Lodovico Tomarchio (1886-1947) was an Italian operatic tenor who made his professional debut in 1910. He made his first stage appearances in the United States in 1923, and had settled there by 1931.
Retired from the stage, Tomarchio began teaching, and became involved with the Paris Inn, a bohemian nightclub with singing waiters, all of whom were former professional singers. As well as supervising them, he also performed in the venue himself.
Tomarchio made appearances in eight films during the 1930s, including four MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, A Night at the Opera, Maytime and Swiss Miss (in which he was credited). He can also be glimpsed in archive footage in a montage sequence in Lady Be Good.
Christian Franz Bruno Julius Maria Rub (1886-1956) was allegedly an admirer of his fellow Austrian, Adolf Hitler. This is according to those who worked with him on his most enduring contribution to cinema, as the voice and physical model for Gepetto in Pinocchio (1940).
Rub started out as a stage actor in Germany, working in provincial theatre. It is unclear when he relocated to the United States, but his first film there, The Belle of New York, was made in 1919. This was the first of more than 100 film roles, most of them during the sound era.
Rub was a jobbing character actor, accepting both credited and uncredited parts in pictures, including Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now (1934), Peter Ibbetson (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Captains Courageous (1937) and, perhaps fittingly, Nazi Agent (1942).
Christian Rub appeared uncredited in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle, The Night is Young and Maytime, and was credited as the coachman in The Great Waltz.
Grace Flora Heller (1888-1963) was a prominent actor in provincial theatre, notably Philadelphia, and also worked on Broadway in 1918 and 1946.
Hayle started working in films while in her mid-forties, developing a niche as dignified ladies in more than 120 pictures. Early appearances, usually uncredited, included Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Baby Face (1933), Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Topper (1937).
She was a customer at The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and, in the same year, played her most well-remembered role, as Madame Napaloni in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). Hayle’s final screen appearance was in the Elvis Presley vehicle Loving You (1957).
Grace Hayle was in seven MGM musicals, starting with The Cat and the Fiddle. Online resources always claim she played a character named Lettuce, but I find it difficult to believe she was not actually Lettice. Her subsequent appearances were in The Great Ziegfeld, Maytime, Sweethearts, Ship Ahoy, I Married and Angel and Athena.
Leonid Nikolaevich Kinskii (1903-98) started out working as a theatrical mime in Czarist Russia. He left the country in 1921 and acted on stage in various countries until arriving in the United States in 1924.
After further stage work, and working on a film in 1926 where he did not make the final cut, Kinskey finally made it to the screen with an uncredited appearance in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932). He went on to become one of the most instantly-recognizable character actors in Hollywood.
Pictures featuring Kinskey include Duck Soup (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Algiers (1938), The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), Ball of Fire (1942) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1956).
Kinskey is best remembered as Sascha the “crazy Russian” bartender in Casablanca (1942) and was the last-surviving member of its leading cast.
During the Second World War, Kinskey worked with the US government to help select American films to be shown in the Soviet Union. Later in life, he worked extensively on television.
Kinskey acted in eight MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Maytime, The Great Waltz, I Married an Angel, Presenting Lily Mars and Nancy Goes to Rio.
German Hermann Bing (1889-1947) is a Pagliacci-like figure, literally starting out as a circus clown, adding comic eccentricity to dozens of films, and driven by depression to take his own life.
Bing left home at 16 to join the circus, and later worked as a comedian in varietétheaters. He entered the German film industry in the early 1920s, apparently working on the production side, though he may also have acted. By the late thirties he was working with F W Murnau, and travelled with him to the United States to work as assistant director on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). He can also be seen onscreen in a brief appearance as a tram conductor. He went on to assist on Murnau’s 4 Devils (1928).
Bing stayed on in Hollywood and developed a career as a supporting player, playing German characters with exaggerated accents and a general air of frustrated dignity. In the early 1930s, he also appeared in German-language versions of pictures such as Garbo’s Anna Christie (1930) and Menschen hinter Gittern (1931), a version of The Big House (1930) directed by Paul Fejos.
Herman Bing was often uncredited, but always memorable, and his more than 100 feature films included Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Ford’s Flesh (1932), Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Barbary Coast (1935) and Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). He was also the voice of the Ringmaster in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
His career was hit hard by the war and, by the mid-1940s, Bing was struggling to find work, which contributed to his tragic end.
Herman Bing appeared in eleven MGM musicals, including six with Jeanette MacDonald: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, Maytime, Sweethearts and Bitter Sweet. The others were The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, The Great Waltz and Broadway Melody of 1940.
Jeanette Anna MacDonald (1903-65) was unquestionably MGM’s most popular musical star of the 1930s. She made sixteen pictures in fourteen years, eight of them opposite Nelson Eddy. Her films were mainly operettas, with a few notable exceptions. Unlike Eddy, she was a capable actor, with a particular skill at comedy.
MacDonald had made her professional stage debut in 1920. Working steadily, she obtained her first starring role on Broadway in 1927. She was spotted by Ernst Lubitsch, who took her to Hollywood to star in his first sound picture, The Love Parade (1929). (She was first, presumably to give her some on-set experience, uncredited in Say It with Songs [1929]).
She made seven films released in 1930, some good (Monte Carlo [1930], again with Lubitsch), some bad (the execrable The Lottery Bride [(1930]).
MacDonald had a quieter year in 1932 (like every other musical performer in Hollywood), but made two outstanding pictures, Lubitsch’s One Hour With You (1932) and Love Me Tonight (1932), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. She then signed her contract with MGM.
The sixteen Metro musicals were: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow (her final film with Lubitsch), Naughty Marietta (teaming for the first time with Eddy), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (very much a change of pace), Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Smilin’ Through, I Married an Angel, Cairo and Three Daring Daughters.
In the last of these, she played a divorcée with children, and her career as a film star was effectively over. She sings a few songs in The Sun Comes Up (1949), but this is a Lassie film, not a musical.
MacDonald was also by now suffering from the heart condition that ended her life so early. She spent her final decade and a half performing in concerts, stage musicals, opera and on the radio.
Slavoljub Vorkapić (1894-1976) is one of the more fa
scinating and unexpected figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Born in Serbia, Vorapich studied to be a painter, and was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris in the late 1910s. He travelled to the United States in 1920, and found work as an actor, predominantly for the director Rex Ingram (he played Napoleon in Scaramouche [1923]).
In 1928, Vorkapich directed, with the collaboration of Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, a short and influential experimental film called The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, allegedly with a budget of $98. The prowess in editing demonstrated in the film led to employment in Hollywood, initially by Paramount, and then RKO and MGM. He came to specialize in montage sequences, in which action over a lengthy period of narrative time is compressed into a few minutes of screen time in what he called “symphonies of visual movement”. Vorkapich would be brought in specifically to shoot and edit these, often expressionistic, sequences. He developed and utilized techniques in pacing action for maximum psychological impact on the viewer.
Vorkapic was also adept at in-camera special effects, such as the collapse of Wall Street at the end of The Conquerors (1932) and the locust attack in The Good Earth (1937).
He made propaganda shorts during the Second World War, and then took up academic posts in California, and later in Yugoslavia. This was also where he directed his only feature film, Hanka (1955). He lectured on what he saw as the autonomous visual language of cinema, and never hesitated to criticize directors of high reputation, including Eisenstein and Ford, for what he considered incompetence.
Vorkapich’s work at MGM can be seen in the musicals Dancing Lady, San Francisco, Maytime, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts.
Quite why he was seen as simpatico with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is unclear.
Patrick Holme-Sumner (1897-1974) was a stage actor who starred in British films during the late 1910s, including a series about the adventures of a couple called Adam and Eve.
After travelling to the USA to work on Broadway, Somerset ended up in Hollywood, where he was generally restricted to uncredited roles. He became a member of John Ford’s stock company, appearing in nine of the director’s films, including The Informer (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1936).
Somerset also worked with Rouben Mamoulian (Becky Sharp [1935]), Clarence Brown (Anna Karenina [1935]), George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett [1935]) and Frank Capra (Mr Deeds Goes to Town [1936]).
Pat Somerset appeared in three Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Maytime and The Firefly.
Joseph Max Newman (1909-2006) was a highly-respected assistant director who worked his way up to become a mediocre director.
Newman started out in the film industry as an office boy, then a clerk. His first assignments as assistant director were in 1933, when worked on eight MGM productions, including Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor. He worked for Cukor again on David Copperfield (1934), for which he was nominated for the Assistant Director Academy Award.
MGM allowed him to start directing shorts in 1938, alongside his work as AD on features. His first full-length picture was Northwest Rangers (1942), Metro’s version of a ‘B’ movie.
Newman directed around 45 low-budget features before moving to television. His most high-profile picture This Island Earth (1955), though its more interesting aspects are attributable to Jack Arnold, who reshot some of Newman’s footage.
Seven MGM musicals had Newman as AD: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, San Francisco (another Oscar nomination), Maytime and The Firefly. Some sources claim that he directed the famous ‘Donkey Serenade’ sequence in The Firefly.
Benjamin Hunt Stromberg (1894-1968) was, for eighteen years, one of the most powerful men at Hollywood’s most powerful studio.
After a brief career as a reporter, Stromberg became Samuel Goldwyn’s publicity director in New York, before being sent to Hollywood in 1918. He then joined Thomas Ince, and in 1920 directed a promotional short, A Trip Through the World’s Greatest Motion Picture Studios.
In 1921, Stromberg set up his own production company, and produced his first film, The Foolish Age. From 1921-25, he directed and/or produced a dozen or so, predominantly short, pictures.
Stromberg joined the newly-formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925, joining Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf as one of its senior executives. In 1928, he produced two of its early successes, the award-winning White Shadows in the South Seas and Our Dancing Daughters.
During the 1930s, Stromberg produced all of Jean Harlow’s pictures and, running into the 40s, the Thin Man series. He also supervised Marie Antoinette (1938), The Women (1949) and Pride and Prejudice (1940).
After falling out with Mayer, Stromberg produced a number of independent pictures, with varying degrees of success, the best being Lady of Burlesque (1943) and The Strange Woman (1946), which he co-wrote with director Edgar G Ulmer.
Stromberg was an important producer of MGM musicals in the 1930s. Cutting his teeth on Stage Mother, he then worked on six Jeanette MacDonald vehicles: Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Maytime, The Firefly, Sweethearts and I Married an Angel. He also found time to produce the hugely successful The Great Ziegfeld.
