The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: New Moon (1930)

  • Gus Shy

    Augustus Scheu (1893-1945) was a song-and-dance man in vaudeville and on Broadway, noted as an ‘eccentric’ dancer like Ray Bolger and Buddy Ebsen.

    Shy made his Broadway debut in 1915 and worked regularly throughout the 1920s. His biggest show was Good News (1927), in which he played Bobbie. He and the leading lady, Mary Lawlor, recreated their roles in the 1930 film version. 

    Unlike Lawlor, Shy stuck around in Hollywood, and featured in two further Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals and New Moon. He had been in the original production of The New Moon (1927), but playing a different role.

    Gus Shy also worked as a dialogue director on a number of films before retiring from acting to become a Hollywood agent.

  • George Westmore

    George Westmore (1879-1931) was the founder of what is unquestionably Hollywood’s greatest dynasty. Five generations of Westmores, including six of George’s sons, worked as makeup artists for over a hundred years.

    George Westmore was a hairdresser with a distinguished clientele before emigrating from the UK to Canada and then to the United States, where he worked in beauty parlours. In 1917 he established Hollywood’s first makeup department, for the Selig company, and can be credited with creating the profession of film makeup artist. In the 1920s, Westmore worked on some of the most notable pictures starring Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, including The Sheik (1921) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

    Shortly before taking his own life in a particularly unpleasant fashion (mercury poisoning), Westmore worked on three musicals at MGM: The Rogue Song, Call of the Flesh and New Moon.

  • Russell Hopton

    Harry Russell Hopton (1900-45) was an actor who managed to accumulate over 100 screen appearances in less than twenty years, though his parts had declined to mostly uncredited bits by the time he took his own life in 1945.

    Hopton was in two MGM musicals, most prominently as Dorothy Jordan’s brother in Call of the Flesh. Strangely, in the same year he appeared without credit in New Moon.

    Online sources also cite Russell Hopton as the director of two Poverty Row  ‘B’ films for Conn Pictures in 1936. He certainly did acting work for that studio, so it may well be the same person. If so, and given that he acted in ten films released in 1936, it was a busy year.  

  • Margaret Booth

    In 1977, Margaret Booth (1898-2002) received an honorary Oscar in tribute to her 62-year Hollywood career, during most of which she was arguably the industry’s greatest editor. Remarkably, she carried on working for another eight years.

    Like many major Hollywood figures, Booth started out with D W Griffith, working as a negative cutter. She subsequently worked for Louis B Mayer, transferring with him to the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. She was appointed as Supervising Editor in 1939, and stayed there until her shameful dismissal in 1986. During that time, as Booth described it, she worked only in the projection room, never the cutting room (though it is believed she did uncredited cutting on Ben Hur (1959).  She has been described as “the final arbiter on every picture the studio made”.

    The first MGM musical edited by Margaret Booth was The Rogue Song. This was followed by New Moon, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Reckless. After that, she technically supervised the editing of every musical, but made a particularly significant contribution to The Wizard of Oz and Gigi.

    As late as 1982, aged 84, Booth worked as supervising editor on the Columbia-released musical Annie. 

  • Frankie Genardi

    Frankie Genardi (1922-2010) was a child actor who made his debut, aged five, in Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven (1927). He retired at seventeen.

    Genardi’s two Metro musicals were The Rogue Song and New Moon.

  • Lawrence Tibbett

    Lawrence Mervil Tibbet [sic] (1896-1960) was one of the great American opera stars, and also one of the most glamorous. He combined a deep baritone voice, of the quality required by a leading singer at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, with good looks and acting ability. These attributes made it inevitable that, with the advent of sound, Hollywood would come calling. Tibbett had already performed many of the great operatic roles, and developed a successful radio and recording career, when he signed a contract with MGM in 1930.

    Tibbett’s career in films did not last long. He starred in four Metro musicals, made a couple of pictures for Fox, and then returned full-time to the stage. But his Hollywood career was by no means a failure. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his debut performance in The Rogue Song, something achieved by few actors. Unfortunately, The Rogue Song, MGM’s first all-Technicolor musical, is now a lost film.

    Following this success, Tibbett did not embarrass himself in his other assignments, New Moon, The Prodigal and The Cuban Love Song (in which he duetted with himself). 

    By the end of his career, Tibbett had been a leading man at the Met for 27 seasons and established himself in the operatic pantheon.

  • William H O’Brien

    William H O’Brien (1891-1981) made his first film in Australia in 1918, and in a Hollywood career lasting over fifty years he appeared in around 650 films, almost always without credit. These included Scarface (1931), The Thin Man (1934), Rebecca (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Ace in the Hole (1951), High Noon (1952), Some Like It Hot (1959) and, finally, Bedknobs and Brooksticks (1971).

    With a filmography that long, it is little wonder O’Brien was in thirteen Metro musicals across a 36-year period, starting with Children of Pleasure in 1930 and ending with Made in Paris in 1966. In between came New Moon, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Nobody’s Baby, The Firefly, Two Girls on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Two Sisters from Boston, The Glass Slipper, It’s Always Fair Weather and Merry Andrew.

  • Carrie Daumery

    Belgian stage actor Carrie Daumery (1863-1938) starred in a couple of French films in 1908, but began her film career in earnest with a featured part in The Conquering Power (1921), an adaptation of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

    Daumery continued as a prominent supporting player throughout the 1920s, sometimes credited as Madame Daumery. The advent of sound saw her reduced to playing mostly uncredited bit parts. She made appearances in three Metro musicals: Children of Pleasure, New Moon and The Merry Widow. The last of these reunited Daumery with Ernst Lubitsch, for whom she had played the Countess of Berwick in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925).

  • Frank Butler

    Frank Russell Butler (1889-1967) was a prominent screenwriter, though his most successful days were at Paramount rather than MGM. 

    Born in  England, Butler started out as an actor at Famous Players-Lasky in 1920, writing his first scenario the following year. His acting career ended with silent cinema, and he directed only one film for Hal Roach: Flying Elephants, with Laurel and Hardy before they had established their comedy duo characters.

    Butler signed on as a writer at Metro in 1929, and worked on four musicals during his time there. He worked with regular collaborator Sylvia Thalberg on Montana Moon and New Moon. He subsequently worked on two scripts for films involving Laurel and Hardy, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl.

    Returning to Paramount, Butler wrote frequently for Bob Hope, including four of the Road pictures. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1942 for two very different screenplays, Road to Morocco and war drama Wake Island. He won two year later for Going My Way (1944).

  • Sylvia Thalberg

    It is hard to avoid describing Sylvia Thalberg (1907-88) as the younger sister of Irving Thalberg and the wife of MGM producer Lawrence Weingarten, though she would, quite understandably, not have welcomed it. Becoming the youngest writer at Hollywood’s biggest studio in 1927 inevitably attracted accusations of nepotism. This, along with writing a novel, led to her leaving Metro in 1933.

    Having published the novel, Thalberg signed a contract with Paramount in 1935. Her last, uncredited, work on a screenplay was in 1937.

    While at MGM, Thalberg worked on two musicals, Montana Moon and New Moon, both times with regular collaborator Frank Butler. Her brother’s opinion of his sister was, according to Douglas Shearer, “talented but lazy”. But that’s brothers for you.

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