The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: The Bohemian Girl

  • James Finlayson

    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).

  • Thelma Todd

    Thelma Alice Todd (1906-35) made well over 100 film appearances in her brief life, largely in shorts, but also in many notable features.

    A teenage beauty pageant winner, Todd inevitably came to the attention of Hollywood scouts. She made a few undemanding appearances for Paramount, before finding a berth at the Hal Roach Studios in 1929. After working successfully with Roach’s stars, including Laurel and Hardy, Todd was eventually partnered with ZaSu Pitts in a double act intended as a distaff version of Stan and Ollie. Though not achieving the comic heights of their models, the Todd and Pitts shorts are entertaining enough, even using the same theme and incidental music as Laurel and Hardy.

    Thelma Todd was a gifted comedian, and worked well with the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). Todd always looks genuinely amused by the comics she is working with, and incorporates this into her performances.

    Todd could also play it straight, and was Iva Archer, widow of Sam Spade’s partner, in the first version of The Maltese Falcon (1931).

    Todd made two appearances in MGM musicals, both of them in Laurel and Hardy vehicles. She had the female lead in The Devil’s Brother, and was later cast in The Bohemian Girl. Unfortunately, she died before the latter film’s release, and most of her part was edited out.

    Thelma’s Todd’s death was deemed to be suicide, but this was always unbelievable to those who knew her, who said she had never shown the slightest sign of depression. She was in a relationship with director Roland West, and it is claimed that he confessed to her murder on his death bed in 1952.

  • Harry Wilson

    The figures of 350+ film and TV appearances by Harry Wilson (1897-1978) is made more impressive by the fact that Wilson worked almost entirely in the sound era, when the turnover of pictures was not so great as in the silent days.

    British-born Wilson dubbed himself ‘the ugliest man in movies’ (though there was competition), and he was many studios’ go-to actor for convicts and criminal henchmen. He features with Mike Mazurki in Some Like it Hot (1959) as one of George Raft’s goons.

    Wilson appeared uncredited in no fewer than fifteen MGM musicals, across more than thirty years and four decades. In the 1930s he made A Lady’s Morals, The Bohemian Girl, A Day at the Races, Let Freedom Ring and The Wizard of Oz (as a Winkie Guard). In the 40s, Wilson was in Go West, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Luxury Liner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

    His 1950s appearances were in Million Dollar Mermaid, It’s Always Fair Weather, Guys and Dolls and Merry Andrew. And finally, in 1963, Wilson played a roustabout in Billy Rose’s Jumbo. 

    As if Wilson was not busy enough making his own films, he worked for fifteen years as Wallace Beery’s stand-in.

  • 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.

  • Frank Butler

    Frank Russell Butler (1889-1967) was a prominent screenwriter, though his most successful days were at Paramount rather than MGM. 

    Born in  England, Butler started out as an actor at Famous Players-Lasky in 1920, writing his first scenario the following year. His acting career ended with silent cinema, and he directed only one film for Hal Roach: Flying Elephants, with Laurel and Hardy before they had established their comedy duo characters.

    Butler signed on as a writer at Metro in 1929, and worked on four musicals during his time there. He worked with regular collaborator Sylvia Thalberg on Montana Moon and New Moon. He subsequently worked on two scripts for films involving Laurel and Hardy, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl.

    Returning to Paramount, Butler wrote frequently for Bob Hope, including four of the Road pictures. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1942 for two very different screenplays, Road to Morocco and war drama Wake Island. He won two year later for Going My Way (1944).

  • Lee Phelps

    Napoleon Bonaparte Kubuck (1893-1953) notched up over 660 film and TV appearances, most of them uncredited.

    Phelps was in twenty MGM musicals: They Learned About Women, The Florodora Girl, A Lady’s Morals, Flying High, Dancing Lady, Reckless, A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie, The Bohemian Girl, The Great Ziegfeld, Sweethearts, Balalaika, Little Nellie Kelly, Born to Sing (a rare onscreen credit), Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and That Midnight Kiss. 

  • Harry Bernard

    Harry Bernard (1878-1940) was a member of the Mack Sennett comedy stable and a regular collaborator with Laurel and Hardy for Hal Roach. It was in this capacity that he made appearances in The Rogue Song, The Devil’s Brother and The Bohemian Girl. Bernard can also be spotted as a baseball spectator in They Learned About Women. 

  • 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.

  • George Magrill

    George Magrill (1900-52) was a bit-part player and occasional stunt performer whose work spanned cute cartoon animals and a range of henchmen, hooligans and thugs. When you accumulate around 500 films on your cv, it’s inevitable that some of them will be MGM musicals; in Magrill’s case, thirteen of them.

    Magrill began with Marianne in 1929 and ended with Three Little Words in 1950. In between came New Moon, The Merry Widow, The Bohemian Girl, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Great Waltz, New Moon (again), Meet the People, Music for Millions, Yolanda and the Thief and Good News.    

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