The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • Lew Kelly

    Louis Kelly (1879-1944) was one of those experienced theatre actors who found work in Hollywood after the introduction of sound.

    Kelly’s first appearance was actually in one of the last of the silents, a Buck Jones western called The Branded Sombrero (1928). He followed this with Barnum Was Right (1929), a comedy made in both sound and silent versions. His first full-fledged talking picture was The Woman Racket (1930), a crime drama. 

    By 1944, Kelly had made around 230 films. They were mostly programmers and he was usually uncredited. The most prestigious pictures he appeared in were I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), as the cook in a diner, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

    Kelly played Jake, a stagehand, in Metro’s Stage Mother.

  • Luis Alberni

    Luis Alberni (1886-1962) had been acting for a few years in his native Spain when he travelled to the United States in 1914. He succeeded in finding stage work, but quickly made his screen debut in Children of the Ghetto (1915).

    Over the next forty years, Alberni appeared in over 170 pictures, playing a wide range of ‘ethnic’ parts. Most of them were programmers, but from time to time he secured featured roles in more prestigious films. In 1933, he played Dr Bomb in Topaze, alongside John Barrymore.

    Alberni was the nightclub owner in Roberta (1935) and had a notable role as Mr Louis Louis in Easy Living (1937). He played Basset for James Whale in The Great Garrick (1937) and was the Pike family’s chef in The Lady Eve (1941), made the same year that he played the King of Naples in That Hamilton Woman.

    Luis Alberni was in four Metro musicals, starting out uncredited in Stage Mother and Let Freedom Ring. He then had a featured role as Nick the cafe owner in Babes on Broadway, and finished, again without credit, in I Married an Angel. 

  • John Elliott

    John Hugh Elliott (1876-1956) worked his way through the acting ranks to make his debut on Broadway in 1917, at the relatively advanced age of 40. He made his first film two years later, in When a Man Loves (1919). 

    Elliott eventually acted in over 300 films, but only eighteen were made during the silent era, when he maintained his stage career. He came into his own with the introduction of sound, when stage experience became a valuable commodity in Hollywood. In 1930 he took a supporting role in The Rampant Age, and was also credited as dialogue director, a function that became common in the early years of talking pictures.

    Elliott was uncredited in well over half of his films, and only rarely in high-status productions. He played a bank director in the infamous Baby Face (1933) and was the Exalted Exhausted Ruler in Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert (1933).

    In Jesse James (1939), Elliott played a judge, while he was a party guest in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He also appeared in the film noir The Dark Corner (1946) and was directed by Jean Renoir in The Woman on the Beach (1947).

    Elliott’s lone performance in an MGM musical was in Stage Mother.

  • Margaret Jones

    Margaret Eugenia Jones (1917-2002) had three siblings who were also child actors, the most successful being her younger sister, Marcia Mae Jones. Margaret’s career lasted just ten years and comprised only five film appearances.

    Her one MGM musical was also her final film: she played a student in Stage Mother.

  • Shirley Jean Rickert

    Shirley Jean Rickert (1926-2009) was unfortunate enough to be the child of a stage mother, who hustled success in a baby contest into a Hollywood career for her child. 

    Rickert was in five of Hal Roach’s ‘Little Rascals’ pictures, and played Tomboy Taylor in Mickey Rooney’s Mickey McGuire series. She also played herself in the multi-studio charity fundraiser The Stolen Jools (1931).

    When the child parts ended, Rickert continued to make occasional appearances in films, usually as a dancer or chorus girl, while pursuing a range of other jobs. During the 1950s she worked in burlesque as an exotic dancer (stripper), under the title ‘Gloria and her Crowning Glory’, a reference to her long blonde hair.

    Rickert appeared in seven MGM musicals, starting with the aptly-named Stage Mother, where she played Maureen O’Sullivan as a child. Later on, she danced in Best Foot Forward, Meet the People, Good News, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain and I Love Melvin. All these appearances were uncredited.

  • Harrison Greene

    Vaudeville performer Harrison Greene (1884-1945) crammed around 150 features and 100 shorts into his fifteen-year screen career. Rarely credited in ‘A’ pictures, he at least earned a medium closeup in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), one of his first appearances.

    Greene’s parts were generally small, but more than simple walk-ons. He danced with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and was one of the (many) people looking for an apartment in The More the Merrier (1943).

    Greene was in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Broadway Melody of 1938 and The Ice Follies of 1939. The AFI also asserts that Greene was brought in to direct the Virginia Reel performed during the dream sequence in Going Hollywood, presumably because it was not in Albertina Rasch’s wheelhouse.

  • Margaret Bert

    British-born Margaret Bert (1896-1971) was not an especially prolific Hollywood character actor; fewer than 200 appearances in 35 years is nothing special. But she was a stalwart of the MGM musical, showing up without credit in thirty-one of them.

    It is unclear when Bert emigrated to the United States, but her earliest-known credit is The Blackbird, a Tod Browning crime story with Lon Chaney. She was always uncredited and almost always in small, background parts, though she did have more to do as the heroine’s mother in Sarge Goes to College (1947) and its sequel, Campus Sleuth (1948).

    Bert was frequently cast as nurses, flitting around while others did the acting, and this was the case in her first three MGM musicals, Stage Mother, Reckless and San Francisco. These were followed by Bitter Sweet, Little Nellie Kellie, Rio Rita, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Unfinished Dance, Summer Holiday, Easter Parade, Luxury Liner, Words and Music, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Annie Get Your Gun, Summer Stock, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain, Skirts Ahoy, Because You’re Mine, Everything I Have is Yours, I Love Melvin, Give a Girl a Break, Easy to Love, Rose Marie, The Student Prince, Brigadoon, The Glass Slipper and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

    Bert continued acting on television until 1964.

  • Hank Bell

    Henry Branch Bell (1892-1950) had the nickname Handlebar, in reference to his ostentatious moustache.

    Bell and his facial hair spent most of their time, from 1920 onwards, on the streets of the Old West, playing a variety of sheriffs, cowpokes and townsmen in literally hundreds of ‘B’ westerns.

    His occasional forays into ‘A’ pictures included Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936, as an unemployed farmer), The Buccaneer (1938, as a pirate), They Died with their Boots On (1941) and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Bell was one of the patrons of the Opera House who was minded to ride the actor Granville around town on a rail.

    Hank Bell can be seen (unmistakably) in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Girl of the Golden West and Let Freedom Ring.

  • Mary Ann Jackson

    Mary Ann Jackson (1923-2003) made her screen debut aged two in the provocatively-titled Dangerous Curves Behind (1925). She went on to play Bubbles, the baby of the Smith family in around thirty Mack Sennett comedy shorts (1926-28).

    From 1928 to 1931, at the Hal Roach studios, she played Mary Ann in 33 ‘Little Rascals’ shorts. Jackson’s career was more or less over by the time she was ten, apart from one 1941 picture. Unlike many of her peers, however, she lived a long and happy life, looking back favourably on her years in the limelight.

    Jackson was near the end of her career when she made a memorable appearance as one of the child performers in Stage Mother, ‘singing’ and ‘dancing’ to ‘How’m I Doin’?’.

  • Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer

    IMDb gives Carl Dean Switzer (1927-59) 132 acting credits. Around half of these involved playing Alfalfa, a popular character in the Hal Roach Our Gang series. This led to him becoming better known by the nickname than his real name.

    Switzer was almost a stereotype of the Hollywood child actor: a prolific childhood career followed by a few low-budget features and an early, violent death. He was shot in a dispute about a dog, having become a dog breeder and hunting guide.

    Switzer is most often seen today in the seasonal revivals of White Christmas (1954). He is the brother, seen only in a photograph, of Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney.

    Switzer was seen in two Metro musicals. Most memorably, he demonstrated his gift for terrible singing with a rendition of ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ in Stage Mother. This was very much acting, as he apparently had a good singing voice. His other appearance was in The Ice Follies of 1939.

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