The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Madam Satan

  • Nathalie Visart

    The film career of Natalie Visart (1910-86) is inextricably linked to Cecil B DeMille. She was a friend of his daughter Katharine, joining her in uncredited revelry in the zeppelin in Madam Satan.

    Visart later began a relationship with the future director Mitchell Leisen, who designed costumes for DeMille’s films, working with him on The Sign of the Cross (1932). He secured for her the role of costume designer on The Plainsman (1936), and she went on to carry out that function on five more of DeMille’s pictures. She also worked for Frank Capra, designing for Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Meet John Doe (1941).

    Visart’s work was highly-respected, but she gave up her career after marrying in 1946.

  • Kasha Haroldi

    Kasha Haroldi (1907-92) was an actor who arguably received the most publicity for being, for a few years, the sister-in-law of Joan Crawford.

    Haroldi made her first appearance on screen in 1923 and the last in 1938. With the possible exception of Wesley Ruggles’s version of The Age of Innocence (1924), the only film she was associated with to feature in the history books is Madam Satan, in which, like so many others, she played one of the wives of Henry VIII.

  • Elvira Lucianti

    Like Natalie Storm, Elvira Lucianti (dates unknown) is a mysterious figure who walked onto the zeppelin as one of Henry VIII’s wives in Madam Satan.

  • Mary McAllister

    Mary McAlister [sic] (1908-91) was ‘Little Mary McAlister’, one of America’s first child stars.

    She made her first appearance in 1915 for Essanay, and starred in Sadie Goes to Heaven (1917) two years later.

    McAllister worked regularly up until 1928, when talking pictures slowed down her adult career. She retired following an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan.

  • June Nash

    June Nash (1911-79) had a very brief film career, comprising nine appearances.

    The high point was playing the female lead in Strange Cargo (1929).

    The low point may have been an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan.

  • Natalie Storm

    Someone called Natalie Storm (1905-??), apparently born in Durban, South Africa, may have been in Hollywood during 1930 and appeared as one of Henry VIII’s wives in Madam Satan.

  • Henry Stockbridge

    Henry Stockbridge (1871-1952) was an actor who made his screen debut, in his late fifties, as one of the wise fools in Cecil B DeMille’s Dynamite (1929). The following years he was the uncredited Butterfly Man in DeMille’s Madam Satan.

    Stockbridge only appeared in half a dozen films culminating with Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), playing one of the unemployed farmers. 

  • Ella Hall

    Ella August Hall (1897-1981) came from an acting family, and performed on the stage at an early age. She joined the Biograph Company in 1912, worked for Griffith and Sennett, then played the lead in Lois Weber’s Memories (1913). In total, Hall appeared in nearly 100 films.

    Hall worked busily until early 1918, when she took a break following the birth of her first child. She made only a handful of films in the 1920s, and made an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan. 

    Hall’s final film, without credit, was Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932).  

  • Vera Gordon

    Vera Pogorelsky (1886-1948) was a child actor in Russia before she and her parents emigrated to America with her husband and child in 1905.

    Gordon performed in Yiddish theatre, and also worked in the UK for a while in around 1916.

    She made her first film in 1920, but worked infrequently in Hollywood, preferring the theatre. Gordon’s best-remembered role is Mrs Cohen in The Cohens and the Kellys (1926) and the series of sequels that followed it. She was the archetypal Jewish mother and, fittingly, made her last appearance in Abie’s Irish Rose (1946).

    Gordon only appeared in one MGM musical, a bit part in Madam Satan. 

  • Kenneth Gibson

    Bit player Kenneth Koch Gibson (1898-1972) spent a lot of time being paid to party. He was in fourteen MGM musicals, and in at least eight of them was a party guest or nightclub patron. 

    In a career stretching from 1921 to 1969, Gibson notched up approaching 300 screen appearances. He was actually the male lead in his first film, Big Town Ideas (1921), but by 1929 was generally uncredited. He became a regular bit player for Cecil B DeMille and Preston Sturges, and can be found in some excellent pictures, including This Gun for Hire (1942), The Big Sleep (1946), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Star is Born (1954).

    Gibson’s musicals at Metro were: Madam Satan, New Moon (1940), Yolanda and the Thief, Luxury Liner, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Duchess of Idaho, The Toast of New Orleans, Rich, Young and Pretty, Singin’ in the Rain, Small Town Girl, Interrupted Melody, It’s Always Fair Weather, I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Ten Thousand Bedrooms.

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