Doris McMahon (1910-61) was a performer whose short, mostly precode, career could largely be described as scantily clad.
She was in three MGM musicals, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure and Madam Satan.
Category: Madam Satan
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Mary Carlisle
Gwendolyn Witter (1914-2018) played bits in three MGM musicals (Montana Moon, Children of Pleasure and Madam Satan) before moving on to more substantial roles at Paramount, often paired with Bing Crosby,
Carlisle retired in 1943 and lived for another 75 years.
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Anne Bauchens
Roseanne Bauchens (1882-1967) spent forty years as the editor-of-choice for Cecil B DeMille’s pictures, from Carmen (1915) to The Ten Commandments (1956). She even appeared alongside DeMille when he did his cameo in Sunset Boulevard (1950). So highly did DeMille value Bauchens that it was stipulated in his contracts that she was to be his editor. She won an Oscar for North West Mounted Police (1940).
This meant that Bauchens was the cutter on DeMille’s Metro musical, Madam Satan. Earlier that year, she edited Lord Byron of Broadway.
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Youcca Troubetzkoy
Prince Yucca Troubetskov (1905-1992) was American-born to Russian nobility, and pursued a film career from 1925 to 1939 in both Hollywood and France. He had the kind of exotic, sultry good looks made popular by Rudolph Valentino.
Troubetzkoy had a supporting role in Chasing Rainbows and also made an appearance in Madam Satan.
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Clifford Grey
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.
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Herbert Stothart
Herbert Pope Stothart (1885-1949) is a composer whose name is less familiar today than, say, Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner, but in Hollywood’s golden age he was ranked alongside them for his work at MGM.
Stothart had a successful career writing stage musicals, most notably Rose-Marie, but was invited to join Metro in 1929. He signed a contract and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Scores by Stothart were prominent in some of the studio’s most important pictures of the 1930s and 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille (1936), The Good Earth (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Mrs Miniver (1942), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Yearling (1946). In all, Stothart wrote over 100 scores.
Stothart worked on many of MGM’s musicals. He and Clifford Grey wrote the songs for Devil-May-Care and contributed numbers to Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, In Gay Madrid, The Florodora Girl, Call of the Flesh, New Moon and Madam Satan.
He worked with other lyricists on A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Here Comes the Band, Maytime, The Firefly (composing ‘The Donkey Serenade’), Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, The Chocolate Soldier and I Married an Angel.
Stothart was the musical director on some of these films and also on The Cat and the Fiddle, Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, The Wizard of Oz (picking up an Oscar), New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Girl, Cairo, Thousands Cheer, Kismet, The Unfinished Dance. Musical direction usually involved writing incidental music.
And, of course, Metro produced two versions of Stothart’s greatest stage success, Rose-Marie, and he worked on the first version.
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Aileen Ransom
Aileen Ranson (1911-1956) appeared briefly in a number of films during the 1930s, including two Metro musicals, It’s a Great Life and Madam Satan (in which she portrayed Victory).
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Dorothy Vernon
Dorothea Christine Arens (1875-1970) was a hard-working small-part actor who made four Metro musical appearances: The Broadway Melody, Madam Satan, Bitter Sweet and Presenting Lily Mars.
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Dorothy Dehn
The three MGM-musical roles of Dorothy Dehn (1908-98) represent a downward spiral. From the wholesomeness of the campus in So This Is College, via the part of Quicksilver in Madam Satan, she ended up as a Maxim’s girl in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow,
