The lyrics of Lorenz Milton Hart (1895-1943) were sophisticated, erudite, witty, conversational and amongst the finest contributions to the Great American Songbook. He stands with Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin as one of the foremost lyricists of the mid-twentieth century.
In 1919, Hart met Richard Rodgers, and they formed a partnership that produced 26 of the most inventive Broadway shows of the late-1920s and 1930s These included A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Babes in Arms (1937), (The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and Pal Joey (1940).
Hart and Rodgers worked in Hollywood for a period in the early 30s, with notable work for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933).
Hart’s erratic behaviour eventually led to a rift with Rodgers, culminating in the latter working with Oscar Hammerstein II on Oklahoma! (1943). Hart died not long after the show’s premier.
Lorenz Hart’s lyrics can be heard in eleven MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady in 1933. The others were Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Words and Music (a less-than-accurate dramatization of the Rodgers and Hart partnership), Torch Song, Love me or Leave Me and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
There were better composers of popular music in the mid-twentieth century than Richard Charles Rodgers (1902-77), but none was as popular, prolific and influential. He was the first person to be awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Pulitzer.
Rodgers’s career hinges on two partnerships with great, but very different, lyricists: Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. He met Hart while still a teenager, and they started out writing amateur shows, until contributing to their first Broadway show, Poor Little Ritz Girl in 1920. Rodgers had to work at other jobs to make a living, and was considering giving up music until the songs he and Hart wrote for a benefit show in 1925 received high praise from the critics. There was particular admiration for ‘Manhattan’, now an American standard.
Rodgers and Hart wrote Broadway shows throughout the late 1920s before moving to Hollywood, where they scored a particular success with songs for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932). Another string of Broadway shows ran from 1935 till Hart’s death in 1943.
Rodgers had, by that time, already begun working with Hammerstein, with Oklahoma! (1943) establishing a new style of integrated musical. They went on to write some of the most successful shows on Broadway and throughout the world of musical theatre.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer never filmed any of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, so it is Rodgers’s collaborations with Hart that feature in ten of the studio’s musicals: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Meet the People, Words and Music (a highly-fictionalized Rodgers and Hart biopic), Torch Song, Love Me Or Leave Me, This Could be the Night and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
Although none of their songs were used by MGM, the influence of Rodgers and Hammerstein can clearly be seen in the greater integration of music and plot from the late 40s onwards.
Burton Levy (1912-97) began writing songs while still a teenager, dropping out of school to do so. By the time he was 18, he had composed music for songs performed in Broadway shows, working regularly with Harold Adamson.
Working for Irving Berlin Inc, Lane was sent to Hollywood with Adamson in 1934, and subsequently took up residence there. The pair worked together until 1936, writing songs for a number of studios. Lane then partnered with Ralph Freed (Arthur’s younger brother) at Paramount, followed by Frank Loesser. His final screen partnership was with Alan Jay Lerner in the 1950s.
Lane composed the music for a number of Broadway musicals, the most successful being Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965).
Notable songs composed by Lane include ‘How About You?’, ‘Old Devil Moon’, ‘I Hear Music’ and ‘ How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?’
Lane songs were used in seventeen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Thousands Cheer, Meet the People, This Time for Keeps, Royal Wedding, Everything I Have is Yours, Torch Song, Give a Girl a Break and Jupiter’s Darling.
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:
Sidney Arnold Franklin (1893-1972) was a director and occasional producer for over forty years, co-directing in the early years with his brother Chester. His experience working with Mary Pickford and the Talmadge sisters led Irving Thalberg to invite him to MGM in 1928 to direct Norma Shearer.
Franklin’s career at Metro was not spectacular (David Thomson described him as colourless), though he did direct some prestigious projects, including The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934 and 1957) and The Good Earth (1937), and he produced Mrs Miniver (1942).
Franklin made two attempts at directing musicals, Devil-May-Care and A Lady’s Morals, and many years later he produced Torch Song.
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.
Not every child actor goes on to a career of well over sixty years as a successful character actor and band leader, but Richard Winslow Johnson (1915-91) managed it. Along the way he made appearances in five MGM musicals and may be the only actor to have worked with both Marion Davies and Roy Orbison.
The films were Marianne (playing the accordion),Thousands Cheer,On an Island With You,Torch Song and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
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).
