The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Swiss Miss

  • Tex Driscoll

    The Hollywood career of John W Morris (1889-1970) ran parallel to the development of Hollywood itself. He made his debut in Cecil B DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914), generally considered to be the first feature film to be made in Los Angeles, shot in a converted barn on the corner of Selma and Vine.

    Driscoll acted in around 200 films, and was in scores of westerns, including Stagecoach (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939), The Return of Frank James (1940), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Canyon Passage (1946), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wichita (1955). He worked under many of the great directors of classical Hollywood: Ford and Hawks (in the same year), Lang, Wellman, Daves, Mann, Tourneur and Fuller. He also made a number of other pictures with DeMille, including the 1931 remake of The Squaw Man..

    Tex Driscoll was in five MGM musicals: New Moon, Naughty Marietta, The Girl of the Golden West, Swiss Miss and Bitter Sweet.

  • Agostino Borgato

    Agostino Borgato (1871-1939) was a theatre actor in Italy and the UK prior to emigrating to America in 1925. He had also appeared in a number of Italian films from 1910 onwards, and directed five in the period 1918-21.

    Borgato made his American screen debut in 1925, eventually appearing in around sixty films. After the introduction of sound, he played a variety of foreigners, though obviously with an emphasis on Italians. He was also cast in foreign-language versions of Hollywood films.

    Borgato acted in seven MGM musicals: A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Maytime, The Firefly and Swiss Miss.

  • Billy Taft

    Information is scarce about the actor Billy Taft (1908-95). His film career appears to have lasted from 1929 to 1940, and to have consisted of around fourteen credits. Two of these were MGM musicals: Good News and Swiss Miss. 

    Billy Taft’s most enduring performance was probably duetting with Ruby Keeler in the ‘Sittin’ on the Backyard Fence’ number in Footlight Parade (1933).

  • Hal Roach

    Most of the names synonymous with silent film comedy are performers: Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. But they are joined by two producer-directors: Mack Sennett and Harold Eugene Roach (1892-1992).

    Roach began working as an extra in Hollywood in 1912, and produced his first comedy shorts in 1915, in partnership with his friend Harold Lloyd. He worked with Lloyd until 1923, and went on to establish the Laurel and Hardy team. Roach wrote, produced and sometimes directed hundreds of comedy shorts and features.

    In 1928, the Hal Roach studio began releasing its films through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is how he became connected with its early musical pictures. In 1930, MGM wanted to add comic relief to The Rogue Song, so Roach directed additional sequences featuring Stan and Ollie as members of Lawrence Tibbetts band of outlaws.

    In 1933, the Hal Roach Studio and MGM co-produced The Devil’s Brother, a Laurel and Hardy musical that Roach directed. He also worked as an uncredited director on Swiss Miss and The Bohemian Girl (which he co-wrote), and produced Babes in Toyland and Nobody’s Baby.

  • Laurel & Hardy

    Arthur Stanley Jefferson (1890-1965) and Norvell Hardy (1892-1957), the most acclaimed of all comedy duos, were not MGM contract players; they worked for producer Hal Roach. But, from 1927, Roach released his pictures through Metro, which is how the pair came to be included in two of the studio’s all-star pictures: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Hollywood Party.

    Laurel and Hardy were also roped in to provide comic relief to The Rogue Song. Their sequences were filmed separately under Roach’s supervision and intercut with the main story.

    The pair also starred in versions of four operettas, with plots adapted to suit their style: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland , The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.

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