The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: The Broadway Melody

  • Ernest Belcher

    Ernest Belcher (1882-1973) is almost totally forgotten, but was a very significant figure in the presentation of dance in early Hollywood. One of the few writers on his work described him as “a figure of national importance”.

    Belcher studied ballet in the UK and worked in the music halls and as a principal danseur before travelling to the United States with a dance troupe in 1914. After various dancing jobs, he established himself as a teacher in Los Angeles.

    His career in film choreography began in 1918 he was hired by D W Griffith to stage dances for Broken Blossoms (1918). Working as a dance director, he taught, amongst others, Pola Negri, Betty Grable, Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Gwen Verdon and Gower Champion, as well as his own daughter, Marge Champion.

    Belcher provided dance direction in many silent films, including The Phantom of the Opera (1925), almost always without onscreen credit. But in 1928 the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers dubbed him ‘Dance Director of Movieland’. 

    He was there at the beginning of the sound era, arranging dance in The Jazz Singer (1927), and he trained Shirley Temple, staging the ballet in The Little Princess (1939).

    It is ironic, given the size of Belcher’s contribution to dance on film, that his only known involvement in MGM musicals was the appearance of Ernest Belcher’s Dancing Tots in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

  • Dorothy Coonan

    Dorothy Rae Coonan (1913-2009) started dancing professionally aged 14, making her first screen appearance in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody. She worked several times on films choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

    In 1933, director William Wellman gave her one of the leads in Wild Boys of the Road. She played Sally, the teenage hobo who disguises herself as a boy to ride the freight trains. 

    She and Wellman married in the following year, and remained together for over four decades, until his death in 1975.

    Dorothy Wellman retired after her marriage, though she did make an uncredited appearance as a nurse in her husband’s The Story of GI Joe (1945). IMDb states she played a chorus girl in Sis Hopkins (1941), a low-budget Judy Canova comedy, but this seems unlikely.

  • Diana Verne

    Like a number of other performers, Diana Verne (19??-??) was a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody and nothing else is known about her.

  • Marshall Ruth

    Marshall Ruth (1898-1953) was an actor who worked steadily in films for twenty years, almost always uncredited. His size and shape made him a natural choice when 20th-Century-Fox were looking for someone to play Roscoe Arbuckle in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939).

    In The Broadway Melody, Ruth played the impresario Zanfield’s assistant.

  • Alice Pitman

    Alice Pitman (19??-??) appeared as a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody. Nothing else is known about her.

  • Charlotte Merriam

    Charlotte Merriam (1903-72) started out as a screen actor playing in silent shorts, but graduated to features. Perhaps her most important role was the lead in The Brass Bottle (1923), which was directed by Maurice Tourneur. She also had an important part in the first screen version of Captain Blood (1923).

    Merriam transitioned into sound pictures, where she memorably played the negligent mother in Night Nurse (1931). Less memorably, she made an uncredited appearance in The Broadway Melody, playing a flapper.

  • Betty Arthur

    Elizabeth Kathryn Leopold (1910-2005) was a dancer who was, apparently, discovered at a young age by prima ballerina and dessert inspirer Anna Pavlova. 

    She made a handful of screen appearances in the late twenties,and her low point as a dancer may well have been in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody.

  • Edward Dillon

    Edward Dillon (187?-1933) appeared on at least 340 films, most of them in the silent era, from 1908 onwards. He worked under D W Griffith and played leads opposite Mary Pickford. He also directed around 140 films, including a 1915 version of Don Quixote.

    In sound pictures, Dillon was usually uncredited. This includes The Broadway Melody, which starred Bessie Love, whom Dillon had directed in A Daughter of the Poor (1917). 

  • J Emmett Beck

    J Emmett Beck (19??-45) is an actor with just three citations in the AFI register.

    One of these, and the last one, is Babe Hatrick in The Broadway Melody.

  • Sam S Zimbalist

    Samuel S Zimbalist (1901-58) is the only producer to posthumously receive the Oscar for Best Picture, when it was awarded to Ben Hur (1959). This made him, at that time, the producer of the second and third highest-grossing pictures in history. The film placed third was Zimbalist’s Quo Vadis (1951), while first place was, of course, held by Gone With the Wind (1939).

    This was a long way from Zimbalist’s beginnings in the industry, as an office boy at Metro Studios. He took up editing, becoming a full-fledged editor in 1925 with MGM’s first version of The Wizard of Oz.

    In 1929, Zimbalist had his first brush with the Academy Awards when he edited The Broadway Melody.

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