The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Two Girls on Broadway

  • Adrienne D’Ambricourt

    Adrienne Dumontier (1878-1957) had a successful career on the French stage prior to the First World War, working at the Comédie-Française. She emigrated to the United States after the war, and by 1922 was active on Broadway.

    D’Ambricourt made a few silent films at New York studios, but travelled to Hollywood, along with many others, in 1929, starting out with a featured role in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). She went on to play French character roles, often uncredited, in around seventy pictures. These included Design for Living (1933), Peter Ibbetson (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), The Song of Bernadette (1943) and To Have and Have Not (1944).

    During the early 1930s, D’Ambricourt also featured prominently in French-language versions of pictures, including MGM’s A Lady’s Morals, released in France with the more sensible title of Jenny Lind.

    D’Ambricourt acted in seven Metro musicals, across a 25-year period. She was credited as the concierge in The Cat and the Fiddle, then uncredited in The Merry Widow, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Two Girls on Broadway, Million Dollar Mermaid and Les Girls, her final film.

    Adrienne D’Ambricourt also terrified generations of French children as the voice of the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

  • George J Folsey

    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.

  • Bert Moorhouse

    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.

  • Edward Peil Sr

    Edward J Peil (1882/3-1958) studied drama at university, which ultimately led him to pursue a career in acting. His obituary stated that he was in a film, Charley’s Aunt, as early as 1906, , and that he starred in the first five-reel picture in 1910. What is certain is that he began to accumulate credits in 1913, following a period working in the theatre. 

    Peil worked for various studios in the 1910s, including playing a German officer in D W Griffith’s The Greatest Thing in Life (1918). He also performed in yellow face in Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), doing so again in John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924) and a number of other films of the 1920s. 

    Edward Peil acted in well over 420 pictures, though most of his appearances in the sound era were uncredited, apart from the many ‘B’ westerns he made for minor studios. 

    Seven of his uncredited appearances were in MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Girl of the Golden West, Two Girls on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Three Daring Daughters and Excuse My Dust.  

  • Tom McGuire

    Thomas McGuire (1873-1954) was a British stage actor who made his way to Hollywood and, in his forties, began a thirty year career comprising over 180 films.

    McGuire’s most enduring performances from the silent era was J J King, the heroine’s father, in Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr (1928).

    Strangely, given his background in the theatre, the quality of McGuire’s roles declined in the sound era, where he was generally uncredited. He was in four of Preston Sturge’s later films.

    Tom McGuire appeared in six MGM musical, starting with Flying High, then A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Two Girls on Broadway, Thousands Cheer and Two Girls and a Sailor.

  • Charles R Moore

    Hattie McDaniel famously said “I’d rather play a maid than be one”. The actor Charles Randolph Moore could have said much the same about being a railway porter. He played the role at least 38 times, in well over one-third of his total appearances. He also played more than his fair share of lift operators. 

    Moore worked for some of Hollywood’s top directors, including William A Wellman, Josef von Sternberg, Victor Fleming, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and William Wyler. He was a member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, and acted in six of his pictures. In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), he was the cook who was shaken to pieces in the speeding land yacht.

    In all three of Moore’s MGM musicals–The Prodigal, Reckless and Two Girls on Broadway–Moore played a porter.

  • William H O’Brien

    William H O’Brien (1891-1981) made his first film in Australia in 1918, and in a Hollywood career lasting over fifty years he appeared in around 650 films, almost always without credit. These included Scarface (1931), The Thin Man (1934), Rebecca (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Ace in the Hole (1951), High Noon (1952), Some Like It Hot (1959) and, finally, Bedknobs and Brooksticks (1971).

    With a filmography that long, it is little wonder O’Brien was in thirteen Metro musicals across a 36-year period, starting with Children of Pleasure in 1930 and ending with Made in Paris in 1966. In between came New Moon, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Nobody’s Baby, The Firefly, Two Girls on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Two Sisters from Boston, The Glass Slipper, It’s Always Fair Weather and Merry Andrew.

  • Eddie Phillips

    Eddie Phillips (1899-1965) acted in close to 200 films in his 40-year career. Between 1926 and 1929 he appeared over forty times as Don Trent in The Collegians, a series of shorts from Universal depicting the lives and loves of a group of students. His film career petered out in the early fifties, but he continued to have a successful career on Broadway.

    Phillips had a featured role in Chasing Rainbows, and subsequently made uncredited appearances in The Firefly and Two Girls on Broadway. 

  • Nacio Herb Brown

    Nacio Herb Brown (1896-1964) was hired by MGM in 1928 to write scores for sound pictures; it was at a point when synchronized music was still perceived by many as the most promising feature of the new system. 

    Brown was paired with lyricist Arthur Freed to produce songs for the studio’s first all-talking picture, The Broadway Melody. Their partnership continued for many years as the contributed numbers to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (in which he and Freed appeared onscreen), Marianne, Lord Byron of Broadway, Montana Moon, Dancing Lady, Going Hollywood, Student Tour, Broadway Melody of 1936, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Two Girls on Broadway, Hullabaloo, Little Nellie Kelly, Lady Be Good, Born to Sing, Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St Louis, Three Little Words, Pagan Love Song, Singin’ in the Rain and The Affairs of Dobie Gillies.

    Brown also worked with other lyricists on It’s a Great Life, Ziegfeld Girl, The Big Store, Swing Fever, Holiday in Mexico, On an Island With You, The Kissing Bandit and Seven Hills of Rome.

  • Edmund Goulding

    Edmund Goulding (1891-1959) is best remembered as athe director of films including Grand Hotel (1932) and Nightmare Alley (1947). But his biographer, Matthew Kelly, has drawn attention to Goulding’s wide-ranging contributions at MGM, which included not only writing and producing but also consultation on music, makeup and costume. His singular contribution to film musicals was to extemporize the plot of The Broadway Melody for Irving Thalberg and Lawrence Weingarten. According to the latter, Thalberg’s secretary took notes because they were aware of Goulding’s ability to “tell a story in the morning and forget everything about it by the afternoon”.

    Goulding subsequently made an uncredited contribution to the screenplays of Hollywood Party (on which he was also an uncredited co-director) and, understandably, Two Girls on Broadway, the remake of The Broadway Melody. He directed some scenes in A Night at the Opera without credit.

    Goulding was never a credited director on a Metro musical, though some sources erroneously claim Blondie of the Follies (1932) to be a musical. The film has a show business background and features one musical number in long shot, but it is actually a romantic comedy with an excellent performance by Marion Davies.

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