Harry Lillis Crosby Jr (1903-77) was one of the most successful and influential singers in the world during the middle decades of the twentieth century. He was a prolific recording artist–at least 1600 songs, possibly nearer 2000–and a star of radio, television, concert hall and big screen.
Crosby joined his first band–as a drummer–in 1923, and performed in various acts until being spotted by a member of the Paul Whiteman organization. He and his friend Miles Rinker were hired as singers and found themselves performing with one of the biggest bands in the country, with an international reputation. Out of this came the three-person Rhythm Boys, who appeared in the Universal musical revue King of Jazz (1930).
Crosby went solo in 1931 and, alongside the other strands of his career (including recording the best-selling single of all time), he became a film star, accumulating over 80 credits up to 1979. Most of his films were musicals, or comedies with music (for example, the Road pictures he made with Dorothy Lamour and Bob Hope). But he also took on straight roles, culminating in an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as a singing priest in Going My Way (1944).
Bing Crosby made scores of musicals, but most of them were at his home studio, Paramount. He only made two for MGM, one at the beginning of his screen career and one late on. They were Going Hollywood and High Society.
Sylvia Bruce teaches French at Briarcroft School, but dreams of another life. Listening to crooner Bill Williams on the radio [Our Big Love Scene], she decides to pack a bag and set off to find life, love and music.
Sylvia Bruce (Marion Davies) wishes on a star
In New York, Bill Williams has to record a song [Beautiful Girl] before leaving for Hollywood. He will be travelling with his French co-star, Lili Yvonne. Sylvia sneaks into Bill’s room to thank him for the way his music has changed her life.
Bill wants to board his train without anyone knocking, so he can avoid the big send-off arranged by his publicist, Jack Thompson. But at Grand Central Station, he is besieged by reporters and fans. Bill makes a run for it [Just an Echo in the Valley], with the crowd in pursuit [Going Hollywood].
On the train, Bill finds Bert Conroy, the director of the film, Ernest Pratt Baker, who is financing it, and Sylvia, who shocks Bill by telling him she loves him.
Later, Bill is surprised again when he finds that Lili has hired Sylvia to be her maid. This is short-lived, because Bill tells the jealous Lili that Sylvia loves him, leading Lili to slap Sylvia.
Crooner Bill Williams (Bing Crosby) seems pleased to see Sylvia on the train
Later, in Hollywood, on the first day of filming, Bert already thinks both the picture and Lili are “a bust”. Sylvia meets Jill Barker, who is trying to break into movies. Sylvia becomes Jill’s roommate at Ailoha Bungalow Court., where she dreams about Bill [We’ll Make Hay While the Sun Shines].
Later, on the set, Sylvia turns up as an extra in blackface. Bill apologizes for the way Lili treated her on the train. Lili finds them together and slaps Sylvia again.
Ernest gets Sylvia and Jill jobs in the chorus. On location, Lili performs her number [Cinderella’s Fella], which Bert thinks is terrible. Lili quits, but Bill persuades her to change her mind.
During a break [medley], Sylvia impersonates Lili Cinderella’s Fella]. Lili slaps Sylvia for the third time, but this time Sylia hits back. Ernest asserts himself and gives the lead in the picture to Sylvia. Bill invites Sylvia to dinner [After Sundown]. Bill tells Sylvia he is through with Lili. but is irritated when Sylvia will not go back to his apartment with him. He drops her off, but forgets his hat. Sylvia takes the hat to him, but finds he is with Lili.
Sylvia tracks down Bill and Lili Yvonne (Fifi D’Orsay) in a Mexican dive
Next day, Ernest warns Bert that Lili is trying to get Bill to walk off the picture. Bill does not understand why Sylvia is avoiding him. She tells him he is a fake, like everything else in Hollywood. Bill goes on a bender with Lili, ending up in Mexico, and the studio decides to replace him. Sylvia and Jill track him down, and Sylvia reminds him that he said he loved her. She asks Bill to come back with her, but Lili restrains him [Temptation].
Back at the studio, they are about to start filming with a replacement when Bill arrives [Our Big Love Scene]. Sylvia and Bill kiss.
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.
For those who grew up in the 60s and 70s, Sterling Price Holloway Jr (1905-92) is the voice of Winnie the Pooh; there can be no other. He was also the voice of the snake Kaa in The Jungle Book (1967) and, before that, of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (1951), amongst other Disney performances.
After training at the American School of Dramatic Arts, Holloway toured widely with stock companies, both acting and singing. He was only 21 when he moved to Hollywood, making his debut in a Fox short called The Battling Kangaroo (1928).
Holloway appeared in over 170 pictures, mostly credited, and almost always bringing something eccentric to the role, with his very distinctive voice and physical appearance. Typical examples would be the frenzied delivery boy in Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), or ‘Chilly’ Willie Simms in Mitchell Leisen’s comedy Remember the Night (1940).
He was cast against type, and to great effect, in Lewis Milestone’s war film A Walk in the Sun (1945). He plays the medic McWilliams, whose brief lack of concentration brings about his own death.
Sterling Holloway made appearances in four Metro musicals. In Dancing Girl he plays Pinky, the scene-stealing author of the show being staged. He was uncredited in Going Hollywood and The Cat and the Fiddle, and then featured as Mishka, Danilo’s orderly, in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, where he was finally allowed to demonstrate his singing voice.
Holloway carried on working into his eighties, bowing out by narrating the highly-respected ‘Atomic Shakespeare’ episode of Moonlighting in 1986.
Joseph Max Newman (1909-2006) was a highly-respected assistant director who worked his way up to become a mediocre director.
Newman started out in the film industry as an office boy, then a clerk. His first assignments as assistant director were in 1933, when worked on eight MGM productions, including Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor. He worked for Cukor again on David Copperfield (1934), for which he was nominated for the Assistant Director Academy Award.
MGM allowed him to start directing shorts in 1938, alongside his work as AD on features. His first full-length picture was Northwest Rangers (1942), Metro’s version of a ‘B’ movie.
Newman directed around 45 low-budget features before moving to television. His most high-profile picture This Island Earth (1955), though its more interesting aspects are attributable to Jack Arnold, who reshot some of Newman’s footage.
Seven MGM musicals had Newman as AD: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, San Francisco (another Oscar nomination), Maytime and The Firefly. Some sources claim that he directed the famous ‘Donkey Serenade’ sequence in The Firefly.
No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.
Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.
He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.
At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films.
Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.
Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie,Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.
Vaudeville performer Harrison Greene (1884-1945) crammed around 150 features and 100 shorts into his fifteen-year screen career. Rarely credited in ‘A’ pictures, he at least earned a medium closeup in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), one of his first appearances.
Greene’s parts were generally small, but more than simple walk-ons. He danced with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and was one of the (many) people looking for an apartment in The More the Merrier (1943).
Greene was in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Broadway Melody of 1938 and The Ice Follies of 1939. The AFI also asserts that Greene was brought in to direct the Virginia Reel performed during the dream sequence in Going Hollywood, presumably because it was not in Albertina Rasch’s wheelhouse.
British actor Nora Cecil (1878-1951) began her acting career on the London stage before moving to the United States and Broadway in her early twenties.
She made her screen debut in Maurice Tourneur’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), and went on to appear in over 200 pictures. She worked for Tourneur again as one of Mary Pickford’s teachers in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).
Cecil came into her own when she grew old enough to play prim or sour-faced ‘spinster types’, like the missionary in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Aunt Emily in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933) and the teacher in Nothing Sacred (1937). She was memorable in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as the landlady who throws out Doc Boone.
In I Married a Witch (1942) she played Harriet Wooley, one of the nagging women who make miserable the lives of the cursed Wooley men.
In Cecil’s final film, Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), she played Louisa Ames, the malicious town gossip.
Nora Cecil was uncredited in six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Two Sisters from Boston and No Leave, No Love.
