The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: The Hollywood Revue of 1929

  • Albertina Rasch

    Albertina Rasch (1891-1967) was an important component of early MGM musicals. She provided dance direction for seven pictures, which normally featured her eponymous ballet troupe, as well as acting in two others.

    Rasch trained at the State Opera House in Vienna, and pursued a career there before relocating to the United States when she was around 18. She was involved in spectacular productions at the 5,000-seat New York Hippodrome and performed as prima ballerina with a number of companies. Rasch also acquired vaudeville experience.

    In the early twenties she established the Albertina Rasch Dancers and played a part in the development of syncopated American Ballet such as ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (1925).

    At MGM, Rasch developed the insertion of ‘ballet spectacles’ into the studio’s musicals, something she had begun on Broadway. She and her dancers first appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, which was followed by Devil-May-Care, Broadway Melody of 1936 (the ‘Lucky Star’ ballet involving Eleanor Powell), Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz and Sweethearts. She also worked on the abandoned The March of Time.

    Rasch acted in The Rogue Song and appeared without credit in The Firefly. 

    Rasch was married to composer Dimitri Tiomkin.

  • Gwen Lee

    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.

  • George K Arthur

    Scottish-born Arthur George Brest (1899-1985) was under contract to MGM when producer Harry Rapf teamed him with Karl Dane for a series of silent comedy features.

    Dane’s strong Danish accent posed problems when sound came along and their MGM career came to an end shortly after a short appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Arthur also appeared in Chasing Rainbows. After making a few shorts for Paramount, he and Dane split up.

    In 1957 Arthur won an Oscar for producing a short film, The Bespoke Overcoat (1956), an early film by director Jack Clayton.

  • Karl Dane

    Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb (1886-1934) was a Danish-born comedian who found fame supporting John Gilbert in Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925). Under contract to MGM, he formed a successful comedy partnership with George K Arthur, but things became difficult with the introduction of sound, as Dane had a strong accent. His contract was terminated and he took his own life a few years later. At the urging of Jean Hersholt, MGM paid for his burial.

    Dane made an appearance with Arthur in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and had small parts in Montana Moon, Free and Easy and New Moon. 

  • Marie Dressler

    Leila Marie Koerber (1868-1934) began her stage career in the 1880s and was a star on Broadway by the time she was 24. In 1914 she appeared with Chaplin and Mabel Normand in Hollywood’s first feature-length comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance.

    By the early 1920s Dressler’s career was in decline, only to revive in 1927 when she was teamed with Polly Moran in The Callahans and the Murphys. Her stage experience meant that sound presented no problems, and by 1931 she was one of MGM’s top stars, winning an Academy Award for Min and Bill (1930). By 1934 she was dead from cancer.

    Dressler was a natural comedian and makes on the the few genuinely funny contributions to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 ‘singing’ ‘For I’m the Queen’. She went to feature in a supporting role in Chasing Rainbows, in which she and Moran combine to steal the picture.

  • Buster Keaton

    Signing a contract with MGM was probably the worst decision ever made by Joseph Frank Keaton (1895-1966). It brought an end to the period in which he vied with Chaplin to be the greatest, most gifted comic star of the silent screen, and led to dark years of alcoholism and frustration before his rediscovery by later generations.

    Keaton was at least permitted to remain silent in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, performing the ‘Dance of the Sea’ in bizarre drag. The following year he starred in Free and Easy, his first talking feature, and filmed a caveman sequence for the abandoned The March of Time. He was also required to shoot French, Spanish and German versions of Free and Easy.

    Ten years later Keaton appeared uncredited in the MacDonald-Eddy New Moon, and in 1949 he had a supporting role in In the Good Old Summertime. 

    Keaton also contributed as a gag writer to A Night at the Opera, At the Circus, Go West, Easy to Wed, In the Good Old Summertime and Excuse My Dust.

  • William Haines

    Charles William Haines (1900-73) was a popular actor of the 1920s and one of MGM’s biggest stars. His career was cut short by his refusal to hide the fact that he was in a gay relationship by entering into a lavender marriage. This led Louis B Mayer to tear up his contract. Haines went on to become one of Hollywood’s top interior designers, aided in no small part by the willingness of his former colleagues to give him work.

    In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 it is Haines who, bizarrely, cuts Jack Benny’s tuxedo to shreds. And in Free and Easy he is glimpsed as a guest at the premiere.

  • 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.

  • Joan Crawford

    Lucille Faye LeSueur (1904?-77) is often remembered today for the hard-faced, wide-shouldered roles she played in the 1940s and 50s, especially her Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce (1945). But in her early years at MGM she was best-known for playing wild young women, a model established in her breakthrough silent hit, Our Dancing Daughters (1928).

    Always driven by the ambition to succeed, Crawford worked hard on developing her speaking voice when sound was introduced, practising elocution and pronunciation. Her success can be gauged from appearance alongside Conrad Nagel in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where, although clearly nervous, her voice stands up well alongside an actor who learned his trade in the theatre. Crawford’s singing and dancing are somewhat forced but, again, reveal a gritty determination to pull off something new.

    Crawford did well enough to earn the lead in one of Metro’s first dozen musicals, Montana Moon, which was a commercial success despite its many shortcomings.

    It was intended that this be followed up with Great Day, an adaptation of a recent Broadway flop, in which Crawford would be reteamed with Johnny Mack Brown, her Montana Moon co-star. Shooting began in the autumn of 1930, under the direction of Harry Pollard, but was halted abruptly after two weeks, at a cost of $280,000. The reasons for this are unclear, but it may have been a victim of studio reaction to the public’s growing aversion to musicals.

    During the 1933 musical revival, Crawford was cast alongside Clark Gable in Dancing Lady, where she at least got to dance alongside Fred Astaire in his first film.

    By 1953 Crawford had long ceased being an MGM contract player, but she returned to the studio for a final musical outing in Torch Song, which played more to her melodramatic instincts. Unfortunately, she suffered the indignity of having her singing voice dubbed.

  • Norma Shearer

    Canadian-born Edith Norma Shearer was the Queen of MGM in the late 20s and throughout the 30s. This was undeniably owing in part to her status as the wife of Irving Thalberg, the studio’s presiding genius for most of that period. But she was also a talented actor who came into her own during the pre-code era playing sexually liberated women.

    Shearer’s Technicolor appearance as herself in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, rehearsing the balcony scene with John Gilbert, was by way of being a warm-up for her 1936 film of Romeo and Juliet, which paired her with Leslie Howard.

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