Arthur Thomas Hoyt (1874-1953) was a prolific character actor, acting in almost 250 feature films and well over 100 shorts.
Hoyt made the first of several appearances on Broadway in 1905, and by 1914 was making short films for companies based in New York. He made his feature debut for Bluebird Photoplays in 1916.
Hoyt had credited supporting roles in Rex Ingam’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and in The Lost World (1925), which was directed by his brother Harry.
In the sound era, Hoyt features in two iconic prison pictures, The Criminal Code (1931) and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932). He was the motor court manager in It Happened One Night (1934), and appeared in Magnificent Obsession (1936).
In the 1940s, Hoyt was a central member of the Preston Sturges stock company, appearing in all nine of the director’s films from The Great McGinty (1940) to The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947). The latter was his final film.
Arthur Hoyt acted for MGM in four musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Hullabaloo and Babes on Broadway. All four appearances were uncredited.
Merrill Manley Pye (1902-75) was an important member of Cedric Gibbons’s unit at MGM from 1925 until 1968, and one who had a significant impact on the look of the studio’s musicals across most of that period.
Pye had studied architecture, which made him a desirable addition to Gibbon’s team. The respect in which he was held is suggested by his first picture, Edmund Goulding’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), where he shares equal credit with Gibbons for Settings.
He was art director, uncredited, on Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and given associate art director credit for David Copperfield (1935). In 1959, Pye was Oscar-nominated for his art direction on Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest, responsible for recreating the Mount Rushmore monument on a sound stage.
But it was in musicals that Pye made his real mark. He started out with the art direction of Dancing Lady, where he has been credited with introducing the Moderne style to MGM’s musical pictures: what has been described as “flat mise-en-scenes surfaces, horizontal accents, tonal values distinction, and smooth and curved lines with glossy surfaces”.
Pye went on to be art director (or associate) on Going Hollywood, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Swing Fever, Bathing Beauty, Ziegfeld Follies, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
But Pye also received another type of credit on some pictures: Musical Presentation. IMDb erroneously interprets this as him having a role in the music department, but it was actually a special credit for a role that involved the overall visual design of a musical number. This involved not only the structural design of sets, but also camera movement through the set, incorporating an element of direction.
Pye carried out this function on musical numbers in Born to Dance, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Honolulu, Strike Up the Band, Bitter Sweet, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, The Chocolate Soldier, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy!, Panama Hattie, For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Broadway Rhythm and Meet the People.
It is notable that Pye’s services in musical presentation were not required on the Freed Unit musicals of the later 1940s and 1950s, where directors like Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli would retain that creative control.
Burton Levy (1912-97) began writing songs while still a teenager, dropping out of school to do so. By the time he was 18, he had composed music for songs performed in Broadway shows, working regularly with Harold Adamson.
Working for Irving Berlin Inc, Lane was sent to Hollywood with Adamson in 1934, and subsequently took up residence there. The pair worked together until 1936, writing songs for a number of studios. Lane then partnered with Ralph Freed (Arthur’s younger brother) at Paramount, followed by Frank Loesser. His final screen partnership was with Alan Jay Lerner in the 1950s.
Lane composed the music for a number of Broadway musicals, the most successful being Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965).
Notable songs composed by Lane include ‘How About You?’, ‘Old Devil Moon’, ‘I Hear Music’ and ‘ How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?’
Lane songs were used in seventeen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Thousands Cheer, Meet the People, This Time for Keeps, Royal Wedding, Everything I Have is Yours, Torch Song, Give a Girl a Break and Jupiter’s Darling.
Luis Alberni (1886-1962) had been acting for a few years in his native Spain when he travelled to the United States in 1914. He succeeded in finding stage work, but quickly made his screen debut in Children of the Ghetto (1915).
Over the next forty years, Alberni appeared in over 170 pictures, playing a wide range of ‘ethnic’ parts. Most of them were programmers, but from time to time he secured featured roles in more prestigious films. In 1933, he played Dr Bomb in Topaze, alongside John Barrymore.
Alberni was the nightclub owner in Roberta (1935) and had a notable role as Mr Louis Louis in Easy Living (1937). He played Basset for James Whale in The Great Garrick (1937) and was the Pike family’s chef in The Lady Eve (1941), made the same year that he played the King of Naples in That Hamilton Woman.
Luis Alberni was in four Metro musicals, starting out uncredited in Stage Mother and Let Freedom Ring. He then had a featured role as Nick the cafe owner in Babes on Broadway, and finished, again without credit, in I Married an Angel.
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:
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.
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.
Emma Dunn (1875-1966) was a British stage actor who travelled to the USA and worked extensively on Broadway. Her 1906 appearance in the first American production of Peer Gynt (1867), playing the protagonist’s mother despite being twenty years younger than the other actor, was typical of the way Dunn was frequently cast older than her actual age.
Dunn’s first screen appearance was in Muraice Tourneur’s Mother (1914), in which she recreated, silently, a role she had originated on Broadway. She made only a couple more silent pictures, but found plenty of work after the introduction of sound.
Dunn continued to play many mothers, including Jean Arthur’s in The Talk of the Town (1942) and Dr Kildare’s multiple times in the MGM series. She also played Mrs Jaeckel in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1941).
Emma Dunn was mother to the uxorious Lawrence Tibbett in The Prodigal, and ten years later played Mickey Rooney’s mom in Babes on Broadway.
Her final role was as Alexis Smith’s old nurse in The Woman in White (1948).
William Carlton Stockdale (1874-1953) accumulated over 300 screen appearances in a thirty-year career that began in 1913 with Broncho Billy’s Last Deed. The title was misleading, because Stockdale went on to appear in more than thirty of Broncho Billy Anderson’s popular shorts, always playing a different character.
Prior to his film career, Stockdale was a stage actor and vaudeville performer. In pictures, he came to specialize in villains and heavies, though his first appearance in an MGM musical was on the right side of the law, playing the New York Chief of Police in A Lady’s Morals.
Stockdale made four additional contributions, in Stage Mother, Student Tour, San Francisco and Babes in Arms (though it would appear his scenes were not used).
Stockdale became a footnote in Hollywood history when he provided actor Charlotte Selby with an alibi when she was under suspicion for the 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor. Persistant rumours maintain that the alibi was bought and paid for.
Beatrice Hagen (1917-99) claimed a minor place in film history by providing the voice of Snow White in the French version of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As well as being a Disney voice actor (she played Mickey’s nephews), she was a ubiquitous chorus girl in musicals from a number of studios.
For MGM, Hagen made uncredited appearances in The Broadway Melody, Flying High, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Maytime, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, Ziegfeld Girl, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, The Harvey Girls and Texas Carnival.
