Andrew Jackson Baxley (1884-1950) appeared in a handful of excellent films during his career as a character actor, including two with Orson Welles (The Magnificent Amberson in 1942 and The Lady from Shanghai in 1947). But there, as in most of his other pictures, he was uncredited.
Baxley was in eight Metro musicals: Free and Easy, The Florodora Girl, Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Strike Up the Band, Thrill of a Romance and Summer Holiday.
Lawrence Wells Steers (1888-1951) appeared in around 550 films during his thirty-year career, sometimes credited, more often not.
Twenty-seven of those uncredited roles were in Metro musicals, starting in 1930 with Lord Byron of Broadway. Steers was subsequently in Stage Mother, Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Nobody’s Baby, The Great Waltz, At the Circus, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, Two Girls and a Sailor, Meet the People, Ziegfeld Follies (giving the hattrick of MGM Ziegfeld titles), Yolanda and the Thief, Holiday in Mexico, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, A Date with Judy, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Duchess of Idaho, The Toast of New Orleans and The Great Caruso.
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.
William Sylvester Gray (1896-1946) was an editor at MGM whose career-high was an Oscar nomination for The Great Ziegfeld.
Gray’s other musicals were The Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Gay Madrid and Everybody Sing.
Gwendolyn Lepinski (1904-61) was a department store model doing occasional stage work when she was discovered by producer-director Monta Bell and offered a contract with Metro in 1925. She mostly played supporting roles and made a successful transition to sound.
Lee appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and then secured a lead role as Peggy in Chasing Rainbows. She made a cameo as herself in Free and Easy, and was then let go by the studio. After a few years working on Poverty Row, Lee returned to MGM in 1935 as a stock player in minor roles. In that capacity, she turned up alongside Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera and was an audience member in The Great Ziegfeld.
Lee retired from screen acting in 1938.
Beatrice Hagen (1917-99) claimed a minor place in film history by providing the voice of Snow White in the French version of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As well as being a Disney voice actor (she played Mickey’s nephews), she was a ubiquitous chorus girl in musicals from a number of studios.
For MGM, Hagen made uncredited appearances in The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Maytime, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, Ziegfeld Girl, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, The Harvey Girls and Texas Carnival.
Karl Max Schneefuss (1892-1962), who worked under the name Charles Maxwell, started his career at MGM as assistant to William Axt, compositing additional music for Marianne.
Most of Maxwell’s career in musicals was spent as an orchestrator, in which capacity he worked on The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady,The Cat and the Fiddle,The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Here Comes the Band , A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie,The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, The Firefly and New Moon.
William Axt (1888-1959) was a composer and conductor who joined the MGM music department in 1929 and went on to write hundreds of scores. He composed for a number of musicals, mostly early in his career: Marianne, It’s a Great Life, Devil-May-Care, Chasing Rainbows,The Rogue Song, Free and Easy, Call of the Flesh, Madam Satan, Hollywood Party, The Great Ziegfeld, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Everybody Sing and Listen, Darling.
Axi’s work was also taken off the shelf for use as stock music in New Moon, Student Tour, Balalaika and Little Nellie Kelly .
The costumes he designed for The Wizard of Oz, which included the iconic ruby slippers, were unquestionably the high point of the career of Adrian Adolph Greenburg (1903-59), known simply as Adrian. But his designs were included in hundreds of MGM features, mostly between 1928 and 1941, including 34 other musicals. These included eleven Jeanette MacDonald pictures: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon and Bitter Sweet.
Adrian was very active during 1929-31, designing for Marianne, Devil-May-Care,The Rogue Song, Montana Moon, In Gay Madrid, Madam Satan, New Moon andThe Cuban Love Song.
Dancing Lady reunited Adrian with Joan Crawford a year after the white mousseline de soie dress he created for her in Letty Linton (1932) was copied commercially and sold over 500,000 units.
Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Great Waltz and Honolulu led up to the triumph ofThe Wizard of Oz. Adrian then worked on Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl andThe Chocolate Soldier before leaving MGM in 1941 to open his own fashion business.
He continued to freelance for a variety of studios and returned to Metro for a final musical, the aptly-named Lovely to Look At.
No other songwriter made a contribution to the Hollywood musical on the same scale as Irving Berlin (1888-1989), who published his first song in 1907 and retired 55 years later. He worked for all the major studios on films including Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936) and Carefree (1938) for RKO, On the Avenue (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) for 20th Century-Fox, Holiday Inn (1942), Blue Skies (1946) and White Christmas (1954) for Paramount, and This is the Army (1943) for Warner Bros.
Two songs contributed to Hallelujah were Berlin’s first work for MGM. Seven years later, ‘A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody’ was the centrepiece number in The Great Ziegfeld. In 1948 Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ turned up in Big City.
The same year saw Metro’s first full Irving Berlin feature, when he contributed 17 numbers (reduced to 16 in the final edit) to Easter Parade (or, to give the full title from the film’s opening, Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade).
In 1950 Metro filmed Berlin’s recent Broadway success, Annie Get Your Gun, retaining 11 of the stage version’s 14 songs.
Finally, Easter Parade’s ‘Shakin’ the Blues Away’ was the basis for the only production number in Love Me or Leave Me.
