Ernie Alexander (1890-1961) was typical of Hollywood’s hardworking bit players. Out of over 200 mostly uncredited performances, sixteen were in Metro musicals.
Beginning as a doughboy in Marianne, Alexander was a student in So This Is College, a servant in Hollywood Party, and a townsman in Babes in Toyland.
Alexander’s contribution to Here Comes the Band was lost in the edit, but he came back with an elevator operator in Rose-Marie and a racetrack usher in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
He was a revolutionary in The Great Waltz, a photographer in Broadway Serenade and an expectant father in Little Nellie Kelly. He played a pageboy in Lady Be Good and stagehands in Ship Ahoy and For Me and My Gal.
He delivered flowers in Du Barry Was a Lady and finally acquired a name as Charlie the bellboy in I Dood It.
Finally, Alexander was back in uniform as a commissionaire in Swing Fever.
William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures was essentially a vanity project for the production of films starring Marion Davies. That films like Marianne are far more than vanity projects is largely owing to Davies’s talents as a comic performer.
Marianne is a sound remake of a silent film, also starring Davies, that had been made only a few months earlier. Apart from her brief appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 , it was Davies’s talking debut and, whatever the merits of the film, it is a small triumph for her personally. She overcame the stammer which had made her fearful of speaking on screen. More than that, she uses a French accent, sings, and shares screen time with a pig. She even demonstrates her skills as a mimic, impersonating Maurice Chevalier and Sarah Bernhardt.
“Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise” Marianne (Marion Davies) does Maurice Chevalier
The film itself is overlong at approaching two hours, but technically more proficient than many contemporaneous talkies. It is also the first Metro musical to combine a non-backstage setting with a bespoke songlist. (Hallelujah was intended by King Vidor to include only traditional songs and its two Irving Berlin numbers were included against his wishes.) Three songwriting partnerships contributed these songs: Ahlert and Turk (four numbers), Klages and Greer (two), and Freed and Brown (one).
Marianne is not an integrated musical in the sophisticated sense of the Freed unit’s output in the 1950s, but its musical numbers do arise naturally from the action. The title song, ‘Marianne,’ is performed three times. André sings it in French and the words specifically relate to his departure and his wish that Marianne remain faithful to him. Later, the words are spoken in English by Marianne herself, to explain why she cannot go with Stagg. Finally, Stagg sings to Marianne, saying “The words could be mine as well as his, couldn’t they?”. This is a sophisticated use of a song to develop the story.
Similarly, ‘Just You, Just Me’ has lyrics appropriate to Stagg’s final attempt to persuade Marianne to go with him. He sings the love song to her alone, but while surrounded by dancing couples singing a completely different song. Again, director Robert Z Leonard is employing a sophisticated technique for the period, utilizing sound rather than simply recording it and incorporating a song to move the story forward.
Stagg (Lawrence Gray) sings ‘Just You, Just Me’ to Marianne
Elsewhere, Cliff Edwards and Benny Rubin make the first of their many appearances as vocal and comic support to a musical’s star players. Edwards subsequently had a chart hit with a recording of ‘Just You, Just Me’.
Karl Max Schneefuss (1892-1962), who worked under the name Charles Maxwell, started his career at MGM as assistant to William Axt, compositing additional music for Marianne.
Most of Maxwell’s career in musicals was spent as an orchestrator, in which capacity he worked on The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady,The Cat and the Fiddle,The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Here Comes the Band , A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie,The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, The Firefly and New Moon.
William Axt (1888-1959) was a composer and conductor who joined the MGM music department in 1929 and went on to write hundreds of scores. He composed for a number of musicals, mostly early in his career: Marianne, It’s a Great Life, Devil-May-Care, Chasing Rainbows,The Rogue Song, Free and Easy, Call of the Flesh, Madam Satan, Hollywood Party, The Great Ziegfeld, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Everybody Sing and Listen, Darling.
Axi’s work was also taken off the shelf for use as stock music in New Moon, Student Tour, Balalaika and Little Nellie Kelly .
The costumes he designed for The Wizard of Oz, which included the iconic ruby slippers, were unquestionably the high point of the career of Adrian Adolph Greenburg (1903-59), known simply as Adrian. But his designs were included in hundreds of MGM features, mostly between 1928 and 1941, including 34 other musicals. These included eleven Jeanette MacDonald pictures: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon and Bitter Sweet.
Adrian was very active during 1929-31, designing for Marianne, Devil-May-Care,The Rogue Song, Montana Moon, In Gay Madrid, Madam Satan, New Moon andThe Cuban Love Song.
Dancing Lady reunited Adrian with Joan Crawford a year after the white mousseline de soie dress he created for her in Letty Linton (1932) was copied commercially and sold over 500,000 units.
Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Great Waltz and Honolulu led up to the triumph ofThe Wizard of Oz. Adrian then worked on Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl andThe Chocolate Soldier before leaving MGM in 1941 to open his own fashion business.
He continued to freelance for a variety of studios and returned to Metro for a final musical, the aptly-named Lovely to Look At.
Jesse Greer (1896-1970) published over 100 songs, but perhaps only ‘Just You, Just Me,’ written with Ray Klages for Marianne, and reprised years later in This Could Be the Night, has become a standard.
Greer and Klages also wrote a number featured in So This is College.
Raymond Klages (1888-1947) and his composer-partner Jesse Greer are perhaps the least-known of the three songwriting partnerships that contributed to Marianne, but it is their song ‘Just You, Just Me’ that went on to become a jazz standard that has been recorded by dozens of artists. It was used again by Metro almost thirty years later in This Could Be the Night.
Klages and Greer’s only other work for the studio was a song in So This is College.
Lyricist Roy Kenneth Turk (1892-1934) had his biggest hit posthumously when Elvis Presley recorded his 1927 ‘Are You Lonely Tonight,’ written with composer Lou Handsman. His most frequent collaborator was composer Fred E Ahlert, with whom he and Bing Crosby wrote ‘Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’
Turk and Ahlert wrote numbers for Marianne, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure and In Gay Madrid. In addition, they contributed to the abandoned The March of Time and ‘Mean to Me’ was included in Love Me Or Leave Me.
Frederick Emil Ahlert (1892-1953) was a composer of popular music who most frequently worked with lyricist Roy Turk. The pair collaborated with Bing Crosby on the singer’s ‘theme song’ ‘Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’. Ahlert also wrote ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ with Joe Young.
Ahlert and Turk contributed songs to Marianne, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure and In Gay Madrid. In addition, ‘Mean to Me’ was included in Love Me Or Leave Me.
Ahlert’s music for ‘Poor Little G-String,’ written with Turk for the abandoned The March of Time, was used for a dance number in Broadway to Hollywood.
