The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Babes in Toyland

  • Nick Grinde

    Harry A Grinde (1893-1979) was a vaudeville performer who found work as a director at MGM in the late twenties. From then until 1945 he directed around sixty generally low budget features for a variety of studios.

    Early on, Metro occasionally used Grinde to work in partnership with tyro directors who had joined the studio directly from theatre work. For example, he co-directed The Bishop Murder Case (1930) with Broadway director David Burton.

    Another such was Good News, which Grinde co-directed with Edgar J MacGregor, director of the original broadway production.

    Grinde did not direct any additional musicals at Metro, being far more at home with westerns and thrillers, though he did, out of left field, write the screenplay for Babes in Toyland.

  • Hal Roach

    Most of the names synonymous with silent film comedy are performers: Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. But they are joined by two producer-directors: Mack Sennett and Harold Eugene Roach (1892-1992).

    Roach began working as an extra in Hollywood in 1912, and produced his first comedy shorts in 1915, in partnership with his friend Harold Lloyd. He worked with Lloyd until 1923, and went on to establish the Laurel and Hardy team. Roach wrote, produced and sometimes directed hundreds of comedy shorts and features.

    In 1928, the Hal Roach studio began releasing its films through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is how he became connected with its early musical pictures. In 1930, MGM wanted to add comic relief to The Rogue Song, so Roach directed additional sequences featuring Stan and Ollie as members of Lawrence Tibbetts band of outlaws.

    In 1933, the Hal Roach Studio and MGM co-produced The Devil’s Brother, a Laurel and Hardy musical that Roach directed. He also worked as an uncredited director on Swiss Miss and The Bohemian Girl (which he co-wrote), and produced Babes in Toyland and Nobody’s Baby.

  • Kewpie Morgan

    Horace Allen Morgan (1892-1956) was a studio electrician who became an actor when director Romaine Fielding decided he needed a “fat boy” for a character part in Teasing a Tornado (1915). He went on to be a regular supporting player in silent comedies, working with Buster Keaton on Three Ages (1923) and Sherlock Jr (1924). He played similar roles to Oliver Hardy in his pre-Laurel days.

    Morgan was in two Metro musicals. He was in The Rogue Song, and then actually appeared with Oliver Hardy in the uncredited role of Old King Cole in Babes in Toyland. 

  • Frank Butler

    Frank Russell Butler (1889-1967) was a prominent screenwriter, though his most successful days were at Paramount rather than MGM. 

    Born in  England, Butler started out as an actor at Famous Players-Lasky in 1920, writing his first scenario the following year. His acting career ended with silent cinema, and he directed only one film for Hal Roach: Flying Elephants, with Laurel and Hardy before they had established their comedy duo characters.

    Butler signed on as a writer at Metro in 1929, and worked on four musicals during his time there. He worked with regular collaborator Sylvia Thalberg on Montana Moon and New Moon. He subsequently worked on two scripts for films involving Laurel and Hardy, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl.

    Returning to Paramount, Butler wrote frequently for Bob Hope, including four of the Road pictures. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1942 for two very different screenplays, Road to Morocco and war drama Wake Island. He won two year later for Going My Way (1944).

  • Laurel & Hardy

    Arthur Stanley Jefferson (1890-1965) and Norvell Hardy (1892-1957), the most acclaimed of all comedy duos, were not MGM contract players; they worked for producer Hal Roach. But, from 1927, Roach released his pictures through Metro, which is how the pair came to be included in two of the studio’s all-star pictures: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Hollywood Party.

    Laurel and Hardy were also roped in to provide comic relief to The Rogue Song. Their sequences were filmed separately under Roach’s supervision and intercut with the main story.

    The pair also starred in versions of four operettas, with plots adapted to suit their style: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland , The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.

  • Ernie Alexander

    Ernie Alexander (1890-1961) was typical of Hollywood’s hardworking bit players. Out of over 200 mostly uncredited performances, sixteen were in Metro musicals.

    Beginning as a doughboy in Marianne, Alexander was a student in So This Is College, a servant in Hollywood Party, and a townsman in Babes in Toyland.

    Alexander’s contribution to Here Comes the Band was lost in the edit, but he came back with an elevator operator in Rose-Marie and a racetrack usher in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

    He was a revolutionary in The Great Waltz, a photographer in Broadway Serenade and an expectant father in Little Nellie Kelly. He played a pageboy in Lady Be Good and stagehands in Ship Ahoy and For Me and My Gal. 

    He delivered flowers in Du Barry Was a Lady and finally acquired a name as Charlie the bellboy in I Dood It. 

    Finally, Alexander was back in uniform as a commissionaire in Swing Fever.

  • Oliver T Marsh

    Oliver Taylor Marsh (1892-1941) was an MGM company man for most of his career, and arguably achieved his greatest successes with some of the nineteen musicals he photographed, most of which were directed by Robert Z Leonard and W S Van Dyke.

    Marsh’s earliest efforts were Marianne, In Gay Madrid and The Florodora Girl. He protographed the 1930 New Moon and also worked uncredited on the 1940 remake. He returned to the genre after the 1932 hiatus and shot Dancing Lady. The following year he worked with Lubitsch on The Merry Widow and moved immediately from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland.

    Marsh photographed the Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld and the destruction of San Francisco in the film of the same name. Maytime was the first of his five MacDonald-Eddy operettas, and he also worked with MacDonald on The Firefly and with Eddy on Rosalie. The Girl of the Golden West was followed by an Academy Award, with Allen Davey, for their Technicolor work on Sweethearts. 

    Following the ridiculous Ice Follies of 1939, Marsh was with Jeanette MacDonald again for Broadway Serenade. He rounded off his career with Broadway Melody of 1940, Bitter Sweet (again Oscar-nominated for Technicolor) and Lady Be Good, made shortly before his untimely death.

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