The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Free and Easy

  • Free and Easy

    Synopsis

    Gopher City, Kansas. Elvira Plunkett, Miss Gopher City, boards a train for Hollywood, a prize from the Chamber of Commerce. She is accompanied by her mother, Ma Plunkett, and her manager, Elmer J Butts. Elmer, who has the tickets, is forced to ride on the caboose until the first stop. Elvira and Ma mistakenly occupy the room of Larry Mitchell, an MGM movie star, who is returning to Hollywood for the opening of his new picture.  Ma and Elvira are reunited with Elmer when the train stops. 

    Elmer (Buster Keaton), stuck in the caboose

    The following week, Larry’s picture premieres at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, with MGM contract players in attendance. Elmer, Elvira and Mas are there at Larry’s invitation. Elmer has to drive miles to park the car and enters the theatre just as the film is ending. He is mistaken for William Haines and dragged onto the stage. Back at their hotel, Elmer tries and fails to tell Elvira that he loves her. 

    Director Fred Niblo, playing himself, attempts to drum a single line into Elmer’s head: “Oh woe is me, the Quoon has sweened”

    The next day, at the MGM studios, Elvira and Ma watch Larry film a musical number [It Must Be You]. Larry introduces them to director Fred Niblo. Elmer arrives, but cannot get through the studio gates. He finally sneaks in with a crowd of extras. Elmer is chased by a studio guard and accidentally sets off an explosion on an outdoor set, before running onto a sound stage where Lionel Barrymore is directing. He ruins a take, then runs onto the stage where Larry is filming and gets involved in a musical number. 

    The guard catches him, but Larry and Elvira intercede. They persuade Niblo to give Elmer a small part in the picture, but it all goes badly wrong. Larry sends Elmer to the transportation department so he can get a ride home, and Elmer ends up getting a job as a driver. 

    His first job is driving Elvira and Larry home from a party; they do not realize Elmer is the driver. He overhears Larry inviting Elvira to go to his house. While Larry sets about seducing Elvira, Elmer, who thinks Larry is asking her to marry him,rushes to fetch Ma. Elmer and Ma arrive to find Elvira in tears. Elmer tackles Larry and they both end up unconscious. Elvira and Ma leave. Larry is ashamed, and he and Elmer become friends. They discover they used to know each other when Larry was Heiny Schwartz, the butcher’s son, back in Kansas. 

    Larry arranges for Elmer to try another part in the picture, and apologizes to Elvira. Meanwhile, Ma unexpectedly wins a part in the picture. Elmer and Ma perform a comic skit in the musical comedy [Oh King, Oh Queen]. Elvira admires Elmer, but has given up on the idea of acting herself; she never wanted to come to Hollywood, it was all Ma’s idea. She could never be happy making-believe all her life. Elmer tells Elvira that a certain movie star loves her very much and only needs a little encouragement; Elvira thinks he means Larry. 

    Ma Plunkett (Trixie Friganza) and Elmer perform ‘Oh King, Oh Queen’

    In another scene from the musical, Elmer is trying to take the girl back to his home in Brooklyn [The Free And Easy]. Elmer is considered a great comedian and offered a contract by the studio, but he is dismayed to learn that Elvira and Larry are getting married. Elvira watches as the final scene of the picture is filmed [The Free and Easy; It Must Be You], while Elmer gazes sadly at her and despairs.   

  • Dorothy Sebastian

    Stella Dorothy Sebaston (1904-57) was a chorus girl who became a stage and then screen actor, securing a five-year contract at Metro. She appeared with Joan Crawford and Johnny Mack Brown in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), and supported them again in Montana Moon, playing Crawford’s sister.

    Sebastian appeared in one other MGM musical, Free and Easy, with her friend Buster Keaton. Her contract ended and her career declined through minor studios, ending in playing bit parts.

  • John Miljan

    John Miljan (1892-1960) was a supporting actor who appeared in over 200 films during his thirty-four-year career. He made regular appearances in Cecil B DeMille pictures, notably as General Custer in The Plainsman (1936).

    Miljan’s four MGM musicals began with Devil-May-Care, as Ramon Novarro’s nemesis. He played himself in the Hollywood-set Free and Easy, and was with Novarro again in In Gay Madrid. His final appearance was as Pierre Brugnon in the remake of New Moon.

  • Lionel Barrymore

    Although Lionel Herbert Blyth (1878-1954) apparently had no ambition to join the family business (the show business), by the time sound films were introduced he had been an actor for 36 years, with extensive stage and screen experience. Early on he had worked under D W Griffith at the Biograph Company and he was a contract player for MGM since its inception, having been signed by Louis B Mayer to work for Metro Pictures.

    Barrymore also directed pictures, though far less skillfully than he acted in them. It is ironic, therefore, that his first two appearances in MGM musicals both cast him in the role of a director. In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 he is directing Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. And in Free and Easy he is directing the bedroom scene that is disrupted by Elmer.

    Barrymore went from there to the director’s seat for real, taking charge of Metro’s new signing, Lawrence Tibbett, in The Rogue Song.

    In 1939 Barrymore had a supporting role in Let Freedom Ring and two years later was the judge in Lady Be Good.

    That was the end of Barrymore’s career in MGM musicals, though his most famous role, as Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) still lay in the future. 

  • Gwen Lee

    Gwendolyn Lepinski (1904-61) was a department store model doing occasional stage work when she was discovered by producer-director Monta Bell and offered a contract with Metro in 1925. She mostly played supporting roles and made a successful transition to sound.

    Lee appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and then secured a lead role as Peggy in Chasing Rainbows. She made a cameo as herself in Free and Easy, and was then let go by the studio. After a few years working on Poverty Row, Lee returned to MGM in 1935 as a stock player in minor roles. In that capacity, she turned up alongside Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera and was an audience member in The Great Ziegfeld.

    Lee retired from screen acting in 1938.

  • Karl Dane

    Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb (1886-1934) was a Danish-born comedian who found fame supporting John Gilbert in Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925). Under contract to MGM, he formed a successful comedy partnership with George K Arthur, but things became difficult with the introduction of sound, as Dane had a strong accent. His contract was terminated and he took his own life a few years later. At the urging of Jean Hersholt, MGM paid for his burial.

    Dane made an appearance with Arthur in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and had small parts in Montana Moon, Free and Easy and New Moon. 

  • Buster Keaton

    Signing a contract with MGM was probably the worst decision ever made by Joseph Frank Keaton (1895-1966). It brought an end to the period in which he vied with Chaplin to be the greatest, most gifted comic star of the silent screen, and led to dark years of alcoholism and frustration before his rediscovery by later generations.

    Keaton was at least permitted to remain silent in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, performing the ‘Dance of the Sea’ in bizarre drag. The following year he starred in Free and Easy, his first talking feature, and filmed a caveman sequence for the abandoned The March of Time. He was also required to shoot French, Spanish and German versions of Free and Easy.

    Ten years later Keaton appeared uncredited in the MacDonald-Eddy New Moon, and in 1949 he had a supporting role in In the Good Old Summertime. 

    Keaton also contributed as a gag writer to A Night at the Opera, At the Circus, Go West, Easy to Wed, In the Good Old Summertime and Excuse My Dust.

  • William Haines

    Charles William Haines (1900-73) was a popular actor of the 1920s and one of MGM’s biggest stars. His career was cut short by his refusal to hide the fact that he was in a gay relationship by entering into a lavender marriage. This led Louis B Mayer to tear up his contract. Haines went on to become one of Hollywood’s top interior designers, aided in no small part by the willingness of his former colleagues to give him work.

    In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 it is Haines who, bizarrely, cuts Jack Benny’s tuxedo to shreds. And in Free and Easy he is glimpsed as a guest at the premiere.

  • Richard Carle

    Charles Nicholas Carleton (1871-41) was a successful stage actor and director who did not start his film career-proper (he made one picture in 1915) until he was in his mid-fifties, where he became a successful, if fairly anonymous, supporting player.

    Carle was the entomology professor in So This Is College, a eunuch in Elmer’s movie in Free and Easy, Knapp in Hollywood Party (credited), Maurice Chevalier’s attorney in The Merry Widow and a member of the Founders’ Club in San Francisco.

  • Drew Demorest

    Drew Demorest (1893-1949) was a small-part player who on occasion wore costumes designed by his wife, Henrietta Frazer.

    Demorest made appearances in The Broadway Melody (uncredited, but fittingly playing Turpe the costumer), Marianne (as a doughboy), They Learned About Women (with onsceen credit as Edwards), Free and Easy (as Robert Montgomery’s valet), Children of Pleasure (as a songwriter) and as a French officer in The Firefly. All of these were uncredited.

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