The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: San Francisco

  • Anita Loos

    Corinne Anita Loos (1888-1981) habitually lied about her age, but 1888 is the most likely year. Her name is now inextricably linked with her most famous novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and its adaptations, but she was connected with the cinema for most of her career.

    Loos started in public life as a child performer on the stage, and only later tried her hand at writing. In 1911, she submitted a story idea to the Biograph studio. It is often claimed that her first filmed script was D W Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), but it was actually Griffith’s The New York Hat (1912), with Mary Pickford. It was only when she visited the studio some time later that Griffith discovered that ‘A Loos’ was female. She would eventually write an estimated 100 scenarios for Biograph and/or Griffith, and for the Lubin studio. Most famously, she provided the intertitles for Intolerance (1916).

    Loos moved to New York in 1918 to write for Famous Players-Lasky. She also published two books on screenwriting, and wrote her first stage play in 1923. Only in 1931 did Loos settle in Hollywood, signing a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Prominent amongst her screenplays were Red-Headed Woman (1932), the musical San Francisco, for which she was Oscar nominated, and The Women (1939).

    Loos’s final Hollywood film was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945, dialogue only), after which she returned to New York and worked in other mediums.

    In addition to San Francisco, Loos worked uncredited on The Cat and the Fiddle and Babes in Arms, and wrote the screenplay for I Married an Angel.

  • George Nardelli

    Discrepancies between IMDb and the AFI Catalogue are normal when it comes to actors’ work. It is usually claimed that this is because, while the former is crowd sourced and includes short films and television appearances, the former is restricted to feature films and based on scholarly research.

    However true this may be (and the AFI listings are full of very unscholarly errors), it cannot account for the fact that French-born Achille Nardelli (1895-1973) was in 194 feature films in forty years, while the AFI lists only twenty-one titles in 27 years. One of them is wrong, and on this occasion I suspect it is the AFI. Its list just does not look like anyone’s career, not least because of the ten-year gap from 1939 to 1949.

    Both sources agree that Nardelli was in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and The Toast of New Orleans. IMDb maintains that he was also uncredited in The Merry Widow, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, The Great Caruso, Lili, Deep in my Heart, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, Silk Stockings and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

  • Adrienne D’Ambricourt

    Adrienne Dumontier (1878-1957) had a successful career on the French stage prior to the First World War, working at the Comédie-Française. She emigrated to the United States after the war, and by 1922 was active on Broadway.

    D’Ambricourt made a few silent films at New York studios, but travelled to Hollywood, along with many others, in 1929, starting out with a featured role in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). She went on to play French character roles, often uncredited, in around seventy pictures. These included Design for Living (1933), Peter Ibbetson (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), The Song of Bernadette (1943) and To Have and Have Not (1944).

    During the early 1930s, D’Ambricourt also featured prominently in French-language versions of pictures, including MGM’s A Lady’s Morals, released in France with the more sensible title of Jenny Lind.

    D’Ambricourt acted in seven Metro musicals, across a 25-year period. She was credited as the concierge in The Cat and the Fiddle, then uncredited in The Merry Widow, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Two Girls on Broadway, Million Dollar Mermaid and Les Girls, her final film.

    Adrienne D’Ambricourt also terrified generations of French children as the voice of the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

  • Jeanette MacDonald

    Jeanette Anna MacDonald (1903-65) was unquestionably MGM’s most popular musical star of the 1930s. She made sixteen pictures in fourteen years, eight of them opposite Nelson Eddy. Her films were mainly operettas, with a few notable exceptions. Unlike Eddy, she was a capable actor, with a particular skill at comedy.

    MacDonald had made her professional stage debut in 1920. Working steadily, she obtained her first starring role on Broadway in 1927. She was spotted by Ernst Lubitsch, who took her to Hollywood to star in his first sound picture, The Love Parade (1929). (She was first, presumably to give her some on-set experience, uncredited in Say It with Songs [1929]).

    She made seven films released in 1930, some good (Monte Carlo [1930], again with Lubitsch), some bad (the execrable The Lottery Bride [(1930]).

    MacDonald had a quieter year in 1932 (like every other musical performer in Hollywood), but made two outstanding pictures, Lubitsch’s One Hour With You (1932) and Love Me Tonight (1932), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. She then signed her contract with MGM.

    The sixteen Metro musicals were: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow (her final film with Lubitsch), Naughty Marietta (teaming for the first time with Eddy), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (very much a change of pace), Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Smilin’ Through, I Married an Angel, Cairo and Three Daring Daughters.

    In the last of these, she played a divorcée with children, and her career as a film star was effectively over. She sings a few songs in The Sun Comes Up (1949), but this is a Lassie film, not a musical.

    MacDonald was also by now suffering from the heart condition that ended her life so early. She spent her final decade and a half performing in concerts, stage musicals, opera and on the radio.  

  • Slavko Vorkapich

    Slavoljub Vorkapić (1894-1976) is one of the more fa

    scinating and unexpected figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

    Born in Serbia, Vorapich studied to be a painter, and was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris in the late 1910s. He travelled to the United States in 1920, and found work as an actor, predominantly for the director Rex Ingram (he played Napoleon in Scaramouche [1923]).

    In 1928, Vorkapich directed, with the collaboration of Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, a short and influential experimental film called The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, allegedly with a budget of $98. The prowess in editing demonstrated in the film led to employment in Hollywood, initially by Paramount, and then RKO and MGM. He came to specialize in montage sequences, in which action over a lengthy period of narrative time is compressed into a few minutes of screen time in what he called “symphonies of visual movement”. Vorkapich would be brought in specifically to shoot and edit these, often expressionistic, sequences. He developed and utilized techniques in pacing action for maximum psychological impact on the viewer. 

    Vorkapic was also adept at in-camera special effects, such as the collapse of Wall Street at the end of The Conquerors (1932) and the locust attack in The Good Earth (1937).

    He made propaganda shorts during the Second World War, and then took up academic posts in California, and later in Yugoslavia. This was also where he directed his only feature film, Hanka (1955). He lectured on what he saw as the autonomous visual language of cinema, and never hesitated to criticize directors of high reputation, including Eisenstein and Ford, for what he considered incompetence.

    Vorkapich’s work at MGM can be seen in the musicals Dancing Lady, San Francisco, Maytime, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts.

    Quite why he was seen as simpatico with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is unclear.

  • Charles Sullivan

    Charles Sullivan (1899-1972) was a ubiquitous character actor in American films between 1925 and 1966, accumulating around 550 appearances on the big screen.

    Notable appearances include King Kong (1933, where he was also Robert Armstrong’s stunt double), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Glass Key (1942), State of the Union (1948) and The Last Hurrah (1958).

    Sullivan can be seen, uncredited, in fourteen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Student Tour, San Francisco, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Music for Millions, Easy to Wed, Living in a Big Way, Big City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Rose Marie and It’s Always Fair Weather. 

  • Clark Gable

    A database of performers in musicals seems an unlikely place to find the King of Hollywood. But William Clark Gable (1901-60) was a contract player and did what he was told–twice, in the case of musicals.

    Gable became a stage actor at the age of 21, touring in stock companies. From 1923, he laboured in the fields of extra work in Hollywood, including a bit part dancing in Erich von Stroheim’s version of The Merry Widow (1925). In Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), he played a Roman guard. He continued to do stage work during this period, spending time in New York.

    In 1931, Gable undertook a range of supporting roles in Hollywood, with his appearance in Night Nurse (1931) bringing him particular attention, playing the villainous chauffeur, Nick. Immediately afterwards,MGM cast him opposite Greta Garbo in Susan Lenox (Her Rise and Fall) and Joan Crawford in Possessed (both 1931). The first true ‘Clark Gable’ picture was Red Dust (1932), with Jean Harlow, establishing him as MGM’s leading leading man. 

    Loaned out to Columbia as a punishment for being difficult, Gable won an Oscar for the hugely-popular It Happened One Night (1934), and was nominated again for playing Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty(1935), a role he hated.  In 1939, he was the people’s choice to play Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind (1939). He had by hen been dubbed ‘the King’ in a nationwide poll.

    Shattered by the sudden death of his wife, Carole Lombard, Gable took time out from 1942 to 1944 to serve in the air force during the Second World War. After his return, his career never reached the same heights as previously, but he remained a star until his death aged 59. His final role was in John Huston’s film maudit The Misfits (1961).

    Gable’s two musicals for MGM were Dancing Lady and San Francisco. In deference to his macho image, his characters were named Patch Gallagher and Blackie Norton.

  • Joseph M Newman

    Joseph Max Newman (1909-2006) was a highly-respected assistant director who worked his way up to become a mediocre director.

    Newman started out in the film industry as an office boy, then a clerk. His first assignments as assistant director were in 1933, when worked on eight MGM productions, including Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor. He worked for Cukor again on David Copperfield (1934), for which he was nominated for the Assistant Director Academy Award.

    MGM allowed him to start directing shorts in 1938, alongside his work as AD on features. His first full-length picture was Northwest Rangers (1942), Metro’s version of a ‘B’ movie.

    Newman directed around 45 low-budget features before moving to television. His most high-profile picture This Island Earth (1955), though its more interesting aspects are attributable to Jack Arnold, who reshot some of Newman’s footage.

    Seven MGM musicals had Newman as AD: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, San Francisco (another Oscar nomination), Maytime and The Firefly. Some sources claim that he directed the famous  ‘Donkey Serenade’ sequence in The Firefly.

  • Henry Roquemore

    Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.

    The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.

    Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.

    Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.

  • 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.

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