The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Marianne

  • Roscoe Ates

    Roscoe Blevel Ates (1895-1962) was working in vaudeville as a comedian when he made his screen debut in 1929’s South Sea Rose.

    The following year, after an uncredited appearance in Marianne and a small part in Love in the Rough, Ates had a strong supporting role in King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930). He appeared in many further westerns, including a run as a character named Soapy Jones for PRC.

    Ates had a speech impediment as a child, which he revived to good effect in a number of pictures playing stuttering characters.

    Roscoe Ates’s other Metro musicals were Ziegfeld Girl and Meet Me in Las Vegas.

  • Douglas Scott

    British-born Douglas Frazer Scott (1925-88) moved with his parents to Los Angeles aged three, and almost immediately began working as a child actor.

    Scott’s career was over by the time he was eighteen, but it still encompassed working with Cecil B DeMille in Dynamite 1929), with Dorothy Arzner in Sarah and Son (1930), John Ford in Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and with William Wyler, as the young Hindley in Wuthering Heights (1939).

    Less auspiciously, Scott appeared without credit in Marianne.

  • Seymour Kupper

    Seymour Kupper (1915-34) made an appearance as a child actor in The Jazz Singer (1927), but his career was over a couple of years later. His last film was an uncredited role in Marianne. He would appear to have suffered a tragically-early death.

  • Emile Chautard

    Émile Chautard (1864-1934) was forty-four when he made his first screen appearance in 1910, following a successful stage career. He directed his first film in the same year, and was appointed head of production at Paris’s Éclair Films in 1913. Between 1910 and 1924, Chautard directed over 100 films, but stopped acting in 1917. During a period at the World Film Company in 1915, he trained an apprentice cutter named Josef Von Sternberg.

    Chautard took a job with Famous Player-Lasky in around 1922, but only directed a handful of films in America. He returned to acting, making around over sixty appearances. Notable films included 7th Heaven (1927) and three by his former protegé, Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus (both 1932). In the last of these, Von Sternberg cast him as a nightclub manager named Chautard. He was also in the French-language versions of several pictures.

    Chautard was in Marianne and Free and Easy. He was uncredited in the latter, which was increasingly the case during the final years of his career.

  • Robert Edeson

    Robert Edeson (1868-1931) was an actor on Broadway and a vaudeville performer before making his film debut in 1914, starring in Cecil B DeMille’s The Call of the North. He had played his role in the original stage production.

    Edeson continued to play leading roles throughout the silent era, including as Colonel Zapt in Rex Ingram’s 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. He also created the first screen version of lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1927).

    Edeson acquired his most unusual assignment when actor Rudolph Christians died before Erich Von Stroheim had completed Foolish Wives (1922). Edeson took over as the character, but always acting with his back to the camera. 

    Robert Edeson’s only involvement in MGM musicals was as the General in Marianne.

  • Scott Kolk

    Walter Scott Kolk (1905-93) was a professional drummer before becoming an actor, and also sang in revues.

    Kolk made his film debut in Marianne, and the following year experienced the harsher side of the First World War when he played one of the volunteers in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). 

    Shortly before finally retiring from acting (he had taken several years out in the early thirties), Kolk portrayed the eponymous hero on the 12-part serial Secret Agent X-9 (1937), based on a comic strip co-written by Dashiell Hammett.

  • 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. 

  • James C McKay

    James C McKay (1894-1971) worked as both director and editor during the silent era, starting in 1916 and for a variety of studios. His career seems to have tailed off during the 1930s.

    McKay edited two musicals for MGM: Marianne and They Learned About Women.

  • Oscar Apfel

    Oscar C Apfel (1878-1938) was a successful Broadway director before moving into film direction. He made well over 100 films, and supervised Cecil B DeMille during his early days in Hollywood. He also pursued a secondary career as an actor, and that was what he continued after the introduction of sound. 

    He became a busy supporting player, and his MGM musical parts included Major Russart in Marianne and Mr Mandelbaum in It’s a Great Life. Both were uncredited. 

  • Dick Winslow

    Not every child actor goes on to a career of well over sixty years as a successful character actor and band leader, but Richard Winslow Johnson (1915-91) managed it. Along the way he made appearances in five MGM musicals and may be the only actor to have worked with both Marion Davies and Roy Orbison.

    The films were Marianne (playing the accordion),Thousands Cheer,On an Island With You,Torch Song and The Fastest Guitar Alive.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!