Burton Levy (1912-97) began writing songs while still a teenager, dropping out of school to do so. By the time he was 18, he had composed music for songs performed in Broadway shows, working regularly with Harold Adamson.
Working for Irving Berlin Inc, Lane was sent to Hollywood with Adamson in 1934, and subsequently took up residence there. The pair worked together until 1936, writing songs for a number of studios. Lane then partnered with Ralph Freed (Arthur’s younger brother) at Paramount, followed by Frank Loesser. His final screen partnership was with Alan Jay Lerner in the 1950s.
Lane composed the music for a number of Broadway musicals, the most successful being Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965).
Notable songs composed by Lane include ‘How About You?’, ‘Old Devil Moon’, ‘I Hear Music’ and ‘ How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?’
Lane songs were used in seventeen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Thousands Cheer, Meet the People, This Time for Keeps, Royal Wedding, Everything I Have is Yours, Torch Song, Give a Girl a Break and Jupiter’s Darling.
Of all Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s great musical stars, Frederick Austerlitz (1899-1987) was technically the first. He did not star for the studio until 1940, but he made his first appearance seven years earlier, in Dancing Lady, playing himself. He stands alongside Gene Kelly as the two greatest dancer-choreographers in cinema.
After a very successful stage career, dancing with his sister Adele, Fred Astaire sought a Hollywood career after Adele got married and retired. He was 34 when he signed with RKO, who immediately loaned him to MGM, for Dancing Lady.
In the years that followed, Astaire and a new partner, Ginger Rogers, made nine pictures at RKO, a number of which are considered the high points of the 1930s musical. Astaire innovated in a number of areas, not least his insistence that dances be photographed with full-length shots, without cutaways to the face or feet.
When the Rogers partnership ended in 1939 with The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Astaire starred for the first time at MGM, dancing with Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940.
Then came perhaps Astaire’s most successful post-Rogers collaboration, when he danced in two pictures with the much-underrated Rita Hayworth at Columbia. He was back at MGM in 1945, dancing with Gene Kelly for the only time in Ziegfeld Follies, then starring in Vincente Minnelli’s strange Yolanda and the Thief.
After an attempted retirement, Astaire was lured back to MGM to replace the injured Gene Kelly in Easter Parade, after which he was reunited with Rogers in The Barkeleys of Broadway. He made five more musicals at Metro during the next ten years: Three Little Words, Royal Wedding (in which he danced on the ceiling), The Belle of New York (in which he danced on clouds), The Band Wagon (in which he and Cyd Charisse performed ‘Dancing in the Dark’ for the ages) and Silk Stockings (the final film in which he danced like Fred Astaire).
Astaire turned to straight acting from 1959, with the exception of Finian’s Rainbow (1968), where he anguished over Francis Ford Coppola’s inept style of shooting dance numbers. He made his final film in 1981.
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.
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.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
James Henderson Finlayson (1887-1953) was acting on the stage in his native Scotland when he travelled with a play to the United States in 1911. His parents had recently died and he decided, along with one of his brothers, to stay there.
Finlayson obtained a part in a 1912 production of Bunty Pulls the Strings, and later worked in vaudeville with Alex Lauder, the lesser-known brother of Harry. He ended up touring with a play that took him to Los Angeles, and never left.
He made his first film appearance in 1917, and by 1919 was working at the Mack Sennett studio. He became a key member of Sennett’s troupe, working repeatedly with Ben Turpin. But in 1922, Finlayson signed with Hal Roach.
Roach tried to groom him as a lead player, but this did not work out. He is said to have considered partnering Finlayson with Laurel and Hardy as a comedy trio, but staff director Leo McCarey realized that the duo was a better bet. So Finlayson became an unofficial third member of the partnership, appearing in thirty-three films with Stan and Ollie, right the way through to Saps at Sea in 1940.
Finlayson always wore a fake walrus moustache and became famous for his overacting, master of the double take and the quizzical or exasperated face, accompanied by the extended cry of ‘D’oooh!’.
James Finlayson was in five Metro musicals, initially with Laurel and Hardy. He featured prominently in The Devil’s Brother, followed by The Bohemian Girl. Later on, when he had become a bit-part player, he appeared in Two Sisters from Boston, Till the Clouds Roll By and Royal Wedding.
Finlayson also worked with Hawks in The Dawn Patrol (1930), Hitchcock in Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Lubitsch in Angel (1937) and To Be or Not to Be (1942).
German-born Paul Alfred Marquardt (1889-1960) was a composer who worked for many years as an arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and for other studios. Although rarely receiving an onscreen credit, Marquardt made a substantial contribution to MGM’s musical history.
He orchestrated the music for many non-musical films, including Anna Karenina (1935),Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), The Women (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), Rebecca (1940),Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), High Noon (1952) and Friendly Persuasion (1957). Marquardt also composed original scores in the 1930s, including for The Sign of the Cross and A Farewell to Arms (both 1933). He worked on well over 350 films between 1930 and 1957.
The first of Marquardt’s 39 MGM musicals was The Cuban Love Song, collaborating with Charles Maxwell. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco. Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, Rosalie, Everybody Sing, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz, Sweethearts (in which he also appeared as a conductor), The Wizard of Oz (credited for orchestral and vocal arrangements), Babes in Arms, At the Circus, Balalaika, New Moon, Hullabaloo, Rio Rita, I Married an Angel, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Follies, Holiday in Mexico, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Royal Wedding and Show Boat.
George Frederick Benge (1875-1955) was an English actor who made a living in Hollywood mostly playing butlers, valets, footmen and assorted dogsbodies and lackies. Perhaps his finest hour was as Ronald Colman’s slightly-intrepid valet Danny in Bulldog Drummond (1929).
It’s not clear when Benge relocated to America, but he made the first of his over-200 screen appearances in 1922, as one of Prince John’s henchmen in Robin Hood. He then played his first butler in The Ten Commandments (1923) (in the modern section, not running the Pharaoh’s household).
Benge was in six Metro musicals: Madam Satan, (as the butler on a zeppelin) Rosalie, Sweethearts, Living in a Big Way, Royal Wedding and Million Dollar Mermaid.
No one had a longer connection with MGM musicals than Arthur Freed (1894-1974), starting at the very beginning with The Broadway Melody in 1929 and ending in 1960 with Bells Are Ringing. Of course, his role changed significantly during that period.
Freed had not been working long as a lyricist at MGM when he and composer Nacio Herb Brown were assigned the task of producing the first bespoke score for a film musical. Following the success of The Broadway Melody, Freed’s songs were a mainstay of the studio’s musical output for a quarter of a century. He and Brown contributed numbers to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Marianne, Lord Byron of Broadway, Montana Moon, Dancing Lady, Going Hollywood, Student Tour, Broadway Melody of 1936, San Francisco, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Two Girls on Broadway, Hullabaloo, Little Nellie Kelly, Lady Be Good, Born to Sing, Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St Louis, Three Little Words, Pagan Love Song, Singin’ in the Rain and The Affairs of Dobie Gillies
He also worked without Brown on the 1930 Good News and on A Lady’s Morals, The Prodigal, Hollywood Party, A Night at the Opera, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Bathing Beauty, Anchors Aweigh, Ziegfeld Follies, Yolanda and the Thief and Love Me or Leave Me.
During the 1930s Freed spent time on Metro’s sound stages, watching the staging of his songs and learning about the craft of creating film musicals. He also devoted time to ingratiating himself with studio head Louis B Mayer, making known his ambition to become involved in the production side of the process. Finally, in 1938, Mayer decided to give Freed his chance.
Arthur Freed initiated the filming of The Wizard of Oz and was its de facto producer, although only credited as associate producer; Mayer safeguarded the project by appointing the more experienced Mervyn LeRoy as producer.
Having shown what he could do, Freed was made a full producer and worked on 39 musicals and a handful of non-musicals during the next thirty years. The musicals were Babes in Arms, Little Nellie Kelly, Strike Up the Band, Lady Be Good, Babes on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Panama Hattie, Cabin in the Sky, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Best Foot Forward, Meet Me in St Louis, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Easter Parade, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Pagan Love Song, An American in Paris, Royal Wedding, Show Boat, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, It’s Always Fair Weather, Kismet, Invitation to the Dance, Silk Stockings, Gigi and Bells Are Ringing.
The Freed Unit became MGM royalty and made most of the musicals upon which the studio’s current reputation rests. Opinions vary as to the extent to which Freed can take credit for this achievement, and the unit did produce a few duds. But, at the very least, Arthur Freed was the catalyst for a body of work of unrivalled sophistication and artistry.
