Moisés Simón Rodríguez (1889-1945) was a Cuban composer and band leader who is best remembered today for writing the song ‘El Manisero’, known in English as ‘The Peanut Vendor’.
Simons began his professional career as a pianist and musical director, before establishing his own jazz band in 1924. As a composer, he was part of the Afrocubanismo movement which foregrounded Black identity within Cuban culture.
Simons composed ‘El Manisero’ in 1930, and it went on to sell millions of copies as sheet music and in recordings by a variety of artists. In 1931, the song was used prominently in MGM’s The Cuban Love Song.
Bert Lahr secured screen immortality by playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. But his first film, Flying High, demonstrates why he otherwise never achieved major success in Hollywood: he was simply too big for the screen, like Jimmy Durante turned up to 11. Lahr’s gurning, his exaggerated physical movements, and his insistence on saying most of his lines twice, may have come across well in the stalls of a Broadway theatre, but are just too much in medium-closeup.
Pat O’Brien (as Sport Wardell) holds on, to avoid being blown off the screen by Bert Lahr (as Rusty Krause)
When Lahr is on screen with co-star Pat O’Brien, it would be an understatement to say it is as though they were in two different films: it is more as if they were two different species. This is not to suggest that Lahr is not entertaining, because he is, but it is also a relief when he is off screen for a while.
It is interesting to contrast Lahr with his co-star, Charlotte Greenwood. She, too, was a stage performer with an eccentric bent, but she was actor enough to be able to modify (or moderate) her stage persona to the greater intimacy of the screen.
Rusty wants Pansy Potts to keep her distance
Flying High is an enjoyable romp but, as one of MGM’s three 1931 musicals, prior to the 1932 moratorium, it is rather light on music. Twelve of the thirteen DeSylva-Brown-Henderson songs from the Broadway show are missing, replaced by three from the bottom drawer of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. There are a couple of production numbers directed by Busby Berkeley and featuring Kathryn Crawford. These show Berkeley refining the techniques he had developed on Eddie Cantor vehicles at Goldwyn, but still lacking the precision that would be on display a couple of years later in 42nd Street.
A bit of early chorus girl regimentation by Busby Berkeley
Berkeley’s numbers are the liveliest parts of the picture, with Charles Reisner clearly happy to point his camera at Bert Lahr and let him get on with it.
Charles Gardner Sullivan (1884-1965) was a prolific screenwriter with around 200 credits, the great majority of which were from the silent era. He was noted for the unusual amount of directorial detail included in his screenplays. Producer Jesse Lasky, speaking of Sullivan’s collaboration with Cecil B DeMille on films like The Buccaneer (1938) and Union Pacific (1939), described him as “the methodical giant who composed sequences of short shots and elaborately prepared camera angles that were calculated to give DeMille pictures a tremendous sense of visual place”.
It was while working as a journalist that Sullivan began contributing story ideas to film studios. The first accepted would seem to have been Her Polished Family (1912), though this is not included by IMDb.
When Lee Surrenders (1912) was filmed by Thomas Ince, beginning a long collaboration between Sullivan and the producer/director. In 1914, the writer relocated to Hollywood and joined Ince’s permanent staff. He worked on some of Ince’s most successful pictures, and co-wrote Civilization (1916), the big-budget anti-war film. It was a subject he would return to fourteen years later, when he supervised the screenplay for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
By 1920, Sullivan was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood and, for a time, ran his own production company.
Sullivan made one contribution to MGM’s musicals, co-writing, with Bess Meredyth, the screenplay for The Cuban Love Song.
John G Lynch (1870-1936) was a successful business person operating a chain of theatres on the East coast who, in his mid-forties, contributed a story to a New York picture company and began a new career.
Within a few years he was working for the Thomas Ince Corporation in Hollywood, churning out stories and occasional screenplays. When he died in 1936, he was working as an editorial supervisor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Lynch is credited with Adaptation on The Cuban Love Song, but it is unclear what he adapted, since the picture appears to be an original story.
The reputation of Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II (1889-1943) as ‘One-Shot Woody’ was what enabled him to direct over ninety films in twenty-five years, half of them during the sound era.
Van Dyke’s mother was an actor, leading to his own early appearances on the stage as a child. Constantly on tour, he claimed to have attended schools in every state.
He undertook many jobs during his early years as an adult, before obtaining his first job in the film industry in 1915. He began pretty much at the top, as one of a number of assistant directors under D W Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915). Two years later, after having written a number of films, he directed his first feature, The Land of Long Shadows (1917), based on his own screenplay.
Van Dyke’s work in silent films was prolific, but undistinguished. It was as a director of sound pictures that he came into his own. He travelled to Tahiti in 1928 to make White Shadows in the South Seas, MGM’s first feature with recorded sound (music and sound effects). Two years later he shot Trader Horn (1931) mostly in Africa, with some dialogue scenes reshot in Hollywood.
Van Dyke went on to become a mainstay of MGM’s production schedule, reputedly Louis B Mayer’s favourite (because most efficient) director. He directed the first Johnny Weissmuller film as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), The Thin Man (1934) and three of its sequels, and Marie Antoinette (1938).
He made nine musicals for MGM and, after The Cuban Love Song, all of them starred either Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, or both of them together: Naughty Marietta,(which he also produced), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (also produced by Van Dyke), Rosalie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, I Married and Angel and Cairo.
Van Dyke was also used regularly to direct reshoots or new scenes for other directors’ pictures, and he did this for Broadway Melody of 1936 and the 1940 New Moon, again with MacDonald and Eddy.
Woody Van Dyke was a Christian Scientist and, when he learned in 1943 that he was terminally ill, refused medical treatment and took his own life.
Jayne Dunham Francis Shadduck (1915-93) was barely 17 when MGM hired her to provide baby sounds in The Cuban Love Song.
This was followed by a ten-year career combining small parts in some decent films (for example, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933) and Annie Oakley (1935) with voice work for Walt Disney. She provided the voices of Mickey Mouse’s nephews, Morty and Ferdie, in a number of short cartoons.
Shadduck was also an aviator at a time when this was rare for women.
After leaving show business, Shadduck lived in Hawaii and spent years being, by the account of her son, the mother from hell.
Some careers cannot be categorized in a few words. Almy Purves Pullen (1909-92) imitated birds and animals. But he did it in the most impressive way possible.
After various jobs, including a stint as a radio presenter, Pullen started as a voice actor, providing bird and animal noises for Walt Disney, in 1931. He whistled for Cock Robin in Who Killed Cock Robin? (1935), and worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As a change of pace, he played a whistling saw in Pinocchio (1940), and was back to birds for Sleeping Beauty (1959). During this period, as well as providing sounds for Disney shorts, he also worked for Max Fleischer on Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons.
Pullen provided the voice of Cheeta in Tarzan pictures and was a coyote in DeMille’s The Crusades (1935).
In 1945, Pullen began working with Spike Jones and his City Slickers, and was renamed Dr Horatio Q Birdbath (the ‘Q’ stood for quinine, because he was hard to take). And on the side, Pullen had a nightclub act as a ventriloquist, with a dummy named Johnny and an invisible dog.
Purv Pullen’s connection with MGM musicals is that, in 1931, he provided monkey noises for The Cuban Love Song.
Harry R Strang (1892-1972) had the sort of career Hollywood was built on: thirty-six years and more than 500 appearances as a tough-guy character actor.
Strang trained at AADA and made his professional debut on the stage in 1910. His career in the theatre was interrupted by the First World War, in which he served with the marines. He then returned to the stage, working much of the time with stock companies.
Harry Strang was one of the many stage actors who found work in Hollywood after the introduction of sound, and he was frequently cast in military roles that would have benefitted from his own wartime experience. His many appearances included parts in Hell’s Angels (1930), The Seas Beneath (1931, becoming part of John Ford’s Stock Company), What Price Hollywood? (1932), King Kong (1933), The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), Gone With the Wind (1939), Saboteur (1942), Laura (1944), Detour (1945), The Lady from Shanghai (1945), White Heat (1949), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and The Last Hurrah (1958).
Strang was in five Metro musicals: The Cuban Love Song (as a marine sergeant), San Francisco, Born to Dance, New Moon and Thousands Cheer.
When you have made eight films with John Ford and also worked with Hawks, Capra, Lang and Welles, you can definitely say you have had a career. A very active career in small parts was lucrative enough for Strang to maintain two homes after he retired in 1965, where he could pursue life as an avid birdwatcher.
Mystery surrounds the actor named George Kuma. According to IMDb, he played the “Japanese Tattoo Artist” at the beginning of The Cuban Love Song. There are no other credits, but it is stated that he was born in Hawaii in 1900. The AFI Catalog concurs about Cuban Love Song, but cites one other appearance, in the same year, a Fu Manchu tale called Daughter of the Dragon (1931).
The United States Federal Census for 1930 certainly confirms that a George Kuma, born in Hawaii in 1900, was living in California at the time of the census, so he could have made two screen appearances in the following year. Or he might not have.
