The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Love in the Rough

  • Penny Singleton

    Mariana Dorothy McNulty (1908-2003) found fame at a very young age. As ‘Little Dorothy’, she sang in silent picture houses, then toured in vaudeville as part of the Kiddie Kabaret.

    Later in life she became a labour activist, twice elected resident of the American Guild of Variety Artists and, in 1967, leading a successful month-long strike by performers at the Radio City Music Hall.

    In between all this was an acting career irrevocably associated with the Blondie and Dagwood films produced by Columbia. She and Arthur Lake appeared in all 28 pictures between 1938 and 1950. 

    Earlier in her career, when she was still known as Dorothy McNulty, she performed the first screen version of ‘The Varsity Drag’ in Good News, and immediately afterward had a featured role in Love in the Rough.

  • Henry Sharp

    Henry Thomas Sharp (1892-1966) became a cinematographer in 1920, and went on to become a favourite of Douglas Fairbanks. Films shot by Sharp included Don Q Son of Zorro (1925), The Black Pirate (1926), The Iron Mask (1929) and Fairbanks’s curio, Around the World with Douglas Fairbanks (1931). 

    Sharp also photographed The Marriage Circle (1924) for Ernst Lubitsch and Vidor’s The Crowd (1928)

    Henry Sharp’s two MGM musicals were Lord Byron of Broadway and \love in the Rough.

  • Polly Ann Young

    Like Sally Blane, Polly Ann Young (1908-97) was the less-successful sister of Loretta Young. She acted in around 40 films, mostly in uncredited parts.

    Young’s three Metro musicals were made in a cluster in 1930: They Learned About Women, Children of Pleasure and Love in the Rough.

  • George H Reed

    George Henry Reed (1866-1952) got a strong start in films when he played Jim in the 1920 version of Huckleberry Finn. But the opportunities for Black actors were few at that time and, apart from his appearance as Aaron in the all-Black Green Pastures (1936), Reed was thereafter restricted to a very narrow range of small parts.

    The restrictions and stereotyping faced by Black performers are demonstrated in Reed’s three 1930 Metro musicals, They Learned About Women, Montana Moon and Love in the Rough. He played a train porter in all three of them. 

  • J C Nugent

    John Charles Nugent (1868-1947) was a vaudeville performer who became a playwright, actor and screenwriter. Several of his plays were adapted for the screen. He was the father of Elliott Nugent, who appeared in So This Is College.

    Nugent had supporting roles in They Learned About Women and Love in the Rough. 

  • Basil Wrangell

    The exotically-named Basilio Petrovich von Wrangell (1906-77) was born in Italy, in the Russian embassy, and educated in England. After acting as an interpreter for director Fred Niblo during the production of Ben-Hur (1925), he travelled to the USA to train as an editor. A long and successful career in films and television followed, with an Oscar nomination in 1937 for The Good Earth.

    Wrangell edited Marianne (uncredited) and Love in the Rough. 

  • Ralph Shugart

    Ralph Shugart (1901-50) worked under Douglas Shearer in the MGM sound department from its inception. 

    Shugart was the (mostly uncredited) recording engineer on Marianne, Devil-May-Care, In Gay Madrid, Love in the Rough, Flying High, The Wizard of Oz (where he worked on sound effects) and Bathing Beauty.

  • George Chandler

    W C Fields’s fans will know George Chandler (1898-1985) as Chester Snavely, the unfortunate youth who drank The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933).

    In his fifty-year career Chandler kept very busy, right up to a final appearance in the Lou Grant TV series. He made credited appearances in two MGM musicals–In Gay Madrid and The Florodora Girl–and also showed up uncredited in Devil-May-Care, Love in the Rough, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Broadway Melody of 1940, Swing Fever and The Pirate.

  • Dorothy Jordan

    Dorothy Jordan (1906-88) made her film debut in Black Magic (1929), one of the many trained stage actors to find employment in Hollywood with the advent of sound. After playing Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (1929), she starred opposite Ramon Novarro in his talking debut in Devil-May-Care. 

    Jordan and Novarro were teamed again in two more musicals, In Gay Madrid  and Call of the Flesh. She was also female lead to Robert Montgomery in Love in the Rough.

    Jordan retired in 1933 after marrying producer Merian C Cooper, returning later only in occasional supporting roles. She made notable appearances in two of John Ford’s greatest films: The Sun Shines Bright (1953), where she was the sex worker whose life and death are central to two plot lines; and as John Wayne’s sister-in-law, who meets a tragic end, in The Searchers (1956)

  • Robert E Hopkins

    We may never know how many screenplays Robert E Hopkins (1886-1966) contributed to if Thomas Schatz’s description of him prowling the Culver City lot providing one-liners as required is accurate. We certainly know he contributed to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure (uncredited), Love in the Rough and The Cuban Love Song. 

    Nineteen-thirty-six was a year of extremes. He got an Academy Award nomination for providing the story for San Francisco, and wrote without credit for Hollywood Party. Such was the life of a contract writer at MGM.

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