Samuel Howard Ash (1884-1951), the child of British immigrants, was a talented singer who was signed by Columbia records at the age of 20. He made his debut on Broadway the following year, starring in a Rudolf Friml operetta. He continued to record and perform on Broadway throughout the 1920s.
In 1929, Ash relocated to Hollywood as part of the exodus triggered by talking pictures. He made his debut in a featured role in Unmasked (1929), but was largely uncredited thereafter. His most frequently-revived appearance is as the bank teller in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), but he made well over 200 pictures between 1929 and 1953.
Sam Ash played Mark Thorne in MGM’s Stage Mother, uncredited even though he sang one of the picture’s relatively few songs. He subsequently made lesser uncredited appearances in The Merry Widow, San Francisco, Meet the People and Luxury Liner.
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:
Joan Bennett, Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow, Eleanor Powell, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Powell: just a few of the stars who had the delightful Una Merkel (1903-86) as a best friend during Hollywood’s Golden Age. With an unmistakeable Kentucky twang, Merkel was rarely the star of her pictures, but was also rarely unmemorable in them.
Aged 17, Merkel worked as a stand-in for Lillian Gish on Way Down East (1920), which means it is sometimes her you see in the famous ice floe sequence. After plying the acting trade in the legitimate theatre and in vaudeville, she worked for D W Griffith again when he cast her as Ann Rutledge in Abraham Lincoln (1930).
A hard-working supporting player, Merkel appeared in forty pictures released in the five-year period 1930 to 1934, perhaps most famously partnered with Ginger Rogers in the ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ number in 42nd Street (1933).
Una Merkel’s most famous scene is unquestionably her fight with Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939). Both actors eschewed stunt doubles and ended up heavily bruised, as well as soaking wet from James Stewart’s bucket of water.
In the 1950s, Merkel was a successful and Tony award-winning stage actor, and was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for Summer and Smoke (1961).
Merkel’s nine MGM musicals took her from Alice Brady in 1933 (Broadway to Hollywood) to Elvis Presley in 1966 (Spinout). In between came The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1936, Born to Dance, Rich Young and Pretty, The Merry Widow (again) and I Love Melvin.
Eva Louise Moynahan (1904-92) only appeared in about ten films before giving up her career so she could, as was normal at the time, ‘devote herself to her family’. But she was able to look back on a career that connected her, albeit without credit, with a few memorable pictures.
Channing had wanted to be a dancer, but an injury put paid to that, and she devoted herself to acting instead. After gaining experience on the stage, she was cast in Working Girls (1931), a minor but engaging picture directed by Dorothy Arzner.
In 1934, Channing appeared in two solid MGM classics, The Thin Man and the musical The Merry Widow. She had previously been in two other of the studio’s musicals: Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party.
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.
Enrico Armetta (1888-1945) left Sicily aged 14, as a stowaway on a boat bound for New York. He managed to avoid being sent back, and was working as a valet at the Lambs Club when actor Raymond Hitchcock got him a job in the chorus of a musical.
Armetta worked for stock companies and on Broadway for a few years, and also appeared in a handful of films for New York-based companies. In 1920, he made his way to Hollywood, and established a career playing stereotypical Italians in pictures such as Fantômas (1920) and A Girl in Every Port (1928).
Armetta’s career as a supporting player really took off with the coming of sound, when there was a demand for actors who could do ethnic accents, and he became a familiar face in about 150 films as various Luigis, Giuseppes and Tonys. He had featured roles in two of John M Stahl’s greatest melodramas, Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935), while also playing uncredited barbers, waiters and street vendors.
Henry Armetta had a featured role in The Devil’s Brother, and appeared in a further five MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle (as the taxi driver), The Merry Widow (uncredited as the lascivious Turk at Maxim’s), Everybody Sing, The Big Store and Anchors Aweigh.
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.
Juanita Magda Pike (1913-54) became a Goldwyn Girl at the age of 18 and made her screen debut in the Eddie Cantor hit Palmy Days (1931). Immediately after this, she played a chorus girl in MGM’s Flying High.
Pike made a couple of dozen pictures during the 1930s and 40s, including appearing as a maid in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. She also played a secretary in The Great Dictator (1940).
Nita Pike’s life ended tragically when she committed suicide two days after the death of her husband.
Mary Halsey (1913-89) also worked under the name Mary Jane Halsey, but, in over forty feature films, she never achieved a credit.
On the positive side, she was not, unlike many of her peers, restricted solely to playing chorus girls. She was a nurse in The Falcon’s Brother, and featured prominently in Cat People (both 1942), as the receptionist who hears the scream in the swimming pool.
Having said that, Halsey appeared in six Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals, and was a chorus girl in all of them. They were Flying High, Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow (technically a Maxim’s girl), Broadway Melody of 1936 and The Great Ziegfeld. The outlier was her last musical for the studio, Rosalie.
Halsey worked for the Red Cross during the Second World War.
James Kendall Brock (1901-63) was a sound recording engineer who spent most of his career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and worked on sixteen musicals during that time.
Brock began, under the supervision of Douglas Shearer, on A Lady’s Morals. Here, as for most pictures, he was uncredited.
Barnes was the sound mixer on The Merry Widow and A Night at the Opera, then sound engineer on The Great Ziegfeld, Maytime, The Girl of the Golden West, Du Barry Was a Lady, On an Island With You, Easter Parade, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Band Wagon, Easy to Love, The Student Prince, Interrupted Melody, Merry Andrew and Gigi.
