The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: They Learned About Women

  • Sammy Lee

    Sammy Lee (1890-1968), born Samuel Levy, was the first in a line of important choreographers at MGM, though he arguably achieved greater success on Broadway and at Twentieth Century-Fox.

    Lee is uncredited on The Broadway Melody, which he might have been quite happy about, given the rudimentary nature of the dance numbers. He had worked on Ziegfeld’s Follies in 1927, but this is not reflected in the style of the fictional Zanfield’s show. Lee and director Harry Beaumont could not, in this first-ever film musical, determine how to make a stage performance cinematic. Nor were the chorines of the quality Lee would have been used to on Broadway.

    Lee’s first onscreen credit was for ‘Dances and Ensemble’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he did his best with non-professional dancers Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. He also essayed a pre-Berkeley overhead shot of the chorus.

    Lee went on to stage dances for It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, They Learned About Women, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure, Good News, Love in the Rough (which includes an al fresco number performed at a real golf club), A Lady’s Morals, Broadway to Hollywood and Dancing Lady.

    A move to Twentieth Century-Fox earned Lee Academy Award nominations for King of Burlesque (1936) and Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). He was back at Metro for Honolulu, Hullabaloo, Cairo, Born to Sing, Meet the People and Two Girls and a Sailor.

    Lee had a parallel career as the director of a series of undistinguished shorts.

  • Benny Rubin

    Benny Rubin (1899-1986), like Cliff Edwards, was a recurring presence in Metro’s earliest musicals. A talented dialect comedian, he was limited in most of his musical appearances to a Jewish characterization; it has been suggested that his career was hampered by the idea that he looked “too Jewish”.

    Rubin’s first appearance was alongside Edwards in Marianne, and he followed this up as vaudeville booker Benny Friedman in It’s a Great Life. He is the Jewish half of a double act with Irish Tom Dugan in They Learned About Women, and an agent in Lord Byron of Broadway.

    Rubin plays a doctor from the Bronx who finds himself amongst the cowboys in Montana Moon, while he is back in New York’s show biz as a pianist in Children of Pleasure. In Love in the Rough he is a fish-out-of-water Russian immigrant masquerading as Robert Montgomery’s valet. 

    The 1932 moratorium followed and Rubin was absent from MGM’s musicals until 1953’s Torch Song. He then had, mostly uncredited, roles in Easy to Love, Meet Me in Las Vegas, Ten Thousand Bedrooms and Looking for Love. 

    Benny Rubin’s final appearance was as another Jewish agent in Orson Welles’s film maudit The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the 70s, released 2018).

  • Cliff Edwards

    The man who contributed greatly to the 20s’ ukelele craze. The performer who introduced ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to the world. The voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940). Just three of the reasons why Clifton Avon Edwards (1895-1971), or ‘Ukelele Ike,’ ought not to be quite as forgotten as he is.

    Edwards was a successful vaudeville and café performer, allegedly dubbed ‘Ukelele Ike’ by a waiter who could never remember his name. He became a ubiquitous figure in the early Metro musicals, appearing in over a third of the studio’s productions in 1929-31.

    Edwards’s rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, though lacking Gene Kelly’s familiar phrasing, was good enough to earn the song a reprise in the hastily-devised finale, in which also appeared.

    His first acting role was as Soapy, one of the doughboys in Marianne. He then added musical support in So This is College and performed a speciality number in They Learned About Women. Lord Byron of Broadway saw him in the, not really challenging, role of a vaudeville singer, after which he was way out west as one of the hero’s buddies in Montana Moon. 

    Edwards made an uncredited appearance as himself in Children of Pleasure and has a featured role as the Coach’s assistant, Pooch Kearney, in the 1930 version of Good News. He was then one of Lawrence Tibbett’s hobo pals in The Prodigal.

    The film musical hiatus of 1932 soon followed, and Edwards only appeared in one further musical for Metro, as Minstrel Joe in The Girl of the Golden West. 

    At his height, in the late 1920s, Cliff Edwards was earning $4000 a week. By the time of his death, he was an indigent charity patient in a Hollywood hospital; his body was unclaimed for several days because no one knew who he was. 

  • Irving Thalberg

    The Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg (1899-1937) was the creative engine room of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the studio’s creation in 1925 until his early death. In twelve years he supervised over 400 pictures, including virtually all of its prestige productions, without ever choosing to take an on-screen credit. 

    Thalberg had some level of involvement with most of MGM’s musical output from The Broadway Melody in 1929 until A Day at the Races, on which he was working at the time of his death; it was he who brought the Marx Brothers to Metro, reviving their flagging careers at the cost of comedic purity.

    Thalberg effectively launched the musical genre as the driving force behind The Broadway Melody. He showed his inclination for experimentation-within-limits by okaying Hallelujah even though King Vidor warned him it would make no money.

    Thalberg brought Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbet from the Metropolitan Opera and gifted stardom to Jeanette MacDonald. He persuaded Luise Rainer to take the small role in The Great Ziegfeld that won her an Oscar.

    Although business-oriented, Thalberg was prepared to devote time and money to producing high-quality work, and he made profits as a result. His impact on the early development of the MGM musical is impossible to quantify, but a philosophy of excellence can certainly be seen in the work that followed, especially in the golden age of the early 1950s.

  • Nina Mae McKinney

    Nina Mae McKinney (1913-67) was one of the many Black performers–talented and beautiful–whose careers were stifled by Hollywood racism. 

    After relocating from South Carolina to New York, McKinney was only 15 when she was cast in the all-Black Broadway musical revue Blackbirds of 1928. Her performance was noted by King Vidor, who subsequently cast her as the female lead in Hallelujah. She replaced his original choice, who was rejected by Irving Thalberg as lacking sex appeal. 

    McKinney received glowing reviews for her performance as Chick and it secured her a five-year contract with MGM, but no further roles of substance. She made an uncredited appearance as a singer in They Learned About Women, and eventually walked out on MGM. Richard Watts of The New York Herald Tribune wrote at the time that her “exile from the cinema is the result entirely of narrow and intolerant racial matters.”

    She made only a few films thereafter, perhaps most notably as Paul Robeson’s queen in Sanders of the River (1935) and as Rozelia in Pinky (1949).

  • Sarah Y Mason

    Sarah Y Mason (1896-1980) is one of the forgotten women of early Hollywood, having made a significant contribution, and leaving little information behind. I am grateful to the Women Film Pioneers Project for summarizing what information there is. 

    Dr Roseanne Welch has credited Mason with being the person to name and develop the role of ‘continuity girl’ (now script supervisor): the person on set with responsibility for ensuring continuity from shot to shot and scene to scene. This was in 1918, when she began working for Douglas Fairbanks. 

    Mason later moved into script-writing, often in partnership with her husband, Victor Heerman. It was she who fleshed out Edmund Goulding’s story for The Broadway Melody into a continuity script, with dialogue added later by James Gleason and Norman Houston.

    Mason went on to script They Learned About Women and to adapt Love in the Rough from its stage original. She also worked uncredited on Meet Me in St Louis. She and Heerman won the Best Adaptation Oscar for Little Women (1933). 

  • Bessie Love

    Bessie Love (1898-1986) was given her start in films by D W Griffith in 1915 and enjoyed a successful dramatic career in silent cinema. By the late twenties her film career was in decline and she spent time touring on the musical stage. This led to a part in Warners’ musical short The Swell Head (1928), which in turn secured her a contract with Metro. 

    Her role as Hank in The Broadway Melody won her a nomination for Best Actress and is the film’s standout performance. As well as appearing in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Love went on to star in three more Metro musicals: Chasing Rainbows (which reteamed her with Broadway Melody’s Charles King); They Learned About Women; and the 1930 version of Good News.

    The 1931-32 moratorium on musicals brought this stage of Love’s career to a halt and she went into semi-retirement before relocating to the UK in 1935, where she lived out a long life as a notable supporting player in television and films.

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