Jeanette Anna MacDonald (1903-65) was unquestionably MGM’s most popular musical star of the 1930s. She made sixteen pictures in fourteen years, eight of them opposite Nelson Eddy. Her films were mainly operettas, with a few notable exceptions. Unlike Eddy, she was a capable actor, with a particular skill at comedy.
MacDonald had made her professional stage debut in 1920. Working steadily, she obtained her first starring role on Broadway in 1927. She was spotted by Ernst Lubitsch, who took her to Hollywood to star in his first sound picture, The Love Parade (1929). (She was first, presumably to give her some on-set experience, uncredited in Say It with Songs [1929]).
She made seven films released in 1930, some good (Monte Carlo [1930], again with Lubitsch), some bad (the execrable The Lottery Bride [(1930]).
MacDonald had a quieter year in 1932 (like every other musical performer in Hollywood), but made two outstanding pictures, Lubitsch’s One Hour With You (1932) and Love Me Tonight (1932), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. She then signed her contract with MGM.
The sixteen Metro musicals were: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow (her final film with Lubitsch), Naughty Marietta (teaming for the first time with Eddy), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (very much a change of pace), Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Smilin’ Through, I Married an Angel, Cairo and Three Daring Daughters.
In the last of these, she played a divorcée with children, and her career as a film star was effectively over. She sings a few songs in The Sun Comes Up (1949), but this is a Lassie film, not a musical.
MacDonald was also by now suffering from the heart condition that ended her life so early. She spent her final decade and a half performing in concerts, stage musicals, opera and on the radio.
Gustav Gerson Kahn (1886-1941) was one of Tin Pan Alley’s most prolific and successful writers of popular songs.
Khan started out writing for vaudeville performers in the 1910s before forming the first of many partnerships with composers. In 1924, he wrote his first standard, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’.
Contributing to many Broadway scores throughout the 1920s, he also moved into writing for films, and by 1933 was effectively working full time for Hollywood. Khan’s lyrics featured in Flying Down to Rio (1933), Kid Millions (1934) and Captains Courageous (1937).
Khan worked most frequently with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contributing to Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West and Bitter Sweet.
Khan’s contributions to the Great American Songbook include ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’, ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.
Gus Kahn was played by Danny Thomas in a Warner Bros musical biopic, I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951).
Slavoljub Vorkapić (1894-1976) is one of the more fa
scinating and unexpected figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Born in Serbia, Vorapich studied to be a painter, and was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris in the late 1910s. He travelled to the United States in 1920, and found work as an actor, predominantly for the director Rex Ingram (he played Napoleon in Scaramouche [1923]).
In 1928, Vorkapich directed, with the collaboration of Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, a short and influential experimental film called The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, allegedly with a budget of $98. The prowess in editing demonstrated in the film led to employment in Hollywood, initially by Paramount, and then RKO and MGM. He came to specialize in montage sequences, in which action over a lengthy period of narrative time is compressed into a few minutes of screen time in what he called “symphonies of visual movement”. Vorkapich would be brought in specifically to shoot and edit these, often expressionistic, sequences. He developed and utilized techniques in pacing action for maximum psychological impact on the viewer.
Vorkapic was also adept at in-camera special effects, such as the collapse of Wall Street at the end of The Conquerors (1932) and the locust attack in The Good Earth (1937).
He made propaganda shorts during the Second World War, and then took up academic posts in California, and later in Yugoslavia. This was also where he directed his only feature film, Hanka (1955). He lectured on what he saw as the autonomous visual language of cinema, and never hesitated to criticize directors of high reputation, including Eisenstein and Ford, for what he considered incompetence.
Vorkapich’s work at MGM can be seen in the musicals Dancing Lady, San Francisco, Maytime, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts.
Quite why he was seen as simpatico with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is unclear.
Patrick Holme-Sumner (1897-1974) was a stage actor who starred in British films during the late 1910s, including a series about the adventures of a couple called Adam and Eve.
After travelling to the USA to work on Broadway, Somerset ended up in Hollywood, where he was generally restricted to uncredited roles. He became a member of John Ford’s stock company, appearing in nine of the director’s films, including The Informer (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1936).
Somerset also worked with Rouben Mamoulian (Becky Sharp [1935]), Clarence Brown (Anna Karenina [1935]), George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett [1935]) and Frank Capra (Mr Deeds Goes to Town [1936]).
Pat Somerset appeared in three Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Maytime and The Firefly.
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.
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.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
Robert Clinton Oakes (1899-1972) made close to 400 film and television appearances in a career that lasted over forty years. The son of a Montana horse rancher, it was fitting that a huge proportion of his roles were in westerns.
Chandler made his first, uncredited, appearance in a Paramount western in 1927, but was starring opposite Betty Bronson in his second, Open Range (1927). Sound posed no problem for him, and he had a featured role in The Forward Pass (1929). But the status of his roles on non-westerns and ‘A’ pictures started to decline. Eventually, he settled into a long series of credited and uncredited character parts.
Chandler had small parts in ten Cecil B DeMille pictures, took orders from Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials, and showed up in films as diverse as Roman Scandals (1933), Marie Antionette (1938), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Laura (1944), The Dark Mirror (1946), Red River (1948) and Rancho Notorious (1952).
For MGM, Chandler appeared in The Devil’s Brother and, uncredited, in The Merry Widow, The Bohemian Girl, The Firefly, Rosalie and Born to Sing.
German-born Paul Alfred Marquardt (1889-1960) was a composer who worked for many years as an arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and for other studios. Although rarely receiving an onscreen credit, Marquardt made a substantial contribution to MGM’s musical history.
He orchestrated the music for many non-musical films, including Anna Karenina (1935),Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), The Women (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), Rebecca (1940),Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), High Noon (1952) and Friendly Persuasion (1957). Marquardt also composed original scores in the 1930s, including for The Sign of the Cross and A Farewell to Arms (both 1933). He worked on well over 350 films between 1930 and 1957.
The first of Marquardt’s 39 MGM musicals was The Cuban Love Song, collaborating with Charles Maxwell. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco. Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, Rosalie, Everybody Sing, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz, Sweethearts (in which he also appeared as a conductor), The Wizard of Oz (credited for orchestral and vocal arrangements), Babes in Arms, At the Circus, Balalaika, New Moon, Hullabaloo, Rio Rita, I Married an Angel, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Follies, Holiday in Mexico, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Royal Wedding and Show Boat.
Julius Theodore von Eltz (1893-1964) was a typical Hollywood workhorse. In more than 200 pictures spread over 40+ years, he evolved from silent leading man to character actor to bit-part player, always giving of his best in whatever he did.
Eltz made his stage debut aged 19, appearing on Broadway a number of occasions, and made his first film in 1915. Probably his best-known and most frequently revived role was as Arthur Geiger, the bookseller, pornographer and corpse in The Big Sleep (1946).
Eltz was in two MGM musicals in the 1930s. He played the caddish Carter Jerome in The Prodigal and, six years later, was uncredited in The Firefly.
