The confusion surrounding the birth year of Armand David Kalisz (1887?-1941)–1882 and 1883 are often cited– was in all likelihood created by Kaliz himself. Press reports of his death stated he was only 49, suggesting he maintained secrecy and subterfuge around his age. The most likely year seems to be 1887, which would have made him 53.
Armand Kaliz was Polish, but emigrated to the United States in 1907. He became a vaudeville performer and, from 1910, worked with his wife, the singer Amelia Stone, in both dramatic and comic sketches. They both also had Broadway experience.
Kaliz appeared in at least eighty feature films from 1918 onwards, generally in credited roles, though this tailed off later in his career. Pictures of note included: The Temptress (1926), Greta Garbo’s second American film; Michael Curtiz’s epic Noah’s Ark (1928); Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929); Little Caesar (1932); Flying Down to Rio (1933); A Star is Born (1937); Ninotchka (1939); and Down Argentine Way (1940).
Kaliz played the King in the show-within-a-show in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle, and followed this with uncredited appearances in Ice Follies of 1939, Bitter Sweet and Ziegfeld Girl.
German Hermann Bing (1889-1947) is a Pagliacci-like figure, literally starting out as a circus clown, adding comic eccentricity to dozens of films, and driven by depression to take his own life.
Bing left home at 16 to join the circus, and later worked as a comedian in varietétheaters. He entered the German film industry in the early 1920s, apparently working on the production side, though he may also have acted. By the late thirties he was working with F W Murnau, and travelled with him to the United States to work as assistant director on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). He can also be seen onscreen in a brief appearance as a tram conductor. He went on to assist on Murnau’s 4 Devils (1928).
Bing stayed on in Hollywood and developed a career as a supporting player, playing German characters with exaggerated accents and a general air of frustrated dignity. In the early 1930s, he also appeared in German-language versions of pictures such as Garbo’s Anna Christie (1930) and Menschen hinter Gittern (1931), a version of The Big House (1930) directed by Paul Fejos.
Herman Bing was often uncredited, but always memorable, and his more than 100 feature films included Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Ford’s Flesh (1932), Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Barbary Coast (1935) and Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). He was also the voice of the Ringmaster in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
His career was hit hard by the war and, by the mid-1940s, Bing was struggling to find work, which contributed to his tragic end.
Herman Bing appeared in eleven MGM musicals, including six with Jeanette MacDonald: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, Maytime, Sweethearts and Bitter Sweet. The others were The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, The Great Waltz and Broadway Melody of 1940.
Jeanette Anna MacDonald (1903-65) was unquestionably MGM’s most popular musical star of the 1930s. She made sixteen pictures in fourteen years, eight of them opposite Nelson Eddy. Her films were mainly operettas, with a few notable exceptions. Unlike Eddy, she was a capable actor, with a particular skill at comedy.
MacDonald had made her professional stage debut in 1920. Working steadily, she obtained her first starring role on Broadway in 1927. She was spotted by Ernst Lubitsch, who took her to Hollywood to star in his first sound picture, The Love Parade (1929). (She was first, presumably to give her some on-set experience, uncredited in Say It with Songs [1929]).
She made seven films released in 1930, some good (Monte Carlo [1930], again with Lubitsch), some bad (the execrable The Lottery Bride [(1930]).
MacDonald had a quieter year in 1932 (like every other musical performer in Hollywood), but made two outstanding pictures, Lubitsch’s One Hour With You (1932) and Love Me Tonight (1932), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. She then signed her contract with MGM.
The sixteen Metro musicals were: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow (her final film with Lubitsch), Naughty Marietta (teaming for the first time with Eddy), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (very much a change of pace), Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Smilin’ Through, I Married an Angel, Cairo and Three Daring Daughters.
In the last of these, she played a divorcée with children, and her career as a film star was effectively over. She sings a few songs in The Sun Comes Up (1949), but this is a Lassie film, not a musical.
MacDonald was also by now suffering from the heart condition that ended her life so early. She spent her final decade and a half performing in concerts, stage musicals, opera and on the radio.
Gustav Gerson Kahn (1886-1941) was one of Tin Pan Alley’s most prolific and successful writers of popular songs.
Khan started out writing for vaudeville performers in the 1910s before forming the first of many partnerships with composers. In 1924, he wrote his first standard, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’.
Contributing to many Broadway scores throughout the 1920s, he also moved into writing for films, and by 1933 was effectively working full time for Hollywood. Khan’s lyrics featured in Flying Down to Rio (1933), Kid Millions (1934) and Captains Courageous (1937).
Khan worked most frequently with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contributing to Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West and Bitter Sweet.
Khan’s contributions to the Great American Songbook include ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’, ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.
Gus Kahn was played by Danny Thomas in a Warner Bros musical biopic, I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951).
Greta Meyer (1883-1965) came from a German theatrical family and first appeared on stage, in one of her father’s productions, at the age of three. Later, she acted throughout Europe in plays and operettas. She also acted in a short film in 1917, and a couple of German features in the late 1920s.
Meyer travelled to America as part of an operetta company, and stayed on after it had completed its run, becoming a US citizen in 1923. She performed widely in Yiddish theatre.
Tonight or Never was Meyer’s first American film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1931, and in which she recreated a role she had played on Broadway a year earlier.
Later, she appeared in John Ford’s Flesh (1932) as Jean Hersholt’s wife, and, uncredited, in Ford’s Pilgrimage (1933). She was the disturbed Madeline’s nurse in John M Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939) and uncredited as a masseuse in the all-female The Women (1939).
Meyer acted in four MGM musicals, first of all uncredited as one of the stage mothers in the audition scene of Stage Mother. After that, she played the type of Mitteleuropean matron that was her speciality in Naughty Marietta (as Frau Schuman, with who Jeanette MacDonald shares her dreams), The Great Waltz and Bitter Sweet (as the cafe owner who sells a niece bottle of Tokay).
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.
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:
Nelson Ackerman Eddy (1901-67) was one of MGM’s first great musical stars. An operatic baritone, he appeared in fifteen musicals, playing the lead in all but the first three. In eight of them, he was partnered with Jeanette MacDonald.
From a poor background, Eddy was a boy soprano who went on to have various jobs while indulging his love of music. He engaged in amateur productions, was noticed by the press and, by the age of 23, was working for the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company, and also sang with the Savoy Company.
Eddy spent some time in Europe, acquiring voice training, then returned to the USA and concentrated on concert performances. He was appearing in Los Angeles when Hollywood knocked on his door. He signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the studio did not initially know what to do with him. He made his debut in Handlebars (1933), a musical short, and sang without credit in Broadway to Hollywood. In the same year he appeared as himself in Dancing Lady and Student Tour.
Then MGM struck gold.Just before his option with Metro ran out, he was teamed with MacDonald in Naughty Marietta. The picture made a sizeable profit and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. This led to their re-teaming in Rose-Marie, Maytime, Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon, Bitter Sweet and I Married an Angel.
In addition, Eddy starred in Rosalie, Let Freedom Ring, Balalaika and The Chocolate Soldier. He only appeared in a handful of films after leaving MGM, most notably The Phantom of the Opera (1943) at Universal. His last film was Northwest Frontier (1947), made at Republic and partnering him again with his Balalaika co-star, Ilona Massey. He continued to give live performances for the rest of his life, dying after a stroke experienced while on stage.
Not even his best friends would pretend that Nelson Eddy could act; he was stiff, with a very limited range of line readings. But there is always something engaging about his performances, which always seem good-humoured and lacking in self-importance. This is especially the case in his films with Jeanette MacDonald, which constituted the Golden Age of MGM’s operetta cycle.
The reputation of Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II (1889-1943) as ‘One-Shot Woody’ was what enabled him to direct over ninety films in twenty-five years, half of them during the sound era.
Van Dyke’s mother was an actor, leading to his own early appearances on the stage as a child. Constantly on tour, he claimed to have attended schools in every state.
He undertook many jobs during his early years as an adult, before obtaining his first job in the film industry in 1915. He began pretty much at the top, as one of a number of assistant directors under D W Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915). Two years later, after having written a number of films, he directed his first feature, The Land of Long Shadows (1917), based on his own screenplay.
Van Dyke’s work in silent films was prolific, but undistinguished. It was as a director of sound pictures that he came into his own. He travelled to Tahiti in 1928 to make White Shadows in the South Seas, MGM’s first feature with recorded sound (music and sound effects). Two years later he shot Trader Horn (1931) mostly in Africa, with some dialogue scenes reshot in Hollywood.
Van Dyke went on to become a mainstay of MGM’s production schedule, reputedly Louis B Mayer’s favourite (because most efficient) director. He directed the first Johnny Weissmuller film as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), The Thin Man (1934) and three of its sequels, and Marie Antoinette (1938).
He made nine musicals for MGM and, after The Cuban Love Song, all of them starred either Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, or both of them together: Naughty Marietta,(which he also produced), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (also produced by Van Dyke), Rosalie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, I Married and Angel and Cairo.
Van Dyke was also used regularly to direct reshoots or new scenes for other directors’ pictures, and he did this for Broadway Melody of 1936 and the 1940 New Moon, again with MacDonald and Eddy.
Woody Van Dyke was a Christian Scientist and, when he learned in 1943 that he was terminally ill, refused medical treatment and took his own life.
The Hollywood career of John W Morris (1889-1970) ran parallel to the development of Hollywood itself. He made his debut in Cecil B DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914), generally considered to be the first feature film to be made in Los Angeles, shot in a converted barn on the corner of Selma and Vine.
Driscoll acted in around 200 films, and was in scores of westerns, including Stagecoach (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939), The Return of Frank James (1940), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Canyon Passage (1946), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wichita (1955). He worked under many of the great directors of classical Hollywood: Ford and Hawks (in the same year), Lang, Wellman, Daves, Mann, Tourneur and Fuller. He also made a number of other pictures with DeMille, including the 1931 remake of The Squaw Man..
Tex Driscoll was in five MGM musicals: New Moon, Naughty Marietta, The Girl of the Golden West, Swiss Miss and Bitter Sweet.
