William Morenus (1864-1944) ran away from home, aged 11, to join the theatre. He interrupted his successful stage career forty years later, in 1915, to make a few silent shorts (his first role was playing himself in Fatty and the Broadway Stars), but his film career really started in 1929 with the introduction of sound.
Collier played himself again in Free and Easy, as the MC at the premiere. For a hattrick, he was seen as William Collier Sr once again in Broadway to Hollywood. His non-musical roles offered more variety.
Edgar Dearing (1893-1974) is a familiar face from supporting roles in well over 300 films. He usually portrayed figures of authority, including literally dozens of police officers, a large number of whom were on motorcycles.
His most famous motorcycle cop was in Laurel and Hardy’s Two Tars (1928), in which his vehicle is crushed by a steamroller.
Dearing featured in eleven Metro musicals, with his most notable (and credited) appearance being in the first, Free and Easy. He plays the studio gate guard who pursues Buster Keaton across the soundstages of Culver City.
The other musicals were Here Comes the Band (though Dearing’s scenes were deleted), Rose-Marie, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Everybody Sing, Listen Darling, Honolulu, Broadway Melody of 1940, Go West, The Big Store and Grounds for Marriage
Frederick Liedtke (1874-1948) was a vaudeville performer and actor, and worked in theatrical management before directing his first film in 1916. A successful collaboration with Douglas Fairbanks, combined with directing Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand (1922), gave MGM the confidence to choose Niblo as a safe, if uninspired, replacement for Charles Brabin, who had allowed Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ to spend its $1.25 million budget in two months on unusable footage.
Fred Niblo never directed a musical, but he did act in one. In Hollywood-set Free and Easy he played himself, a director struggling to get Buster Keaton’s character to memorize, and say correctly, his one line of dialogue.
Actor, poet, suffragist and body-positive activist Delia O’Callaghan (1870-1955) had been a star in vaudeville for many years before making her first film appearance in 1923. She had a featured role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), but her best part was probably Ma Plunkett in Free and Easy, which allowed her to demonstrate some of the comedic and musical skills she had honed on the stage.
The weirdest item in Friganza’s filmography is How to Undress in Front of Your Husband (1937), an ‘educational’ short in which she and Elaine Barrymore demonstrate the right and wrong ways for a woman to get ready for bed. Friganza was 67 at the time, but still game.
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 Ma 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.
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 (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.
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.
