The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Billy Rose’s Jumbo

  • Jimmy Durante

    James Francis Durante (1893-1980) had what in Britain might be called a Marmite personality: some people loved him, others hated him. For some, a little went a long way. (Personally, I’m a fan.) But what is undeniable is that Jimmy Durante had the longest career of any performer starring in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals. It began in 1931, ended in 1962, and included eleven pictures across all four decades.

    Durante started out in show business playing ragtime piano, and developed humour out of the musical performance. This led to vaudeville, and then radio, with time spent as part of a three-man comedy act. 

    He made his film debut in 1930, at Paramount’s New York studios. By the following year he was in Hollywood, working for Metro. Jimmy Durante, throughout his career, moved seamlessly between films, Broadway, radio, records and, later on, television. In 1934, for example, he made films in New York because he was appearing on Broadway in Jumbo, which he would film twenty-eight years later.

    Durante was sometimes the leading man in films; for instance, Palooka (1934), where he got top billing over Lupe Velez. More often, however, he was third or fourth billed, providing comic support.

    Durante’s first MGM musical, this time billed below Lupe Velez, was The Cuban Love Song. This was followed by Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party (playing versions of himself), then Student Tour, Two Girls and a Sailor, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, It Happened in Brooklyn, This Time for Keeps, On an Island with You and, finally, Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    Durante’s last big screen appearance was in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), but he continued to work on television. 

  • Busby Berkeley

    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.

  • Billy Rose

    William Samuel Rosenberg (1899-1966) became familiar to audiences in 1975 when he was played by James Caan in Funny Lady, a film about Fanny Brice, to whom Rose was married for nine years. In the mid-20th century, however, he was one of the biggest impresarios on Broadway.

    Rose started out as a stenographer, playing an important role during the First World War as a senior clerk at the War Industries Board. After the war, he started writing song lyrics, and eventually became the co-writer of many standards, including ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’, ‘Don’t Bring Lulu’ and ‘Me and My Shadow’. It should be noted, however, that Rose was an enormously successful self-publicist, and doubt has been cast on the extent of his contribution in song-writing partnerships.

    Inevitably, given his ego, Rose moved into Broadway producing. One of his biggest hits was Jumbo (1936), which was filmed by MGM in 1962. Rose played no part in the production of the film, but a contractual requirement meant that it was titled Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    As an impresario, Rose was known for glitz and vulgarity, but also for giving an early opportunity as choreographer to Gene Kelly, and for staging Carmen Jones in 1943 with an all-Black cast.

    Numbers co-written by Billy Rose were used in The Prodigal and Hit the Deck. 

  • Harry Wilson

    The figures of 350+ film and TV appearances by Harry Wilson (1897-1978) is made more impressive by the fact that Wilson worked almost entirely in the sound era, when the turnover of pictures was not so great as in the silent days.

    British-born Wilson dubbed himself ‘the ugliest man in movies’ (though there was competition), and he was many studios’ go-to actor for convicts and criminal henchmen. He features with Mike Mazurki in Some Like it Hot (1959) as one of George Raft’s goons.

    Wilson appeared uncredited in no fewer than fifteen MGM musicals, across more than thirty years and four decades. In the 1930s he made A Lady’s Morals, The Bohemian Girl, A Day at the Races, Let Freedom Ring and The Wizard of Oz (as a Winkie Guard). In the 40s, Wilson was in Go West, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Luxury Liner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

    His 1950s appearances were in Million Dollar Mermaid, It’s Always Fair Weather, Guys and Dolls and Merry Andrew. And finally, in 1963, Wilson played a roustabout in Billy Rose’s Jumbo. 

    As if Wilson was not busy enough making his own films, he worked for fifteen years as Wallace Beery’s stand-in.

  • Carl ‘Major’ Roup

    Carl Roup (1915-2002) had a long career with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, briefly as a child actor, and then in various production capacities.

    Roup was discovered and cast in his first film, The Red Mill (1925), by Marion Davies, who saw him selling newspapers on the studio lot. She paid for his education at a military school, leading Lon Chaney to nickname him ‘Major’. 

    Roup made a number of other appearances in silent pictures, and played a young baseball fan in They Learned About Women. 

    Roupe later became a script clerk, including on A Day at the Races and At the Circus. In 1946, he started working as a second assistant director on Till the Clouds Roll By, and also carried out that role on On an Island With You, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Pagan Love Song, Show Boat, Lili, Dangerous When Wet, Rose Marie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jupiter’s Darling, Silk Stockings and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    The Los Angeles Times obituary described Roup as “as much a part of MGM as Leo the Lion”.

  • William Daniels

    William H Daniels (1901-70) was one of the most eminent cinematographers working during Hollywood’s Golden Age. The American Cinematographer website refers to his “inconspicuously perfect execution”. Daniels’s career lasted fifty years, from silent cinema to the self-conscious kookiness of Move (1970).

    Daniels started out as a camera operator at Universal, but followed Erich Von Stroheim to MGM, where he shot Foolish Wives (1922), Greed and The Merry Widow (both 1925). He then, famously, became Greta Garbo’s cinematographer of choice, shooting sixteen of her pictures. 

    Daniels worked with many major directors, including Clarence Brown, Frank Borzage, Raoul Walsh, George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Ida Lupino and Jules Dassin  In 1950 he won an Oscar for Dassin’s The Naked City.

    Daniels was photographing musicals for MGM for over thirty years, starting with Montana Moon in 1930 and ending with Billy Rose’s Jumbo in 1962.  In between came Broadway to Hollywood, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Broadway Melody of 1938, New Moon, For Me and My Gal and Girl Crazy.

  • Grady Sutton

    Grady Harwell Sutton (1906-95) was a hard-working supporting player for 60 years, often in codified gay roles. He is probably best-known today for his four films with W C Fields.

    Sutton’s first uncredited appearance in a Metro musical was as a football spectator in So This Is College. He then waited sixteen years for his most substantial part, as Kathryn Grayson’s would-be suitor in Anchors Aweigh.

    This was followed by uncredited appearances in Ziegfeld Follies, Two Sisters from Boston, Holiday in Mexico, No Leave, No Love and, after another sixteen years, Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

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