The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Naughty Marietta

  • Bella Spewack

    Bella Cohen (1899-1990) travelled from Romania to the USA as a child and grew up poor in New York. She became a journalist and, with her husband Sam Spewack, worked in Moscow for four years.

    In the late 1920s, she and Sam began writing plays together, a number of which were performed on Broadway. Their work was also adapted for the cinema. In 1948, they collaborated with Cole Porter, writing the book for the musical Kiss Me, Kate. Broadly speaking, Sam took responsibility for the plot and structure of their work, while Bella was noted for her crackling dialogue.

    The Spewacks’ first work directly for the screen was providing additional dialogue for Paramount’s Caught (1931). They contributed to fourteen other features, including adapting their own play, Clear All Wires! (1933).

    In 1940, they wrote the screenplay for the Cary Grant-Irene Dunn comedy My Favourite Wife, which earned them an Oscar nomination.

    Bella and Sam Spewack wrote one MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle, and some sources state that Bella worked uncredited on Naughty Marietta. In addition, Kiss Me, Kate was filmed by the studio in 1953.

  • Robert Graves

    Robert Graves Jr (1888-1954) was a stage actor who made his Broadway debut while in his mid-twenties.

    Graves made his feature film debut in 1925, and went on to make almost sixty features, plus many shorts. He was a character actor, and made appearances in Blonde Venus (1932), Dante’s Inferno (1935), The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) and Mad Love (1935).

    He appeared in two MGM musicals, uncredited both times. They were The Cat and the Fiddle and Naughty Marietta. 

  • Billy Dooley

    William Dooley (1893-1938) was working in vaudeville, latterly with his wife, Frances Lee, when producer hired him in 1925 to star in comedy shorts. It has been pointed out that Dooley’s onscreen persona owed a lot to the physical appearances of Larry Semon and Harry Langdon: child-like verging on mentally impaired. Dooley’s USP was that he was invariably playing a sailor.

    After 1932, Dooley played generally uncredited supporting roles in around thirty features, including The Cat’s-Paw (1933), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and Anything Goes (1936).

    Dooley appeared without credit in four MGM musicals, starting with The Cat and the Fiddle. He had a showy few seconds as Jeanette MacDonald’s drunken ‘brother’ in Naughty Marietta, and followed this with Here Comes the Band and A Day at the Races, 

  • Joseph Cawthorn

    Joseph Bridger Cawthorn (1868-1949) had a long and varied career long before he went anywhere near a film set.

    Born into a show business family, he made his stage debut aged three. Later, he worked in minstrel shows and vaudeville, frequently as a dialect comedian (in his case, German). He also crossed the Atlantic and worked for a time in British music halls. 

    Cawthorn first appeared on Broadway in around 1897/8, with his first confirmed appearance in The Fortune Teller (1898). He sustained a Broadway career for over twenty years, starring in a variety of productions.

    Cawthorn moved to Hollywood in 1927 and played Olive Borden’s father in The Secret Studio, the first of around 55 screen appearances. Notable roles included Dr Armand de Fontinac in Love Me Tonight, where his experience in operettas came in useful for a duet with Jeanette MacDonald.

    Joseph Cawthorn had featured roles in three MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Naughty Marietta (reunited with MacDonald as her former music teacher) and The Great Ziegfeld (as the protagonist’s father).

  • Jeanette MacDonald

    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.  

  • Gus Kahn

    Gustav Gerson Kahn (1886-1941) was one of Tin Pan Alley’s most prolific and successful writers of popular songs.

    Khan started out writing for vaudeville performers in the 1910s before forming the first of many partnerships with composers. In 1924, he wrote his first standard, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’.

    Contributing to many Broadway scores throughout the 1920s, he also moved into writing for films, and by 1933 was effectively working full time for Hollywood. Khan’s lyrics featured in Flying Down to Rio (1933), Kid Millions (1934) and Captains Courageous (1937).

    Khan worked most frequently with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contributing to Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West and Bitter Sweet.

    Khan’s contributions to the Great American Songbook include ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’, ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.

    Gus Kahn was played by Danny Thomas in a Warner Bros musical biopic, I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951).

  • Frank Hagney

    Australian Frank Sidney Hagney (1894-1973) had a long and industrious Hollywood career: 48 years and around 450 films. Out of all that work, it is unlikely he would have predicted that every Christmas millions of people would watch him pushing Mr Potter’s wheelchair in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

    Hagney was a professional cyclist and boxer in Australia before moving to the United States and beginning his film career in 1919. During the 1920s he had many featured roles in low-budget pictures, and appeared uncredited as the army recruiter in Keaton’s The General (1926). The majority of his roles were in westerns.

    By the late 1930s, Hagney was mostly playing uncredited bit parts, in films that included The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Northwest Passage (1940), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), Unconquered (1947), The Big Clock (1948), All the King’s Men (1949), The Wild One (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

    Hagney acted without credit in ten Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Naughty Marietta, Swing Fever, Meet the People, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, Easy to Wed, On the Town, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive (his final film).

  • Hunt Stromberg

    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.

  • Guy Usher

    James Guy Usher (1883-1944) was a theatre actor who became a character actor in films in his late forties, appearing in close to 200, predominantly ‘B’, pictures. His first credited role was as a murder victim in The Penguin Pool Mystery (1932), after which he was frequently cast as senior police officers, including Inspector Queen in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935).

    The few ‘A’ pictures Usher worked on without credit included Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Gabriel Over the Whitehouse (1933), It’s a Gift (1934, with onscreen credit), Fury (1936), Union Pacific (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941).

    Usher appeared in two MGM musicals in the mid 1930s: Stage Mother and Naughty Marietta (where he gets killed by pirates).

  • Henry Roquemore

    Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.

    The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.

    Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.

    Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.

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