While sound department head Douglas Shearer always ensured he received a credit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were hit-and-miss in their approach to crediting his staff.
Standish John Lambert (1905-59) worked for the studio for at least twenty years, and does not appear to have ever received an onscreen credit. He and his brother Kenneth Lambert joined the studio in the mid-30s as electrical engineers, but Standish appears to have transitioned to the sound department at some point.
Some sources (IMDb) have him listed as working on Going Hollywood in 1933, but that seems unlikely. The earliest pictures cited by the AFI catalogue are from 1944. Clearly Lambert must have been doing something during the previous nine or ten years, but it is impossible to say what.
Most of Lambert’s known contributions are for sound and effects mixing, on pictures like Mrs Parkington (1944), Cry ‘Havoc’ (1944), The Clock (1945) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1945). Later, he worked as sound director on half a dozen pictures, including Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949).
The MGM musicals with Lambert as sound mixer were Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh and The Harvey Girls. He was sound director on Luxury Liner.
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.
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:
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).
Early in his career, George Feder (1901-51) had some good supporting roles in silent pictures, most notably Josef Von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928).
From 1930 onwards, however, virtually all of Raymond’s 130+ appearances were without credit.
Four of these were in MGM musicals. He started in Love in the Rough, as Benny Rubin’s friend from the old country. Following that, he was in Babes in Toyland (as a bogeyman), Here Comes the Band and Broadway Serenade.
Jack Raymond should not be confused with the British actor and director of the same name, who was his contemporary.
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.
Robert Shirley (1904-81), like most of the engineers in Douglas Shearer’s sound department, never received onscreen credit for his work, despite working on some of Metro’s prestige projects. These included Strange Interlude (1932), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
Shirley’s musicals were They Learned About Women, Reckless, The Wizard of Oz (though everyone seems to have worked on that), Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Thrill of a Romance, Anchors Aweigh, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Two Sisters from Boston,Easy to Wed, Holiday in Mexico and, to round things off nicely, Singin’ in the Rain.
Ballard MacDonald (1882-1935) was a Tin Pan Alley lyricist who collaborated with, amongst others, George Gershwin (notably on ‘Somebody Loves Me’). His best-known song, ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,’ belatedly became a hit in the UK when the Laurel and Hardy version from Way Out West was released as a single.
Ballard provided numbers for four MGM musicals. In 1929 he worked with Dave Dreyer on most of the songs for It’s a Great Life. Fifteen years later ‘Somebody Loves Me’ was sung by Lena Horne in Broadway Rhythm.
‘Play That Barbershop Chord,’ a song he co-wrote in 1910, was used in In the Good Old Summertime. Finally, ‘I Love to Go Swimmin With Wimmin,’ written with Sigmund Romberg for the 1921 musical Love Birds, was performed by Gene Kelly and his brother Fred in the Romberg biopic Deep in My Heart.
Nellie Crawford (1873-1959) was enrolled into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame under the much more exotic stage name she began using at some point in the late 20s or early 30s. Donald Bogle has suggested that she chose the unusual name because it enabled her to seek work as Asian as well as Black characters. Sul-Te-Wan was the first Black actor to secure a Hollywood contract when D W Griffith hired her at $25 a week for The Birth of a Nation (1916).
Like Clarence Muse and others, Sul-Te-Wan was a talented actor restricted by Hollywood racism, but she had a featured role in Erich Von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1920), and recieved praise for her appearance as Tituba in Maid of Salem (1937), Paramount’s story of the Salem witch trials.
Sul-Te-Wan’s MGM musicals were Hallelujah, San Francisco and Broadway Rhythm, all in uncredited parts.
Leonard Smith (1894-1947) photographed his first film in 1915 and spent most of his career at Metro. He was nominated four times for an Academy Award, finally winning for The Yearling shortly before his death. Smith was best known for his Technicolor work, but most of the thirteen musicals he worked on were in black and white.
In the 1929-30 period Smith shot So This Is College, They Learned About Women and Free and Easy.
After a seven-year break he worked uncredited on A Day at the Races and Rosalie, photographed Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, then shot the Marx Brothers next two pictures, At the Circus and Go West.
There followed Ship Ahoy and uncredited work on I Married an Angel and Seven Sweethearts. Finally, Smith photographed Best Foot Forward and Broadway Rhythm in colour.
