The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stage Mother

  • Stage Mother

    Some Thoughts

    Stage Mother is a pretty good film, but a lacklustre musical. Based on the backstage novel written by Bradford Ropes immediately after 42nd Street, and with Ropes as co-author of the screenplay, it is a much darker film than the Warner Bros adaptation of the earlier novel, the improbable happy ending notwithstanding. But it lacks 42nd Street’s humour and, most essentially, Busby Berkeley’s production numbers.

    Kitty (Alice Brady), and the new-born Shirley, who is blissfully unaware of what lies ahead
    Kitty (Alice Brady), and the new-born Shirley, who is blissfully unaware of what lies ahead

    Albertina Rasch was no Busby Berkeley,and the two production numbers in Stage Mother, the first of which launches Freed-Brown’s ‘Beautiful Girl’, are mostly by-the-numbers parades of swaying chorus girls.

    What saves Stage Mother is the central performance of Alice Brady, following up her benevolent mother in Broadway to Hollywood with a convincing portrait of the fixated stage mother. In an early scene with her dead husband’s parents and forbidding sister, she is very moving, entirely credible with her nervous laughter. Later, she is a ruthless blackmailer in her daughter’s supposed interests, even acting as a procurer for the gay dance instructor.

    Ralph (Ted Healy) finally persuades Kitty to marry him
    Ralph (Ted Healy) finally persuades Kitty to marry him

    Maureen O’Sullivan was a lesser talent, and very inexperienced, but she holds her own as the manipulated, and later manipulative, daughter. The real problem with her performance is that she exhibits not one iota of the stage talent that everyone else in the picture is attributing to her.

    Director Charles Brabin was beyond his best years when he made Stage Mother; he would only make two further films, before retiring to enjoy the wealth he and his wife, Theda Bara, had accumulated. But he was always more than a Hollywood journeyman, and he and cinematographer George J Folsey achieved a better-looking film than might be expected, often using unconventional camera angles.

    Kitty has charged ,000 for her daughter's virginity. Warren (Franchot Tone) shares his thoughts with Shirley (Maureen O'Sullivan)
    Kitty has charged $10,000 for her daughter’s virginity. Warren (Franchot Tone) shares his thoughts with Shirley (Maureen O’Sullivan)

    Stage Mother has been described as a musicalized soap opera, and there is some justification in that. But it is an entertaining soap opera, let down only by a final scene in which all the blackmail and pimping is brushed to one side. It also contains an audition sequence in which Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer and Mary Ann Jackson, together with an unnamed contortionist, demonstrate just how awful child performers can be.

  • 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.

  • Frank E Hull

    Frank Edgar Hull (1882-1968) was a film editor who spent most of his career working for MGM and, to a lesser extent, Fox. He worked on around eighty pictures in the period 1920-50.

    Hull is famous to film historians for working closely with Erich von Stroheim on the editing of Greed (1924). He received no credit on the final version of the film after it had been drastically cut and re-edited by MGM. Hull also worked with von Stroheim on The Wedding March (1928), which was also subject to studio interference, this time by Paramount.

    Hull’s projects were never as prestigious again, though he did work with John Ford on one of his masterpieces, They Were Expendable (1945).

    Frank Hull edited six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Here Comes the Band, A Day at the Races and Panama Hattie.

  • George J Folsey

    No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.

    Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.

    He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.

    At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films. 

    Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.

    Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).

    The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.

  • Louis Silvers

    The status of Louis Silberstein (1889-1954) as the pioneer of film music is unassailable, given that he worked as musical director and composer on The Jazz Singer (1927), the ur-musical/talking picture.

    Silvers had already claimed his place in musical history when, aged 24, he composed the music for ‘April Showers’, with lyrics by Buddy De Sylva. He also wrote the music for the experimental sound sequences in the D W Griffith turkey Dream Street (1921). He also composed for three other Griffith pictures.

    Silvers had started out as a vaudeville pianist and was working as a musical director on Broadway when he went to Hollywood. His work on The Jazz Singer is far more nuanced and inventive than the film in general, or Al Jolson’s overblown performance in particular, though it rarely figures in discussion of the picture’s importance.

    Silvers went on to compose music for over thirty films and act as musical director on around seventy. He also conducted the music for dozens of Warner’s early Vitaphone recordings. In 1935, he won the Oscar for Best Original Score for One Night of Love (1934).

    For MGM, Silvers composed and conducted incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady, and co-wrote ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.

  • Maurice De Packh

    Composer Maurice De Packh (1896-1960) was already working as an orchestrator on Broadway by the time he was 22, and its was in that capacity that he excelled. He continued to work on Broadway for decades, while maintaining a parallel career in films.

    De Packh, usually without credit, arranged the scores for some of Hollywood’s greatest Golden Age pictures. The total exceeded 240, but some of the highlights were: Queen Christina (1933), The Informer (1935), Top Hat (1935), Ninotchka (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939, one of several), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Nightmare Alley (1947), Unfaithfully Yours (1948), All About Eve (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Rio Bravo (1959) and Spartacus (1960, his final film).

    De Packh started out in MGM musicals composing incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady. He was also the arranger on the latter, and later orchestrated Annie Get Your Gun, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Merry Widow, The Student Prince, I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Gigi. He also co-wrote the song ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.

  • Hunt Stromberg

    Benjamin Hunt Stromberg (1894-1968) was, for eighteen years, one of the most powerful men at Hollywood’s most powerful studio.

    After a brief career as a reporter, Stromberg became Samuel Goldwyn’s publicity director in New York, before being sent to Hollywood in 1918. He then joined Thomas Ince, and in 1920 directed a promotional short, A Trip Through the World’s Greatest Motion Picture Studios. 

    In 1921, Stromberg set up his own production company, and produced his first film, The Foolish Age. From 1921-25, he directed and/or produced a dozen or so, predominantly short, pictures.

    Stromberg joined the newly-formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925, joining Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf as one of its senior executives. In 1928, he produced two of its early successes, the award-winning White Shadows in the South Seas and Our Dancing Daughters.

    During the 1930s, Stromberg produced all of Jean Harlow’s pictures and, running into the 40s, the Thin Man series. He also supervised Marie Antoinette (1938), The Women (1949) and Pride and Prejudice (1940). 

    After falling out with Mayer, Stromberg produced a number of independent pictures, with varying degrees of success, the best being Lady of Burlesque (1943) and The Strange Woman (1946), which he co-wrote with director Edgar G Ulmer.

    Stromberg was an important producer of MGM musicals in the 1930s. Cutting his teeth on Stage Mother, he then worked on six Jeanette MacDonald vehicles: Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Maytime, The Firefly, Sweethearts and I Married an Angel. He also found time to produce the hugely successful The Great Ziegfeld.

  • Don Redman

    Donald Matthew Redman (1900-64) was a bandleader, singer, songwriter and musical arranger for performers including Count Basie and Pearl Bailey.

    Redman has been described as “one of the first great jazz arrangers and…a pivotal figure in the development of Swing and the Big Band style Jazz”. Which makes his one link with the MGM musical even funnier.

    One of Redman’s most successful songs was ‘How’m I Doin’?’, written in 1926 and recorded by a number of artists, including Redman himself. But in MGM Stage Mother it is given a twelve-second rendition by ten-year-old Mary Ann Jackson that is arguably (certainly) the most memorable sequence in the film. She shakes her head, slaps her thigh, rotates her hips and bawls out the inappropriate lyrics in a way that only a true stage mother could love. It’s probably not what Don Redman had in mind.

  • George Graff

    George Graff (1886-1973) was an American songwriter who co-wrote over 400 songs. Of these, one has survived to become a standard: ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, written with Ernest Ball and Chauncey Olcott in 1912.

    Graff lived a long life and this song became a kind of pension fund, earning him an alleged $10,000 a year in royalties up to the time of his death. Only a few years earlier, it had been featured in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967). ‘Irish Eyes’ is often mistaken for a traditional Irish ballad, but Graff admitted that he had never even visited Ireland.

    MGM used the song twice in its musicals: it was tortured by Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer in Stage Mother; and sung sweetly by Nelson Eddy in Let Freedom Ring.

  • Chauncey Olcott

    John Chancellor Olcott (1858?-1932) was a stage actor, singer and songwriter. He started out performing in minstrel shows, but eventually became a regular on Broadway.

    Olcott was of Irish descent, and many of his songs took the form of Irish ballads. Three have become standards: ‘Mother Machree’, ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ and, most particularly, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.

    The last of these has been heard in many pictures through the years, and was used twice in MGM musicals. Olcott died in 1932, so did not live to hear Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer’s painfully off-key rendition in Stage Mother. A few years later, Nelson Eddy treated it with a little more respect in Let Freedom Ring.

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