Sammy Lee (1890-1968), born Samuel Levy, was the first in a line of important choreographers at MGM, though he arguably achieved greater success on Broadway and at Twentieth Century-Fox.
Lee is uncredited on The Broadway Melody, which he might have been quite happy about, given the rudimentary nature of the dance numbers. He had worked on Ziegfeld’s Follies in 1927, but this is not reflected in the style of the fictional Zanfield’s show. Lee and director Harry Beaumont could not, in this first-ever film musical, determine how to make a stage performance cinematic. Nor were the chorines of the quality Lee would have been used to on Broadway.
Lee’s first onscreen credit was for ‘Dances and Ensemble’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he did his best with non-professional dancers Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. He also essayed a pre-Berkeley overhead shot of the chorus.
Lee went on to stage dances for It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, They Learned About Women, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure, Good News, Love in the Rough (which includes an al fresco number performed at a real golf club), A Lady’s Morals, Broadway to Hollywood and Dancing Lady.
A move to Twentieth Century-Fox earned Lee Academy Award nominations for King of Burlesque (1936) and Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). He was back at Metro for Honolulu, Hullabaloo, Cairo, Born to Sing, Meet the People and Two Girls and a Sailor.
Lee had a parallel career as the director of a series of undistinguished shorts.
Nacio Herb Brown (1896-1964) was hired by MGM in 1928 to write scores for sound pictures; it was at a point when synchronized music was still perceived by many as the most promising feature of the new system.
Brown was paired with lyricist Arthur Freed to produce songs for the studio’s first all-talking picture, The Broadway Melody. Their partnership continued for many years as the contributed numbers to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Marianne, Lord Byron of Broadway, Montana Moon, Dancing Lady, Going Hollywood, Student Tour, Broadway Melody of 1936, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Two Girls on Broadway, Hullabaloo, Little Nellie Kelly, Lady Be Good, Born to Sing, Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St Louis, Three Little Words, Pagan Love Song, Singin’ in the Rain and The Affairs of Dobie Gillies.
Brown also worked with other lyricists on It’s a Great Life, Ziegfeld Girl, The Big Store, Swing Fever, Holiday in Mexico, On an Island With You, The Kissing Bandit and Seven Hills of Rome.
No one had a longer connection with MGM musicals than Arthur Freed (1894-1974), starting at the very beginning with The Broadway Melody in 1929 and ending in 1960 with Bells Are Ringing. Of course, his role changed significantly during that period.
Freed had not been working long as a lyricist at MGM when he and composer Nacio Herb Brown were assigned the task of producing the first bespoke score for a film musical. Following the success of The Broadway Melody, Freed’s songs were a mainstay of the studio’s musical output for a quarter of a century. He and Brown contributed numbers to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Marianne, Lord Byron of Broadway, Montana Moon, Dancing Lady, Going Hollywood, Student Tour, Broadway Melody of 1936, San Francisco, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Two Girls on Broadway, Hullabaloo, Little Nellie Kelly, Lady Be Good, Born to Sing, Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St Louis, Three Little Words, Pagan Love Song, Singin’ in the Rain and The Affairs of Dobie Gillies
He also worked without Brown on the 1930 Good News and on A Lady’s Morals, The Prodigal, Hollywood Party, A Night at the Opera, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Bathing Beauty, Anchors Aweigh, Ziegfeld Follies, Yolanda and the Thief and Love Me or Leave Me.
During the 1930s Freed spent time on Metro’s sound stages, watching the staging of his songs and learning about the craft of creating film musicals. He also devoted time to ingratiating himself with studio head Louis B Mayer, making known his ambition to become involved in the production side of the process. Finally, in 1938, Mayer decided to give Freed his chance.
Arthur Freed initiated the filming of The Wizard of Oz and was its de facto producer, although only credited as associate producer; Mayer safeguarded the project by appointing the more experienced Mervyn LeRoy as producer.
Having shown what he could do, Freed was made a full producer and worked on 39 musicals and a handful of non-musicals during the next thirty years. The musicals were Babes in Arms, Little Nellie Kelly, Strike Up the Band, Lady Be Good, Babes on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Panama Hattie, Cabin in the Sky, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Best Foot Forward, Meet Me in St Louis, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Easter Parade, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Pagan Love Song, An American in Paris, Royal Wedding, Show Boat, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, It’s Always Fair Weather, Kismet, Invitation to the Dance, Silk Stockings, Gigi and Bells Are Ringing.
The Freed Unit became MGM royalty and made most of the musicals upon which the studio’s current reputation rests. Opinions vary as to the extent to which Freed can take credit for this achievement, and the unit did produce a few duds. But, at the very least, Arthur Freed was the catalyst for a body of work of unrivalled sophistication and artistry.
The Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg (1899-1937) was the creative engine room of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the studio’s creation in 1925 until his early death. In twelve years he supervised over 400 pictures, including virtually all of its prestige productions, without ever choosing to take an on-screen credit.
Thalberg had some level of involvement with most of MGM’s musical output from The Broadway Melody in 1929 until A Day at the Races, on which he was working at the time of his death; it was he who brought the Marx Brothers to Metro, reviving their flagging careers at the cost of comedic purity.
Thalberg effectively launched the musical genre as the driving force behind The Broadway Melody. He showed his inclination for experimentation-within-limits by okaying Hallelujah even though King Vidor warned him it would make no money.
Thalberg brought Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbet from the Metropolitan Opera and gifted stardom to Jeanette MacDonald. He persuaded Luise Rainer to take the small role in The Great Ziegfeld that won her an Oscar.
Although business-oriented, Thalberg was prepared to devote time and money to producing high-quality work, and he made profits as a result. His impact on the early development of the MGM musical is impossible to quantify, but a philosophy of excellence can certainly be seen in the work that followed, especially in the golden age of the early 1950s.
John Arnold (1889-1964) had been photographing films at Metro since 1916 when he was assigned to The Broadway Melody. He followed this up with The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and was soon after kicked upstairs to become head of the studio’s Camera Department.
Arnold was a co-founder and governor of the American Society of Cinematographers, with a particular interest in technical innovation. This bore dividends on The Broadway Melody when he was able to devise the “coffin on wheels,” a soundproof but mobile camera booth that enabled the film to transcend the existing limitations of sound cinema.
Later in his career Arnold won Oscars for two of his inventions: in 1938, for a semi-automatic follow focus device; and in 1940 for a mobile camera crane.
Arnold was also important to the campaign that secured the inclusion of cinematographers in Hollywood credits.
Many things make The Broadway Melody (1929) a noteworthy film in cinema history. It was the first feature-length musical: although Warners were filming The Desert Song (1929) at the same time, they held back its release and so missed a further opportunity to make history.
The Broadway Melody was also the first musical from the studio that became synonymous with that genre. It was the first musical to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and also the first talking picture to do so, the only previous winner, Wings (1927) having had only a synchronized score and sound effects.
The Broadway Melody also saw the invention (or perhaps more accurately the discovery) of the playback system, whereby performers in musicals lip-synced to songs they had recorded earlier. The Wedding of the Painted Doll was the film’s biggest production number and Irving Thalberg was so dissatisfied with the original footage that he ordered it shot again. According to Bosley Crowther in The Lion’s Share (1957), it was sound engineer Douglas Shearer who suggested that money could be saved by reusing the live music previously recorded. Pre-recording musical performances went on to become standard operating procedure throughout the classical period.
The Broadway Melody was the first backstage musical, putting in place many of the tropes that became genre clichés. This includes the convention that the show being staged is almost always a revue rather than a drama; and the recurring dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow music.
It also includes the first musical number integrated into a film’s narrative. Eddie sings You Were Meant for Me not on stage but in Queenie’s apartment, to a non-diegetic musical accompaniment, sealing his declaration of love and moving forward the narrative.
Conversely, The Wedding of the Painted Doll is a template for the extraneous production number, filmed on a large scale and without the participation of the film’s principal players. It is also the first musical number filmed in (two-strip) Technicolor.
Arthur Freed, who would become MGM’s most important musical producer, made his first contribution to the genre with the seven songs he provided with his partner, Nacio Herb Brown. It is fitting that the trailblazing The Broadway Melody should have used original compositions rather than standards. Freed and Brown provided numbers that complemented the action. The lyrics of the title song, for example
Broadway, you magic street
River of humanity
I have trudged my weary feet
Down your Gay White Way
Dreaming a million dreams of fame
Yearning for you to know my name
reflect the story and experience of Hank, the character at the heart of the picture.
The Broadway Melody is unsophisticated to contemporary eyes, even in comparison to musicals made just a few years later. It is also a rare musical that also exists in a silent version, and even the talkie includes intertitles. And it is undeniable that the clod-hopping chorus line would not have made it into a Busby Berkeley number.
But it is important to remember that, in 1929, Photoplay’s review described it as the film in which talking pictures found new speed and freedom. Harry Beaumont and cinematographer John Arnold devised a “coffin on wheels”: a soundproof camera booth that was also compact enough to move around the set, enabling a sense of space. In a sense, The Broadway Melody was an experimental film: sound technology improved during the shooting period and it has been noted that the quality of sound recording is much better in the later scenes filmed. Irving Thalberg actually drew attention to the studio’s concern that audiences might be confused by a character bursting into song, accompanied by an unseen orchestra–bewilderingly, a stumbling-block to enjoyment of musicals that continues to this day.
Norman Houston (1887-1958) was a sometime actor and director who spent most of his career as a screenwriter, making his mark as one of the principal writers on the extended Hopalong Cassidy series. His sole involvement in MGM’s musicals was to contribute dialogue to The Broadway Melody.
Sarah Y Mason (1896-1980) is one of the forgotten women of early Hollywood, having made a significant contribution, and leaving little information behind. I am grateful to the Women Film Pioneers Project for summarizing what information there is.
Dr Roseanne Welch has credited Mason with being the person to name and develop the role of ‘continuity girl’ (now script supervisor): the person on set with responsibility for ensuring continuity from shot to shot and scene to scene. This was in 1918, when she began working for Douglas Fairbanks.
Mason later moved into script-writing, often in partnership with her husband, Victor Heerman. It was she who fleshed out Edmund Goulding’s story for The Broadway Melody into a continuity script, with dialogue added later by James Gleason and Norman Houston.
Mason went on to script They Learned About Women and to adapt Love in the Rough from its stage original. She also worked uncredited on Meet Me in St Louis. She and Heerman won the Best Adaptation Oscar for Little Women (1933).
Edmund Goulding (1891-1959) is best remembered as athe director of films including Grand Hotel (1932) and Nightmare Alley (1947). But his biographer, Matthew Kelly, has drawn attention to Goulding’s wide-ranging contributions at MGM, which included not only writing and producing but also consultation on music, makeup and costume. His singular contribution to film musicals was to extemporize the plot of The Broadway Melody for Irving Thalberg and Lawrence Weingarten. According to the latter, Thalberg’s secretary took notes because they were aware of Goulding’s ability to “tell a story in the morning and forget everything about it by the afternoon”.
Goulding subsequently made an uncredited contribution to the screenplays of Hollywood Party (on which he was also an uncredited co-director) and, understandably, Two Girls on Broadway, the remake of The Broadway Melody. He directed some scenes in A Night at the Opera without credit.
Goulding was never a credited director on a Metro musical, though some sources erroneously claim Blondie of the Follies (1932) to be a musical. The film has a show business background and features one musical number in long shot, but it is actually a romantic comedy with an excellent performance by Marion Davies.
