was interrupted by the murder of Stanford White, as depicted in The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing (1955).

    After a quarter of a century writing for Broadway, Woolf, who had previously dabbled in screenwriting for silent films in New York,signed a contract to join MGM. Pictures he worked on included Freaks, Grand Hotel and John Ford’s Flesh (all 1932).

    In addition to The Wizard of Oz, Woolf worked on seven other MGM musicals, beginning with Broadway to Hollywood, for which he also wrote a song. Subsequent pictures were Hollywood Party, The Night is Young, Everybody Sing and Ice Follies of 1939. After Oz came Babes in Arms and the posthumously-released Ziegfeld Follies.

  • Mickey Rooney

    A film career that lasted 88 years. About 285 pictures. The biggest box office draw in the United States in 1939. 1940 and 1941, from age 19 to 21. Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr (1920-2014) was no ordinary film star: he was a phenomenon, utterly unique. He was not, by most accounts, a particularly pleasant person; there are plenty of horror stories about his behaviour and attitudes. But I cannot find that this detracts greatly from his achievements on the screen.

    Rooney claimed that he first appeared as part of his parents’ vaudeville act aged 17 months. After they divorced, he went with his mother to Hollywood and made his first film appearance in 1926, and from 1927 to 1934 was the star of over sixty comedy shorts, as a character named Mickey McGuire. He became associated with the name, but was prevented from taking the name as his own, so chose Rooney instead.

    Aged 14, Rooney played Puck in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), one of the film’s brighter spots, a fact all the more remarkable when you know he gave much of his performance with a plaster cast on a broken leg.

    He played the younger son in an adaptation of Ah, Wilderness (1935), and then was cast as the older son in a rehash of the plot, 1937’s A Family Affair. His character was named Andy Hardy, and Rooney played him in 13 sequels, most of which put plenty of cash into MGM’s coffers (he was by now contracted to the studio)

    Rooney starred opposite Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town (1938), and went on to receive a special Oscar known as the Academy Juvenile Award. He was later nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for The Human Comedy (1943).

    Rooney did not look like a leading man, and when it became impossible for him to continue playing teenagers, his career went into decline. But, in Jeanine Basinger’s words, he “kept on working and growing, the mark of a professional”. Even as late as 1979, he achieved critical recognition, and another Academy nomination, for Coppola’s The Black Stallion. And he regularly took part in successful Broadway productions. He even tried his hand, without great success, as a producer and director.

    Mickey Rooney was in twelve MGM musicals, appearing with Judy Garland in seven of them. They were: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Girl Crazy, Summer Holiday, Words and Music and The Strip.

  • Dolly Tree

    British-born Dorothy Marian Isbell (1899-1962) was something of a Renaissance woman, successful in a variety of roles, including as an illustrator, actor and, most notably, as a costume designer.

    As a teenager, Tree’s love of the theatre prompted her to start designing posters. This became a professional opportunity in 1917 when she was employed to produce posters and programmes for a well-known impresario. She also produced comic illustrations for newspapers and periodicals.

    Between 1915 and 1918, Tree starred in around eight British films, including Hindle Wakes (1918), the first version of Stanley Houghton’s 1912 play. 

    Designing costumes for stage and screen began in the early 1920s, and she also designed for the Folies Bergère. Tree emigrated to the United States in 1926 and worked on Broadway, including designing for pre-Hollywood Mae West. By this time, her designs were having an impact on the wider fashion scene of the Jazz Age.

    Tree’s Hollywood career began in 1929, first at Fox, and then eleven years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Pictures she worked on included The Thin Man (1934), David Copperfield (1935), Libeled Lady (1936) and Fury (1936) and The Good Earth (1937).

    Dolly Tree designed costumes for fifteen MGM musicals: The Devil’s Brother, The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Rosalie, Listen Darling, Tce Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Let Freedom Ring, At the Circus, Strike Up the Band, Little Nellie Kelly and Go West.

    Tree’s career effectively ended in 1942, when divorce led to a drink problem. Her reputation has long rested in the shadows created by Adrian and Orry-Kelly, but there is now a growing awareness of her importance as a designer.  

  • Paul Marquardt

    German-born Paul Alfred Marquardt (1889-1960) was a composer who worked for many years as an arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and for other studios. Although rarely receiving an onscreen credit, Marquardt made a substantial contribution to MGM’s musical history.

    He orchestrated the music for many non-musical films, including Anna Karenina (1935), Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), The Women (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), Rebecca (1940),Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), High Noon (1952) and Friendly Persuasion (1957). Marquardt also composed original scores in the 1930s, including for The Sign of the Cross and A Farewell to Arms (both 1933). He worked on well over 350 films between 1930 and 1957.

    The first of Marquardt’s 39 MGM musicals was The Cuban Love Song, collaborating with Charles Maxwell. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco. Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, Rosalie, Everybody Sing, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz, Sweethearts (in which he also appeared as a conductor), The Wizard of Oz (credited for orchestral and vocal arrangements), Babes in Arms, At the Circus, Balalaika, New Moon, Hullabaloo, Rio Rita, I Married an Angel, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Follies, Holiday in Mexico, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Royal Wedding and Show Boat.

  • Busby Berkeley

    The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.

    IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.

    In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.

    Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.

    Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.

    Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

  • Guy Kibbee

    As if to separate himself from the multitude of his contemporaries who started their show business careers in vaudeville, the teenage Guy Bridges Kibbee (1882-1956) started out entertaining on Mississippi riverboats. He later became a leading man for a variety of stock companies.

    The big time came well-on in his career: he made his Broadway debut in 1930, and soon afterwards was signed by Paramount. (He had previously made one short comedy for Warner Bros.) He went on to become one of those immediately-recognizable characters who helped make 30s’ Hollywood as great as it was. His speciality was jovial, a bit dim, occasionally lecherous. The last of these came to the fore in two great Warner musicals, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933).

    Kibee had a rare starring role in Babbitt (1934), the Warners’ less-than-faithful adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s prize-winning novel. He also played malleable Governor Hopper in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Dr Gibbs in the film of Our Town (1940). 

    Guy Kibbee was in four Metro musicals: Flying High, Let Freedom Ring, Babes in Arms and Girl Crazy. 

  • Charles Winninger

    Karl John Winninger (1884-1969), the son of Austrian immigrants, was a seasoned vaudeville performer by the time he made his first short film in 1915. He made the occasional film thereafter, but launched his film career proper after the advent of sound with Soup to Nuts (1930), which was the debut of the Three Stooges.

    Prior to this, Winninger had created the role of Cap’n Andy Hawks in Show Boat (1927), a role which he recreated in Universal’s 1936 film version.

    Winninger was a reliable supporting player throughout his film career, notably in Nothing Sacred (1937) and Destry Rides Again (1939). He only ever played one leading role, in John Ford’s frequently-misunderstood masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright (1953), where he played Judge Billy Priest.

    Charles Winninger co-starred in six MGM musicals, beginning as the doctor in Flying High in 1931. He followed this with Babes in Arms (playing Mickey Rooney’s father), Little Nellie Kelly and Ziegfeld Girl (playing Judy Garland’s father in both), Broadway Rhythm (as George Murphy’s father) and Living in a Big Way (as Gene Kelly’s father-in-law). 

  • John Meehan

    John Meehan (1890-1954) was a Canadian actor and dramatist with some limited success on Broadway who made his greatest mark as a screenwriter for MGM. His play Bless You, Sister (1927) was the source for Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931). 

    Meehan signed a contract with the studio in 1929, along with many other Broadway alumni. Over the next twenty years, he worked on many pictures, including A Free Soul (1931), Dinner at Eight (1933, uncredited) and Boy’s Town (1938). 

    Meehan worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals, Stage Mother, Babes in Arms and Three Daring Daughters.

  • Percy Wenrich

    Percy Wenrich (1880-1952) began writing melodies for fun as a teenager and had his first work self-published at the age of 17. Later on, others were moved to publish his compositions, which supplemented his income as a for-hire pianist. His first really successful song came in 1908/9, and within a few years had written the male quartet standard ‘Moonlight Bay’. 

    Wenrich did not write much directly for films, though ‘Moonlight Bay’ is frequently used as incidental music. Abe Lyman and his Orchestra perform ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ in Madam Satan (marching doughboys had sung it briefly in Marianne) and Mickey Rooney dances to ‘Moonlight Bay’ in Babes in Arms. 

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