Leonard George Hayton (1908-71) was an important figure in the music department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the Golden Age of the studio’s production of musicals.
Hayton started out as a pianist and arranger with Paul Whiteman in the late 1920s, which led to a friendship with Bing Crosby when he was one of the Rhythm Boys. It was Crosby who had arranged for Hayton to conduct the orchestra when he made Going Hollywood at MGM in 1933. He then returned to working with Crosby on radio and recording for several years.
In 1940, MGM signed Hayton as a musical director, and he remained with the studio until 1953. He composed for or acted as MD on a range of non-musical pictures, including H M Pulham Esq (1941), Maisie Gets Her Man (1942) and Battleground (1950). But it was in musicals that he made his greatest mark.
Hayton’s MGM musicals were: Born to Sing, This Time for Keeps (composer), Best Foot Forward, Meet the People, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Living in a Big Way, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, On the Town (winning an Oscar), Singin’ in the Rain and Easy to Love. After leaving MGM, Hayton returned to arrange and conduct numbers for his wife, Lena Horne, in Meet Me in Las Vegas.
Lennie Hayton won another Oscar towards the end of his life, for Hello, Dolly (1968).
No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.
Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.
He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.
At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films.
Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.
Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie,Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.
In a career lasting over a quarter of a century, character actor Herbert Green Moorhouse (1894-1954) made around 380 screen appearances. Some of these were in featured supporting roles, but later on he was predominantly an uncredited extra.
Moorhouse made his debut, without credit, in The Cameraman (1928), the last really good film made by Buster Keaton before MGM crushed his spirit. In the same year, Moorhouse was a featured player in two Poverty Row pictures.
Over the years, Moorhouse played a reporter in Mrs Deeds Goes to Town (1936); a nightclub patron in The Awful Truth (1937); Mary Astor’s dance partner in Midnight (1939); one of Hynkel’s officers in The Great Dictator (1940); another reporter in Sullivan’s Travels (1941); a party guest in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946); a pilot in A Foreign Affair (1948); the nitwit at Paramount who makes Nora Desmond think she is wanted for a fil in Sunset Boulevard (1950); and a newspaper editor in Ace in the Hole (1951).
Moorhouse acted in fifteen Metro musicals in seventeen years, always uncredited, and starting with Stage Mother. He then played spectators at racetracks in Reckless, A Day at the Races and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. After that came Broadway Serenade, Broadway Melody of 1940, Two Girls on Broadway, Ziegfeld Girl, Thrill of a Romance, Easy to Wed, Till the Clouds Roll By, Living in a Big Way, Words and Music, Nancy Goes to Rio and Duchess of Idaho.
Moorhouse became very ill in 1954 and took his own life.
British-born Margaret Bert (1896-1971) was not an especially prolific Hollywood character actor; fewer than 200 appearances in 35 years is nothing special. But she was a stalwart of the MGM musical, showing up without credit in thirty-one of them.
It is unclear when Bert emigrated to the United States, but her earliest-known credit is The Blackbird, a Tod Browning crime story with Lon Chaney. She was always uncredited and almost always in small, background parts, though she did have more to do as the heroine’s mother in Sarge Goes to College (1947) and its sequel, Campus Sleuth (1948).
Bert was frequently cast as nurses, flitting around while others did the acting, and this was the case in her first three MGM musicals, Stage Mother, Reckless and San Francisco. These were followed by Bitter Sweet, Little Nellie Kellie, Rio Rita, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Unfinished Dance, Summer Holiday, Easter Parade, Luxury Liner, Words and Music, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Annie Get Your Gun, Summer Stock, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain, Skirts Ahoy, Because You’re Mine, Everything I Have is Yours, I Love Melvin, Give a Girl a Break, Easy to Love, Rose Marie, The Student Prince, Brigadoon, The Glass Slipper and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.
Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Siodmak, Mitchel Leisen, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian: Scottish actor Elspeth Dudgeon (1871-1955) worked with some of Hollywood’s best directors in her twenty-four-year fil career.
She was a particular favourite of James Whale, who used her in six of his films. Most memorably–and whimsically–he cast her as the centenarian Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932), keeping her real sex a secret even from the rest of the cast, and crediting her as John Dudgeon.
In Sh! The Octopus (1937), Dudgeon played the Nanny whose before-your-eyes transformation into a cackling ‘hag’ was a masterpiece of in-camera special effects.
Dudgeon spent the last twenty or so years of her life in California, but had previously had a long career on the British stage. Whale’s Waterloo Bridge (1931) was her first, uncredited, screen role.
She made four appearances in MGM musicals, all of them without credit: Stage Mother, The Night is Young, Bathing Beauty and Till the Clouds Roll By.
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:
James Henderson Finlayson (1887-1953) was acting on the stage in his native Scotland when he travelled with a play to the United States in 1911. His parents had recently died and he decided, along with one of his brothers, to stay there.
Finlayson obtained a part in a 1912 production of Bunty Pulls the Strings, and later worked in vaudeville with Alex Lauder, the lesser-known brother of Harry. He ended up touring with a play that took him to Los Angeles, and never left.
He made his first film appearance in 1917, and by 1919 was working at the Mack Sennett studio. He became a key member of Sennett’s troupe, working repeatedly with Ben Turpin. But in 1922, Finlayson signed with Hal Roach.
Roach tried to groom him as a lead player, but this did not work out. He is said to have considered partnering Finlayson with Laurel and Hardy as a comedy trio, but staff director Leo McCarey realized that the duo was a better bet. So Finlayson became an unofficial third member of the partnership, appearing in thirty-three films with Stan and Ollie, right the way through to Saps at Sea in 1940.
Finlayson always wore a fake walrus moustache and became famous for his overacting, master of the double take and the quizzical or exasperated face, accompanied by the extended cry of ‘D’oooh!’.
James Finlayson was in five Metro musicals, initially with Laurel and Hardy. He featured prominently in The Devil’s Brother, followed by The Bohemian Girl. Later on, when he had become a bit-part player, he appeared in Two Sisters from Boston, Till the Clouds Roll By and Royal Wedding.
Finlayson also worked with Hawks in The Dawn Patrol (1930), Hitchcock in Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Lubitsch in Angel (1937) and To Be or Not to Be (1942).
The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.
IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.
In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.
Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.
Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.
Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
James Francis McHugh (1894-1969), like many other contributors to the Great American Songbook, had worked as a song plugger before producing his own hits.
He worked in partnership with many lyricists, but perhaps most fruitfully with Dorothy Fields. Amongst the many standards they produced were ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ and ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’.
Fields and McHugh numbers were used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At. Songs written with other lyricists are featured in Two Girls and a Sailor, A Date With Judy (notably ‘It’s a Most Unusual Day’) and Looking for Love.
Born into a showbiz family, Dorothy Fields (1904-74) worked on the stage for a few years before finding her true vocation as a songwriter. She was one of the few women to find success on Tin Pan Alley, and undoubtedly the greatest of them. She wrote the songs for Roberta in 1933 and for Sweet Charity in 1966, and it is astonishing to consider that ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘The Rhythm of Life’ came from the pen of the same writer. Few songwriters had the same ability to adapt to changing musical styles.
Fields’s early work found little success, but she came into her own after partnering with composer Jimmy McHugh. Together, they wrote a string of popular hits, including ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’ and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’.
Fields and McHugh wrote the songs used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At, the studio’s updated version of Roberta, on which she worked with Jerome Kern.
Numbers by Fields working in collaboration with other composers also featured in Mr Imperium, Excuse My Dust and Texas Carnival.
Fields co-wrote the book for the stage show adapted into Annie Get Your Gun.
