William LeVanway (1896-1957) was an editor who spent his entire career at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, latterly as head of the editing department. Unlike Douglas Shearer and Cedric Gibbons, he was not credited on every film.
While still undertaking editing assignments, LeVanway worked on the silent version of The Broadway Melody (1929), and was the cutter on Free and Easy, Good News and A Night at the Opera. He was the supervising editor for An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.
Russell Franks (1901-73) worked in the MGM sound department under Douglas Shearer. After acting as assistant on The Hollywood Revue of 1929, he was recording engineer onChasing Rainbows and Good News.
Reggie Montgomery (1906-??) co-write musical numbers for three MGM musicals–Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure and Good News–and for the abandoned The March of Time.
Little seems to be known about David Cox (1906-19??), who designed costumes at MGM before moving to work with Dolly Tree at Fox in 1932. He is, nonetheless, a featured artist at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where a costume designed for Bessie Love to wear in The Broadway Melody is among the exhibits.
Cox also designed for The Hollywood Revue of 1929, It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Call of the Flesh, Good News and Love in the Rough.
Joseph White Farnham (1884-1931) is the permanent holder of two cinematic records. He was the only person to receive an Academy Award for writing title cards, for The Fair Co-Ed (1927), Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Telling the World (both 1928). And he was the first winner of an Academy Award to die.
Farnham’s brief career in talking pictures was less prestigious, but did include work on six Metro musicals. He wrote a skit for The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and titles for Marianne (both without credit). He then contributed dialogue to So This Is College, Montana Moon, Good News and Love in the Rough. Farnham also appeared as himself in Free and Easy.
Delmer Lawrence Daves (1904-77) started out as a prop boy, dabbled in acting and screenwriting, and became a director singled out by Martin Scorsese as neglected and as a forerunner of his own approach to depicting indigenous Americans in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
In his mid-twenties Daves co-wrote So This Is College, and also appeared onscreen as one of the USC footballers. Sticking with the college background, he then played Beef in Good News.
Anna McKim (1911-79) made her name as an actor of great talent in Scarface (1932) and flourished for a time at Warner Bros. But only a couple of years earlier she had been a regular member of the chorus line in no fewer than eleven of Metro’s early musicals. She is prominent in all her appearances, largely owing to her unique beauty and a screen presence that would be fully revealed by Howard Hawks.
Dvorak is cited by some sources as assistant choreographer to Sammy Lee, who certainly was the dance director on most of her MGM appearances. This would certainly explain her prominence.
Dvorak starts off big in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in a two-shot with Jack Benny. She gets to speak two words (“Pardon me”) and slap Benny in the face. After playing a student in So This Is College, she was back in the chorus line in It’s a Great Life, supporting the Duncan Sisters.
After that, Dvorak was in Devil-May-Care, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, Free and Easy and Children of Pleasure. She was another student in Good News, another chorus girl in Love in the Rough and, finally, a party-goer in the zeppelin in Madam Satan. In later films she was also working on choreography with Sammy Lee.
Dvorak also worked on The March of Time before it was abandoned.
Sammy Lee (1890-1968), born Samuel Levy, was the first in a line of important choreographers at MGM, though he arguably achieved greater success on Broadway and at Twentieth Century-Fox.
Lee is uncredited on The Broadway Melody, which he might have been quite happy about, given the rudimentary nature of the dance numbers. He had worked on Ziegfeld’s Follies in 1927, but this is not reflected in the style of the fictional Zanfield’s show. Lee and director Harry Beaumont could not, in this first-ever film musical, determine how to make a stage performance cinematic. Nor were the chorines of the quality Lee would have been used to on Broadway.
Lee’s first onscreen credit was for ‘Dances and Ensemble’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he did his best with non-professional dancers Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. He also essayed a pre-Berkeley overhead shot of the chorus.
Lee went on to stage dances for It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, They Learned About Women, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure, Good News, Love in the Rough (which includes an al fresco number performed at a real golf club), A Lady’s Morals, Broadway to Hollywood and Dancing Lady.
A move to Twentieth Century-Fox earned Lee Academy Award nominations for King of Burlesque (1936) and Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). He was back at Metro for Honolulu, Hullabaloo, Cairo, Born to Sing, Meet the People and Two Girls and a Sailor.
Lee had a parallel career as the director of a series of undistinguished shorts.
The man who contributed greatly to the 20s’ ukelele craze. The performer who performed ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in its feature film debut. The voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940). Just three of the reasons why Clifton Avon Edwards (1895-1971), or ‘Ukelele Ike,’ ought not to be quite as forgotten as he is.
Edwards was a successful vaudeville and café performer, allegedly dubbed ‘Ukelele Ike’ by a waiter who could never remember his name. He became a ubiquitous figure in the early Metro musicals, appearing in over a third of the studio’s productions in 1929-31.
Edwards’s rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, though lacking Gene Kelly’s familiar phrasing, was good enough to earn the song a reprise in the hastily-devised finale, in which also appeared.
His first acting role was as Soapy, one of the doughboys in Marianne. He then added musical support in So This is College and performed a speciality number in They Learned About Women. Lord Byron of Broadway saw him in the, not really challenging, role of a vaudeville singer, after which he was way out west as one of the hero’s buddies in Montana Moon.
Edwards made an uncredited appearance as himself in Children of Pleasure and has a featured role as the Coach’s assistant, Pooch Kearney, in the 1930 version of Good News. He was then one of Lawrence Tibbett’s hobo pals in The Prodigal.
The film musical hiatus of 1932 soon followed, and Edwards only appeared in one further musical for Metro, as Minstrel Joe in The Girl of the Golden West.
At his height, in the late 1920s, Cliff Edwards was earning $4000 a week. By the time of his death, he was an indigent charity patient in a Hollywood hospital; his body was unclaimed for several days because no one knew who he was.
No one had a longer connection with MGM musicals than Arthur Freed (1894-1974), starting at the very beginning with The Broadway Melody in 1929 and ending in 1960 with Bells Are Ringing. Of course, his role changed significantly during that period.
Freed had not been working long as a lyricist at MGM when he and composer Nacio Herb Brown were assigned the task of producing the first bespoke score for a film musical. Following the success of The Broadway Melody, Freed’s songs were a mainstay of the studio’s musical output for a quarter of a century. He and Brown contributed numbers to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Marianne, Lord Byron of Broadway, Montana Moon, Dancing Lady, Going Hollywood, Student Tour, Broadway Melody of 1936, San Francisco, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Two Girls on Broadway, Hullabaloo, Little Nellie Kelly, Lady Be Good, Born to Sing, Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St Louis, Three Little Words, Pagan Love Song, Singin’ in the Rain and The Affairs of Dobie Gillies
He also worked without Brown on the 1930 Good News and on A Lady’s Morals, The Prodigal, Hollywood Party, A Night at the Opera, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Bathing Beauty, Anchors Aweigh, Ziegfeld Follies, Yolanda and the Thief and Love Me or Leave Me.
During the 1930s Freed spent time on Metro’s sound stages, watching the staging of his songs and learning about the craft of creating film musicals. He also devoted time to ingratiating himself with studio head Louis B Mayer, making known his ambition to become involved in the production side of the process. Finally, in 1938, Mayer decided to give Freed his chance.
Arthur Freed initiated the filming of The Wizard of Oz and was its de facto producer, although only credited as associate producer; Mayer safeguarded the project by appointing the more experienced Mervyn LeRoy as producer.
Having shown what he could do, Freed was made a full producer and worked on 39 musicals and a handful of non-musicals during the next thirty years. The musicals were Babes in Arms, Little Nellie Kelly, Strike Up the Band, Lady Be Good, Babes on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Panama Hattie, Cabin in the Sky, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Best Foot Forward, Meet Me in St Louis, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Easter Parade, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Pagan Love Song, An American in Paris, Royal Wedding, Show Boat, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, It’s Always Fair Weather, Kismet, Invitation to the Dance, Silk Stockings, Gigi and Bells Are Ringing.
The Freed Unit became MGM royalty and made most of the musicals upon which the studio’s current reputation rests. Opinions vary as to the extent to which Freed can take credit for this achievement, and the unit did produce a few duds. But, at the very least, Arthur Freed was the catalyst for a body of work of unrivalled sophistication and artistry.
