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.
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:
