Robert Joseph Anthony Golden (1897-1942) started out as an assistant director on Harold Lloyd pictures, including Dr Jack (1922) and Safety Last! (1923). He is also known to have worked as Lloyd’s double.
Golden’s subsequent work as AD, often uncredited, included seven MGM musicals, beginning with Hallelujah in 1929. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz and Ziegfeld Girl.
Golden directed one picture, a Polly Moran comedy called Honeymoon, in 1928.
Roscoe Blevel Ates (1895-1962) was working in vaudeville as a comedian when he made his screen debut in 1929’s South Sea Rose.
The following year, after an uncredited appearance in Marianne and a small part in Love in the Rough, Ates had a strong supporting role in King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930). He appeared in many further westerns, including a run as a character named Soapy Jones for PRC.
Ates had a speech impediment as a child, which he revived to good effect in a number of pictures playing stuttering characters.
Roscoe Ates’s other Metro musicals were Ziegfeld Girl and Meet Me in Las Vegas.
Blanche Irene Sewell (1898-1949) died far too young, but had become one of the most talented of all Hollywood editors and a seminal influence on the MGM musical style . After training under pioneer Viola Lawrence, Sewell became a full-fledged editor at MGM in 1925 and spent the rest of her career there.
She was the sister-in-law of Walt Disney, and it is generally accepted that she tutored him on the principles of editing and was very influential, in particular, on the form of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Sewell cut some of Metro’s most memorable pictures of the 1930s, including Grand Hotel, Red Dust and Queen Christina. In the 1940s, she edited twenty films, fourteen of which were musicals.
Sewell’s involvement with musicals began in 1930 with Children of Pleasure, after which she cut Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie and Listen Darling.
In 1939, Sewell was chosen to edit The Wizard of Oz, and it was claimed that this was in the hope she could bring to it some of the magic that Disney had produced in Snow White.
After this cameBroadway Melody of 1940, Go West, Ziegfeld Girl, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Du Barry Was a Lady, Best Foot Forward, Bathing Beauty, Easy to Wed, It Happened in Brooklyn, Fiesta andThe Pirate. Sewell’s last work, shortly before her death, was on Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Lawrence Wells Steers (1888-1951) appeared in around 550 films during his thirty-year career, sometimes credited, more often not.
Twenty-seven of those uncredited roles were in Metro musicals, starting in 1930 with Lord Byron of Broadway. Steers was subsequently in Stage Mother, Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Nobody’s Baby, The Great Waltz, At the Circus, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, Two Girls and a Sailor, Meet the People, Ziegfeld Follies (giving the hattrick of MGM Ziegfeld titles), Yolanda and the Thief, Holiday in Mexico, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, A Date with Judy, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Duchess of Idaho, The Toast of New Orleans and The Great Caruso.
Herbert Pope Stothart (1885-1949) is a composer whose name is less familiar today than, say, Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner, but in Hollywood’s golden age he was ranked alongside them for his work at MGM.
Stothart had a successful career writing stage musicals, most notably Rose-Marie, but was invited to join Metro in 1929. He signed a contract and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Scores by Stothart were prominent in some of the studio’s most important pictures of the 1930s and 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille (1936), The Good Earth (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Mrs Miniver (1942), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Yearling (1946). In all, Stothart wrote over 100 scores.
Stothart worked on many of MGM’s musicals. He and Clifford Grey wrote the songs for Devil-May-Care and contributed numbers to Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, In Gay Madrid, The Florodora Girl, Call of the Flesh, New Moon and Madam Satan.
He worked with other lyricists on A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Here Comes the Band, Maytime, The Firefly (composing ‘The Donkey Serenade’), Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, The Chocolate Soldier and I Married an Angel.
Stothart was the musical director on some of these films and also on The Cat and the Fiddle, Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, The Wizard of Oz (picking up an Oscar), New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Girl, Cairo, Thousands Cheer, Kismet, The Unfinished Dance. Musical direction usually involved writing incidental music.
And, of course, Metro produced two versions of Stothart’s greatest stage success, Rose-Marie, and he worked on the first version.
Beatrice Hagen (1917-99) claimed a minor place in film history by providing the voice of Snow White in the French version of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As well as being a Disney voice actor (she played Mickey’s nephews), she was a ubiquitous chorus girl in musicals from a number of studios.
For MGM, Hagen made uncredited appearances in The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Maytime, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, Ziegfeld Girl, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, The Harvey Girls and Texas Carnival.
The costumes he designed for The Wizard of Oz, which included the iconic ruby slippers, were unquestionably the high point of the career of Adrian Adolph Greenburg (1903-59), known simply as Adrian. But his designs were included in hundreds of MGM features, mostly between 1928 and 1941, including 34 other musicals. These included eleven Jeanette MacDonald pictures: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon and Bitter Sweet.
Adrian was very active during 1929-31, designing for Marianne, Devil-May-Care,The Rogue Song, Montana Moon, In Gay Madrid, Madam Satan, New Moon andThe Cuban Love Song.
Dancing Lady reunited Adrian with Joan Crawford a year after the white mousseline de soie dress he created for her in Letty Linton (1932) was copied commercially and sold over 500,000 units.
Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Great Waltz and Honolulu led up to the triumph ofThe Wizard of Oz. Adrian then worked on Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl andThe Chocolate Soldier before leaving MGM in 1941 to open his own fashion business.
He continued to freelance for a variety of studios and returned to Metro for a final musical, the aptly-named Lovely to Look At.
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.
