Norman Houston (1887-1958) was a sometime actor and director who spent most of his career as a screenwriter, making his mark as one of the principal writers on the extended Hopalong Cassidy series. His sole involvement in MGM’s musicals was to contribute dialogue to The Broadway Melody.
Category: Films
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Norman Houston
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Sarah Y Mason
Sarah Y Mason (1896-1980) is one of the forgotten women of early Hollywood, having made a significant contribution, and leaving little information behind. I am grateful to the Women Film Pioneers Project for summarizing what information there is.
Dr Roseanne Welch has credited Mason with being the person to name and develop the role of ‘continuity girl’ (now script supervisor): the person on set with responsibility for ensuring continuity from shot to shot and scene to scene. This was in 1918, when she began working for Douglas Fairbanks.
Mason later moved into script-writing, often in partnership with her husband, Victor Heerman. It was she who fleshed out Edmund Goulding’s story for The Broadway Melody into a continuity script, with dialogue added later by James Gleason and Norman Houston.
Mason went on to script They Learned About Women and to adapt Love in the Rough from its stage original. She also worked uncredited on Meet Me in St Louis. She and Heerman won the Best Adaptation Oscar for Little Women (1933).
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Edmund Goulding
Edmund Goulding (1891-1959) is best remembered as athe director of films including Grand Hotel (1932) and Nightmare Alley (1947). But his biographer, Matthew Kelly, has drawn attention to Goulding’s wide-ranging contributions at MGM, which included not only writing and producing but also consultation on music, makeup and costume. His singular contribution to film musicals was to extemporize the plot of The Broadway Melody for Irving Thalberg and Lawrence Weingarten. According to the latter, Thalberg’s secretary took notes because they were aware of Goulding’s ability to “tell a story in the morning and forget everything about it by the afternoon”.
Goulding subsequently made an uncredited contribution to the screenplays of Hollywood Party (on which he was also an uncredited co-director) and, understandably, Two Girls on Broadway, the remake of The Broadway Melody. He directed some scenes in A Night at the Opera without credit.
Goulding was never a credited director on a Metro musical, though some sources erroneously claim Blondie of the Follies (1932) to be a musical. The film has a show business background and features one musical number in long shot, but it is actually a romantic comedy with an excellent performance by Marion Davies.
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Lawrence Weingarten
Lawrence Weingarten (1897-1975) was working as assistant to Irving Thalberg, his brother-in-law, when he was assigned to work on the supervision of what became Metro’s first musical, The Broadway Melody. Weingarten’s description of working on the picture is included in Samuel Marx’s Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints (1975).
Weingarten had a lengthy career as a producer at MGM, but little subsequent involvement with its musicals. He was an uncredited supervisor on A Day at the Races, but his only producer credit on a musical was Balalaika.
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Harry Beaumont
Harry Beaumont (1888-1966) is not a well-known name, despite having directed the first feature-length musical and a winner of the best picture Academy Award. Originally an actor, he turned to film directing in 1916.
In 1923 Beaumont directed The Gold Diggers, a play which was also the source of Warners’ Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). Perhaps his most notable achievement outside musicals was Metro’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928), which had a synchronized score.
Irving Thalberg must have considered Beaumont a safe pair of hands when assigning him to The Broadway Melody, an ambitious and not inexpensive project. His reputation today is as a journeyman director grinding out assignments, but Richard Barrios points out, in A Song in the Dark (1995), that Beaumont was present at every script conference. Studio records indicate that his contribution to the picture’s dialogue was greater than that of the credited James Gleason.
In 1930 Beaumont directed three further musicals for MGM, Lord Byron of Broadway (with William Nigh), Children of Pleasure and The Florodora Girl, before moving on to other things. Never more than a journeyman director, Beaumont carved himself a small, if often overlooked, niche in cinema history with The Broadway Melody,
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Jed Prouty
Jed Prouty (1879-1956) began his film career in the silent period, but established himself as a comic supporting player with the coming of sound. In The Broadway Melody he plays Uncle Jed, Hank and Queenie’s vaudeville booker.
Hank and Queenie are a fictionalized version of The Duncan Sisters, and a few months later Prouty supported the Duncans themselves in It’s a Great Life.
He played Marion Davies’s father in The Florodora Girl and rounded off his Metro musical career as the theatre owner who critiques the Schnarzan pictures in Hollywood Party.
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James Gleason
James Gleason (1882-1959) became an easily-recognized supporting player specializing in hard-nosed, fast-talking types. But early in his career Gleason was a moderately-successful playwright, which explains his dual contribution to The Broadway Melody as both co-scenarist (dialogue) and bit player. (In what has been called a meta-touch, he plays a music publisher named James Gleason.)
Gleason’s only other Metro musical was Babes on Broadway, as the actor-hating producer whose bacon is saved by Mickey Rooney and his troupe.
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Anita Page
Anita Page (1910-2008) was only 18 when she was cast in The Broadway Melody, having come to notice alongside Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). She announced her retirement in 1934, having apparently secured Mussolini as her number one fan, and only returned to film-making occasionally during a very long life. When she died, Page was discussed as the last of the silent Hollywood stars.
Page made only one further musical for Metro, playing Buster Keaton’s love interest in Free and Easy.
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Bessie Love
Bessie Love (1898-1986) was given her start in films by D W Griffith in 1915 and enjoyed a successful dramatic career in silent cinema. By the late twenties her film career was in decline and she spent time touring on the musical stage. This led to a part in Warners’ musical short The Swell Head (1928), which in turn secured her a contract with Metro.
Her role as Hank in The Broadway Melody won her a nomination for Best Actress and is the film’s standout performance. As well as appearing in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Love went on to star in three more Metro musicals: Chasing Rainbows (which reteamed her with Broadway Melody’s Charles King); They Learned About Women; and the 1930 version of Good News.
The 1931-32 moratorium on musicals brought this stage of Love’s career to a halt and she went into semi-retirement before relocating to the UK in 1935, where she lived out a long life as a notable supporting player in television and films.
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Charles King
Charles King was a 42-year-old successful vaudeville and Broadway actor when Metro starred him in The Broadway Melody. His film career was short-lived, though he did play the lead in one other feature, Chasing Rainbows, in which he was again teamed with Bessie Love. King was featured in the all-star Hollywood Revue of 1929.
King also contributed to The Five O’ Clock Girl (1928), a Marion Davies vehicle based on a Broadway hit, the production of which was abandoned after William Randolph Hearst fell out with MGM.
