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.
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:
William Samuel Rosenberg (1899-1966) became familiar to audiences in 1975 when he was played by James Caan in Funny Lady, a film about Fanny Brice, to whom Rose was married for nine years. In the mid-20th century, however, he was one of the biggest impresarios on Broadway.
Rose started out as a stenographer, playing an important role during the First World War as a senior clerk at the War Industries Board. After the war, he started writing song lyrics, and eventually became the co-writer of many standards, including ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’, ‘Don’t Bring Lulu’ and ‘Me and My Shadow’. It should be noted, however, that Rose was an enormously successful self-publicist, and doubt has been cast on the extent of his contribution in song-writing partnerships.
Inevitably, given his ego, Rose moved into Broadway producing. One of his biggest hits was Jumbo (1936), which was filmed by MGM in 1962. Rose played no part in the production of the film, but a contractual requirement meant that it was titled Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
As an impresario, Rose was known for glitz and vulgarity, but also for giving an early opportunity as choreographer to Gene Kelly, and for staging Carmen Jones in 1943 with an all-Black cast.
Numbers co-written by Billy Rose were used in The Prodigal and Hit the Deck.
Edward Eliscu (1902-98) was multi-talented, an actor, writer, producer and lyricist.
After graduating from university, Eliscu became an actor, securing roles on Broadway. He began writing songs, and in 1929 teamed up with Vincent Youmans and Billy Rose to write the musical Great Day. This included the number ‘Without a Song’, which was sung beautifully by Lawrence Tibbett in MGM’s The Prodigal.
Eliscu also began contributing songs to film scores, after being invited to Hollywood by Nacio Herb Brown. He scored a hit with the first big Astaire and Rogers number, ‘Carioca’ in Flying Down to Rio. He also co-wrote a number in Hit the Deck.
Eliscu’s stage revue Meet the People was a big success in Hollywood in 1939, “an exhortation to Hollywood to come out of its cocoon and realize what was going on in the rest of the world”. None of his work was retained in MGM’s 1944 film of the same name.
Eliscu’s career in Hollywood ended when he was one of the many people named to HUAC by Martin Berkeley. But he continued to work productively back in New York. He served for five years as president of the Songwriters Guild of America.
Vincent Millie Youmans (1898-1946) was a prolific Tin Pan Alley composer. Not a lot of his work is remembered today, but he did write a handful of hardy perennials.
At the level of individual songs, Youmans wrote the music for ‘I Want to Be Happy’ and ‘Tea for Two’. Of his stage musicals, No, No, Nanette (1927) has endured.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not use a lot of Youman’s work, but he did compose the beautiful ‘Without a Song’ for The Prodigal. His 1927 Broadway hit Hit the Deck was filmed by MGM in 1955, with many of Youmans’s numbers retained.
Probably the most frequently revived screen musical with Youmans’s music is RKO’s proto-Astaire/Rogers picture Flying Down to Rio (1933).
Percival Davis (1887-1941) was a prolific lyricist and librettist for the West End and Broadway. His many stage musicals and revues included The Bing Boys are Here and Mr Cinders (1928), from which ‘If You were the Only Girl in the World’ and ‘Spread a Little Happiness’ became standards.
Like many other songwriters, Grey was invited to Hollywood in 1929, where he worked on the early sound masterpiece, The Love Parade (1929) at Paramount.
At MGM he wrote regularly with Herbert Stothart in the 1930s, contributing numbers to Devil-May-Care,Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, In Gay Madrid, The Florodora Girl, Call of the Flesh, New Moon and Madam Satan.
Grey’s lyrics for ‘Like Monday Follows Sunday’ featured in Everything I Have is Yours and Hit the Deck was based on his stage musical from 1927.
As late as 2010 The Guardian was still perpetuating the myth that Clifford Grey was also an Olympic bobsleigher and winner of a gold medal. This arises from a confusion with athlete Clifford ‘Tippi’ Gray (1892-1968), who also dabbled in songwriting.
