The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • George J Folsey

    No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.

    Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.

    He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.

    At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films. 

    Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.

    Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).

    The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.

  • Louis Silvers

    The status of Louis Silberstein (1889-1954) as the pioneer of film music is unassailable, given that he worked as musical director and composer on The Jazz Singer (1927), the ur-musical/talking picture.

    Silvers had already claimed his place in musical history when, aged 24, he composed the music for ‘April Showers’, with lyrics by Buddy De Sylva. He also wrote the music for the experimental sound sequences in the D W Griffith turkey Dream Street (1921). He also composed for three other Griffith pictures.

    Silvers had started out as a vaudeville pianist and was working as a musical director on Broadway when he went to Hollywood. His work on The Jazz Singer is far more nuanced and inventive than the film in general, or Al Jolson’s overblown performance in particular, though it rarely figures in discussion of the picture’s importance.

    Silvers went on to compose music for over thirty films and act as musical director on around seventy. He also conducted the music for dozens of Warner’s early Vitaphone recordings. In 1935, he won the Oscar for Best Original Score for One Night of Love (1934).

    For MGM, Silvers composed and conducted incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady, and co-wrote ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.

  • Maurice De Packh

    Composer Maurice De Packh (1896-1960) was already working as an orchestrator on Broadway by the time he was 22, and its was in that capacity that he excelled. He continued to work on Broadway for decades, while maintaining a parallel career in films.

    De Packh, usually without credit, arranged the scores for some of Hollywood’s greatest Golden Age pictures. The total exceeded 240, but some of the highlights were: Queen Christina (1933), The Informer (1935), Top Hat (1935), Ninotchka (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939, one of several), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Nightmare Alley (1947), Unfaithfully Yours (1948), All About Eve (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Rio Bravo (1959) and Spartacus (1960, his final film).

    De Packh started out in MGM musicals composing incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady. He was also the arranger on the latter, and later orchestrated Annie Get Your Gun, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Merry Widow, The Student Prince, I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Gigi. He also co-wrote the song ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.

  • 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.

  • Don Redman

    Donald Matthew Redman (1900-64) was a bandleader, singer, songwriter and musical arranger for performers including Count Basie and Pearl Bailey.

    Redman has been described as “one of the first great jazz arrangers and…a pivotal figure in the development of Swing and the Big Band style Jazz”. Which makes his one link with the MGM musical even funnier.

    One of Redman’s most successful songs was ‘How’m I Doin’?’, written in 1926 and recorded by a number of artists, including Redman himself. But in MGM Stage Mother it is given a twelve-second rendition by ten-year-old Mary Ann Jackson that is arguably (certainly) the most memorable sequence in the film. She shakes her head, slaps her thigh, rotates her hips and bawls out the inappropriate lyrics in a way that only a true stage mother could love. It’s probably not what Don Redman had in mind.

  • George Graff

    George Graff (1886-1973) was an American songwriter who co-wrote over 400 songs. Of these, one has survived to become a standard: ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, written with Ernest Ball and Chauncey Olcott in 1912.

    Graff lived a long life and this song became a kind of pension fund, earning him an alleged $10,000 a year in royalties up to the time of his death. Only a few years earlier, it had been featured in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967). ‘Irish Eyes’ is often mistaken for a traditional Irish ballad, but Graff admitted that he had never even visited Ireland.

    MGM used the song twice in its musicals: it was tortured by Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer in Stage Mother; and sung sweetly by Nelson Eddy in Let Freedom Ring.

  • Chauncey Olcott

    John Chancellor Olcott (1858?-1932) was a stage actor, singer and songwriter. He started out performing in minstrel shows, but eventually became a regular on Broadway.

    Olcott was of Irish descent, and many of his songs took the form of Irish ballads. Three have become standards: ‘Mother Machree’, ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ and, most particularly, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.

    The last of these has been heard in many pictures through the years, and was used twice in MGM musicals. Olcott died in 1932, so did not live to hear Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer’s painfully off-key rendition in Stage Mother. A few years later, Nelson Eddy treated it with a little more respect in Let Freedom Ring.

  • Thomas J Gray

    Thomas Joseph Gray (1888-1924) was a writer and lyricist who was contributing songs to Broadway shows as early as 1914. He served in the First World War, then picked up his career both at home and for London revues. His most frequent songwriting collaborators were Fred Fisher and Ray Walker.

    Gray started contributing stories to films in 1917, writing for actor Victor Moore. In 1924, he began writing titles for Harold Lloyd, working on films as that included Girl Shy (1924) and The Freshman (1925).

    Back in 1910, Gray and Fisher wrote a song with the catchy title ‘Any Little Girl That’s a Nice Little Girl Is the Right Little Girl For Me’. In 1933, MGM used it in Stage Mother, sung by Alice Brady, with a little help from Ted Healy.

    Gray died aged 36, from “a bronchial ailment”.

  • Bradford Ropes

    Bradford Ropes (1905-66) was one of the people who revived–perhaps saved–the Hollywood musical after its total slump in 1932. It was in that year that he published, at the age of 27, a novel called 42nd Street, inspired by his own experiences as a performer in vaudeville and, more specifically, on Broadway. The subsequent 1933 adaptation by Warner Bros revived the musical genre and became arguably the most successful musical of the first ten years of talking pictures.

    Ropes’s second novel, Stage Mother, came out in 1933 and was rushed into production by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Less successful as a musical–it had no Busby Berkeley–it was a grittier film, closer to the source novel. This is attributable to the fact that Ropes co-wrote the screenplay.

    Ropes went on to sign a contract with, of all studios, Republic, which resulted in some of the 1930s more interesting ‘B’ westerns. He also did further work for MGM, providing the stories for Hullabaloo and Ship Ahoy.

    In the 1950s, Ropes moved into writing for television

  • Stage Mother

    The Crew

    Charles BrabinDirector
    John MeehanScreenplay
    Bradford RopesScreenplay
    Arthur FreedSongwriter
    Nacio Herb BrownSongwriter
    Fred FisherSonwriter (uncredited)
    Thomas J GraySongwriter (uncredited)
    Ernest BallSongwriter (uncredited)
    Chauncey OlcottSongwriter (uncredited)
    George GraffSongwriter (uncredited)
    Don RedmanSongwriter (uncredited)
    Hunt StrombergProducer
    Maurice De PackhComposer (uncredited)
    Louis SilverComposer (uncredited)
    Louis SilverConductor
    George J FolseyCinematographer
    Frank E HullEditor
    Stan RogersArt Director
    Edwin B WillisInterior Decorator
    AdrianCostume Designer
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    Joseph M NewmanAssistant Director
    Albertina RaschChoreographer

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