Composer Paul Lambkovitz (1888-1953) was born either in Poland or Russia, and trained at the Petrograd Conservatory before working as both a conductor and cantor. He emigrated to America in 1922.
Lamkoff was qualified by both his professions to work as a vocal coach and choral arranger for the ‘Kol Nidre’ sequence of The Jazz Singer (1927), roles he also carried out for the 1952 remake.
He then had a sporadic career in the film industry, working as composer, orchestrator and vocal coach on a dozen or so pictures. These included Call of the Flesh, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie and San Francisco. Alongside this he pursued his work as a cantor and expert on Jewish music.
William H O’Brien (1891-1981) made his first film in Australia in 1918, and in a Hollywood career lasting over fifty years he appeared in around 650 films, almost always without credit. These included Scarface (1931), The Thin Man (1934), Rebecca (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Ace in the Hole (1951), High Noon (1952), Some Like It Hot (1959) and, finally, Bedknobs and Brooksticks (1971).
With a filmography that long, it is little wonder O’Brien was in thirteen Metro musicals across a 36-year period, starting with Children of Pleasure in 1930 and ending with Made in Paris in 1966. In between came New Moon, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Nobody’s Baby, The Firefly, Two Girls on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Two Sisters from Boston, The Glass Slipper, It’s Always Fair Weather and Merry Andrew.
Sidney Bracy [sic] (1877-1942) was a stage actor in his native Australia before moving to America and commencing his film career in 1909. Later in life he tended to be cast as authority figures and servants, including upwards of 54 butlers and a variety of valets and chauffeurs.
Four of Bracey’s MGM musical appearances were as butlers: Children of Pleasure, A Lady’s Morals, Hollywood Party and San Francisco. He also showed up uncredited in Broadway to Hollywood, The Firefly and Rosalie.
Andrew Jackson Baxley (1884-1950) appeared in a handful of excellent films during his career as a character actor, including two with Orson Welles (The Magnificent Amberson in 1942 and The Lady from Shanghai in 1947). But there, as in most of his other pictures, he was uncredited.
Baxley was in eight Metro musicals: Free and Easy, The Florodora Girl, Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Strike Up the Band, Thrill of a Romance and Summer Holiday.
Thomas Held (1889-1962) was an Austrian-born editor. After starting out as an assistant director, his first, uncredited editing assignment was on They Learned About Women, where he worked alongside Jack McKay.
Held’s other musicals were San Francisco and The Great Waltz (for which he was Oscar-nominated). He also worked uncredited on The Wizard of Oz.
John F Kelly (1901-47) was an actor whose film appearances fluctuated between small featured roles and walk ons. For instance, he went from playing an uncredited henchman in Everybody’s Doing It to being the not-so-bright Elmer in Bringing Up Baby (both 1938).
Kelly’s MGM musical appearances were all uncredited: They Learned About Women, San Francisco and Born to Dance.
Herbert Pope Stothart (1885-1949) is a composer whose name is less familiar today than, say, Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner, but in Hollywood’s golden age he was ranked alongside them for his work at MGM.
Stothart had a successful career writing stage musicals, most notably Rose-Marie, but was invited to join Metro in 1929. He signed a contract and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Scores by Stothart were prominent in some of the studio’s most important pictures of the 1930s and 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille (1936), The Good Earth (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Mrs Miniver (1942), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Yearling (1946). In all, Stothart wrote over 100 scores.
Stothart worked on many of MGM’s musicals. He and Clifford Grey wrote the songs for Devil-May-Care and contributed numbers to Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, In Gay Madrid, The Florodora Girl, Call of the Flesh, New Moon and Madam Satan.
He worked with other lyricists on A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Here Comes the Band, Maytime, The Firefly (composing ‘The Donkey Serenade’), Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, The Chocolate Soldier and I Married an Angel.
Stothart was the musical director on some of these films and also on The Cat and the Fiddle, Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, The Wizard of Oz (picking up an Oscar), New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Girl, Cairo, Thousands Cheer, Kismet, The Unfinished Dance. Musical direction usually involved writing incidental music.
And, of course, Metro produced two versions of Stothart’s greatest stage success, Rose-Marie, and he worked on the first version.
We may never know how many screenplays Robert E Hopkins (1886-1966) contributed to if Thomas Schatz’s description of him prowling the Culver City lot providing one-liners as required is accurate. We certainly know he contributed to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure (uncredited), Love in the Rough and The Cuban Love Song.
Nineteen-thirty-six was a year of extremes. He got an Academy Award nomination for providing the story for San Francisco, and wrote without credit for Hollywood Party. Such was the life of a contract writer at MGM.
Charles Nicholas Carleton (1871-41) was a successful stage actor and director who did not start his film career-proper (he made one picture in 1915) until he was in his mid-fifties, where he became a successful, if fairly anonymous, supporting player.
Carle was the entomology professor in So This Is College, a eunuch in Elmer’s movie in Free and Easy, Knapp in Hollywood Party (credited), Maurice Chevalier’s attorney in The Merry Widow and a member of the Founders’ Club in San Francisco.
Nellie Crawford (1873-1959) was enrolled into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame under the much more exotic stage name she began using at some point in the late 20s or early 30s. Donald Bogle has suggested that she chose the unusual name because it enabled her to seek work as Asian as well as Black characters. Sul-Te-Wan was the first Black actor to secure a Hollywood contract when D W Griffith hired her at $25 a week for The Birth of a Nation (1916).
Like Clarence Muse and others, Sul-Te-Wan was a talented actor restricted by Hollywood racism, but she had a featured role in Erich Von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1920), and recieved praise for her appearance as Tituba in Maid of Salem (1937), Paramount’s story of the Salem witch trials.
Sul-Te-Wan’s MGM musicals were Hallelujah, San Francisco and Broadway Rhythm, all in uncredited parts.
