Edward Alyn Warren (1974-1940) made his first film appearances while in his forties, which suggests some previous stage experience.
Warren was a character actor, never averse to donning a wig and beard. He was frequently cast in ‘ethnic’ roles; he played Wong Li in The Forbidden City (1918), the first of more than a dozen appearances in yellowface, where he was often credited as Fred Warren. He also portrayed Ulysses S Grant three times, starting with D W Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930).
Tod Browning used Warren in four of his pictures, including The Unholy Three (1925) and The Devil Doll (1936). Other pictures included A Free Soul (1931), The Cat’s Paw (1934), Annie Oakley (1935), You Only Live Once (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939).
Warren appeared in five Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, The Girl of the Golden West, Broadway Serenade and, his final film, 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.
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.
Francis Phillip Wuppermann (1890-1949) was the Wizard of Oz. It was his most famous role, the one that has gained him immortality. But it was not his only role: he made about a hundred films altogether, including thirteen other MGM musicals.
A graduate of Cornell University (he studied business administration), Morgan made his start in acting in the theatre, in a Broadway production of Mr Wu in 1914. His screen debut came two years later, a supporting role in a Vitagraph picture. He was a journeyman player in both media until the late 1920s, when he appeared on stage in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1927). Three years later he created the title role in the comedy Topaze.
In the cinema, a highlight was co-starring as Bunny in John Barrymore’s Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917). He was always based in New York, and apparently told his friend Ralph Bellamy he was selling out by going to Hollywood. Six months later, Morgan was there himself and, after returning East for two Broadway productions, became a fixture in the film capital. He was under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the rest of his life, though he was loaned out in 1933 for Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.
Morgan had a few leading roles, for example in The Affairs of Cellini (1934), which earned him an Oscar nomination. More often, he worked as a character actor, always bringing added value to whatever picture he was in. Particular highlight was Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), as the tragi-comic Mr Matuschek, and his role in Borzage’s anti-Nazi The Mortal Storm (1940).
Morgan was a very good actor, and did also star in a number of pictures, perhaps most notably James Whale’s The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933). In an entertaining minor MGM film from 1943, A Stranger in Town , he starred as a Supreme Court Justice trying to have a duck-hunting vacation in a small town.
The musicals in which Morgan appeared, beside The Wizard of Oz, were Broadway to Hollywood (playing the lead), The Cat and the Fiddle, Naughty Marietta, The Great Ziegfeld, Rosalie, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Hullabaloo (another lead), Thousands Cheer, Yolanda and the Thief and Summer Holiday. This means he worked with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Mickey Rooney and Kathryn Grayson: most of the musical performers whose stars glittered in the MGM firmament.
Frank Morgan, despite his usually cheery persona on and off screen, had a serious problem with alcohol, believed to have been triggered by the murder of the brother with whom he was closest. He was a functioning alcoholic, but the impact on his general health was almost certainly a contributing factor to his death from heart failure at the age of 59, just after he had started shooting Annie Get Your Gun.
British actor Claude Ewart King appeared on stage and in silent films in the UK, making his screen debut in 1912. After serving in the First World War, he emigrated to America, successfully continuing to work in both fields.
King’s most significant American credit was probably as Roger Balfour, whose murder and resurrection were the focus of Tod Browning’s lost film London After Midnight (1927).
King played Ramon Novarro’s disapproving father in In Gay Madrid, and followed this with uncredited appearances in Maytime and Broadway Serenade. His final MGM musical was the 1940 version of New Moon, where he played Monsieur Dubois.
Jay Eaton (1899-1970) had a featured role in his first picture, Her First Elopement (1920), directed by Sam Wood. He went on to act in upwards of 240 films, working for some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, but mostly making small, uncredited appearances.
Nine of these were in MGM musicals, starting with Children of Pleasure, followed by Stage Mother, Hollywood Party and A Night at the Opera (reunited him with Sam Wood). Eaton was in The Great Ziegfeld, Broadway Serenade, Ship Ahoy, Swing Fever and Easy to Wed.
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.
Hanns Kräly (1884-1950) was a German actor and screenwriter, notable for writing many of Ernst Lubitsch’s German films. Their partnership ended when Kraly had an affair with, and subsequently married, Lubitsch’s wife.
In Hollywood, he was nominated three times for Academy Awards for writing, winning in 1930 for The Patriot. His three MGM musicals were the European-set Devil-May-Care and A Lady’s Morals, for which he wrote screenplays, and Broadway Serenade, where he provided the original story.
Ernie Alexander (1890-1961) was typical of Hollywood’s hardworking bit players. Out of over 200 mostly uncredited performances, sixteen were in Metro musicals.
Beginning as a doughboy in Marianne, Alexander was a student in So This Is College, a servant in Hollywood Party, and a townsman in Babes in Toyland.
Alexander’s contribution to Here Comes the Band was lost in the edit, but he came back with an elevator operator in Rose-Marie and a racetrack usher in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
He was a revolutionary in The Great Waltz, a photographer in Broadway Serenade and an expectant father in Little Nellie Kelly. He played a pageboy in Lady Be Good and stagehands in Ship Ahoy and For Me and My Gal.
He delivered flowers in Du Barry Was a Lady and finally acquired a name as Charlie the bellboy in I Dood It.
Finally, Alexander was back in uniform as a commissionaire in Swing Fever.
Oliver Taylor Marsh (1892-1941) was an MGM company man for most of his career, and arguably achieved his greatest successes with some of the nineteen musicals he photographed, most of which were directed by Robert Z Leonard and W S Van Dyke.
Marsh’s earliest efforts were Marianne, In Gay Madrid and The Florodora Girl. He protographed the 1930 New Moon and also worked uncredited on the 1940 remake. He returned to the genre after the 1932 hiatus and shot Dancing Lady. The following year he worked with Lubitsch on The Merry Widow and moved immediately from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland.
Marsh photographed the Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld and the destruction of San Francisco in the film of the same name. Maytime was the first of his five MacDonald-Eddy operettas, and he also worked with MacDonald on The Firefly and with Eddy on Rosalie. The Girl of the Golden West was followed by an Academy Award, with Allen Davey, for their Technicolor work on Sweethearts.
Following the ridiculous Ice Follies of 1939, Marsh was with Jeanette MacDonald again for Broadway Serenade. He rounded off his career with Broadway Melody of 1940, Bitter Sweet (again Oscar-nominated for Technicolor) and Lady Be Good, made shortly before his untimely death.
