The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Big City

  • John George

    Four feet and two inches tall, Tutie (or possibly Tufie) Fatella (1898-1968) emigrated with his family from Syria to the United States in around 1911. By the age of 18, he was in Hollywood, starting out on a career as a character actor that would last almost fifty years and about 250 performances.

    George’s first film is believed to have been Bobbie of the Ballet (1916), which starred Lon Chaney. In the 1920s he worked regularly with both Chaney and director Tod Browning, being particularly memorable as Cojo in the macabre The Unknown (1927). He also featured in Rex Ingram’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and Scaramouche (1923).

    In the sound era, George played a scientist in both Browning’s Dracula and its Spanish version, Drácula (both 1931). He renewed his acquaintance with Bela Lugosi in Edgar G Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). Later appearances included The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Canyon Passage (1946) and a cameo in the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). George’s last big screen appearance was in One-Eyed Jacks (1963), but he continued working in television. 

    Amongst John George’s many roles were eleven in MGM musicals, all uncredited: The Cuban Love Song, Babes in Toyland, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Let Freedom Ring, At the Circus, Du Barry Was a Lady, Two Sisters from Boston, Big City, Singin’ in the Rain and Deep in My Heart.

  • Jimmy McHugh

    James Francis McHugh (1894-1969), like many other contributors to the Great American Songbook, had worked as a song plugger before producing his own hits.

    He worked in partnership with many lyricists, but perhaps most fruitfully with Dorothy Fields. Amongst the many standards they produced were ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ and ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’.

    Fields and McHugh numbers were used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At. Songs written with other lyricists are featured in Two Girls and a Sailor, A Date With Judy (notably ‘It’s a Most Unusual Day’) and Looking for Love.

  • Dorothy Fields

    Born into a showbiz family, Dorothy Fields (1904-74) worked on the stage for a few years before finding her true vocation as a songwriter. She was one of the few women to find success on Tin Pan Alley, and undoubtedly the greatest of them. She wrote the songs for Roberta in 1933 and for Sweet Charity in 1966, and it is astonishing to consider that ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘The Rhythm of Life’ came from the pen of the same writer. Few songwriters had the same ability to adapt to changing musical styles.

    Fields’s early work found little success, but she came into her own after partnering with composer Jimmy McHugh. Together, they wrote a string of popular hits, including ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’ and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’.

    Fields and McHugh wrote the songs used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At, the studio’s updated version of Roberta, on which she worked with Jerome Kern.

    Numbers by Fields working in collaboration with other composers also featured in Mr Imperium, Excuse My Dust and Texas Carnival.

    Fields co-wrote the book for the stage show adapted into Annie Get Your Gun.

  • Irving Berlin

    No other songwriter made a contribution to the Hollywood musical on the same scale as Irving Berlin (1888-1989), who published his first song in 1907 and retired 55 years later. He worked for all the major studios on films including Top Hat (1935),  Follow the Fleet (1936) and Carefree (1938) for RKO, On the Avenue (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) for 20th Century-Fox, Holiday Inn (1942), Blue Skies (1946) and White Christmas (1954) for Paramount, and This is the Army (1943) for Warner Bros. 

    Two songs contributed to Hallelujah were Berlin’s first work for MGM. Seven years later, ‘A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody’ was the centrepiece number in The Great Ziegfeld. In 1948 Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ turned up in Big City.

    The same year saw Metro’s first full Irving Berlin feature, when he contributed 17 numbers (reduced to 16 in the final edit) to Easter Parade (or, to give the full title from the film’s opening, Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade).

    In 1950 Metro filmed Berlin’s recent Broadway success, Annie Get Your Gun, retaining 11 of the stage version’s 14 songs.

    Finally, Easter Parade’s ‘Shakin’ the Blues Away’ was the basis for the only production number in Love Me or Leave Me.

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