The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Chasing Rainbows

  • Charles F Reisner

    Charles Francis Reisner (1887-1962) was an actor and director who might best be described with the word ‘competent’. Yet he managed, in both careers, to be associated with some very impressive projects. Reisner acted with Chaplin in A Dog’s Life (1918), The Kid (1921) and The Pilgrim (1923), and also worked for him as a gag writer. And he was the named director on Keaton’s masterpiece, Steamboat Bill Jr (1928). In fact, it was Reisner who came up with the original story idea, and who was literally on his knees praying while Keaton performed the stunt where the house fell down around him.

    Reisner’s career at MGM was less prestigious, though he was considered a capable pair of hands. This is why he was brought in to rescue The Hollywood Revue of 1929 when Christy Cabanne’s work was judged to be lacking by Irving Thalberg. 

    From there Reisner moved straight on to directing Chasing Rainbows, to which he also contributed dialogue. He then directed Love in the Rough and was working on The March of time when it was abandoned. His next completed musical was Flying High.

    Reisner did uncredited writing for Hollywood Party and was one of its eight directors. He directed Student Tour, then took a break from musicals after a busy couple of years. He returned in 1941 to direct The Big Store, the last and least of the Marx Brothers’ films for Metro.

    In 1943 Reisner made Swing Fever, and ended his career in MGM musicals with Meet the People.

  • Gwen Lee

    Gwendolyn Lepinski (1904-61) was a department store model doing occasional stage work when she was discovered by producer-director Monta Bell and offered a contract with Metro in 1925. She mostly played supporting roles and made a successful transition to sound.

    Lee appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and then secured a lead role as Peggy in Chasing Rainbows. She made a cameo as herself in Free and Easy, and was then let go by the studio. After a few years working on Poverty Row, Lee returned to MGM in 1935 as a stock player in minor roles. In that capacity, she turned up alongside Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera and was an audience member in The Great Ziegfeld.

    Lee retired from screen acting in 1938.

  • George K Arthur

    Scottish-born Arthur George Brest (1899-1985) was under contract to MGM when producer Harry Rapf teamed him with Karl Dane for a series of silent comedy features.

    Dane’s strong Danish accent posed problems when sound came along and their MGM career came to an end shortly after a short appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Arthur also appeared in Chasing Rainbows. After making a few shorts for Paramount, he and Dane split up.

    In 1957 Arthur won an Oscar for producing a short film, The Bespoke Overcoat (1956), an early film by director Jack Clayton.

  • Marie Dressler

    Leila Marie Koerber (1868-1934) began her stage career in the 1880s and was a star on Broadway by the time she was 24. In 1914 she appeared with Chaplin and Mabel Normand in Hollywood’s first feature-length comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance.

    By the early 1920s Dressler’s career was in decline, only to revive in 1927 when she was teamed with Polly Moran in The Callahans and the Murphys. Her stage experience meant that sound presented no problems, and by 1931 she was one of MGM’s top stars, winning an Academy Award for Min and Bill (1930). By 1934 she was dead from cancer.

    Dressler was a natural comedian and makes on the the few genuinely funny contributions to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 ‘singing’ ‘For I’m the Queen’. She went to feature in a supporting role in Chasing Rainbows, in which she and Moran combine to steal the picture.

  • Jack Benny

    Benjamin Kubelsky (1894-1974) was one of the most popular American comedians of the mid-twentieth century, especially in his radio and television work. He was never as successful in films, though To Be or Not to Be (1942) stands out as a major achievement.

    Benny featured in four Metro musicals, beginning with the role of Master of Ceremonies in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. He then had a major supporting role in Chasing Rainbows. His voice was heard on a radio in Children of Pleasure. Finally, and best of the four, Benny starred as journalist Bert Keeler in The Broadway Melody of 1936, getting repeatedly punched in the face by Robert Taylor.

  • The Biltmore Trio

    The Biltmore Trio actually began as a quartet in The Broadway Melody and comprised Eddie Bush (1911-69), Paul Gibbons (1904-87), Ches Kirkpatrick (19??-19??) and Bill Seckler (1905-83). They performed ‘Truthful Parson Brown,’ the only song not written by Freed-Brown.

    They appeared again, as the Biltmore Quartet, in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and also in a musical by Fox, Words and Music (1929). After that, Kirkpatrick seems to have disappeared and they became the Biltmore Trio, featuring in Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure and Love in the Rough. They were also the eponymous stars of a Metro musical short. 

  • David Cox

    Little seems to be known about David Cox (1906-19??), who designed costumes at MGM before moving to work with Dolly Tree at Fox in 1932. He is, nonetheless, a featured artist at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where a costume designed for Bessie Love to wear in The Broadway Melody is among the exhibits.

    Cox also designed for The Hollywood Revue of 1929, It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Call of the Flesh, Good News and Love in the Rough.

  • Fred Fisher

    Originally Alfred Breitenbach, German-born Fred Fisher (1875-1942) wrote the popular ‘Peg O’My Heart’ and many other Irish-themed ballads. He also co-wrote ‘Whispering Grass’ with his equally-successful daughter, Doris Fisher.

    Songs by Fisher, usually written in collaboration with others, are featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, So This Is College, Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure, For Me and My Gal and In the Good Old Summertime. He also contributed a number to The March of Time.

  • Al Boasberg

    Albert Isaac Boasberg (1891-1937) played a number of roles in his short career but was essentially a gag writer. In that capacity he worked with many of the major vaudeville and radio stars of the day, including Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Burns and Allen. In Hollywood, he also wrote for and, on occasion, directed dozens of shorts and features, most notably Battling Butler (1926) and The General (1927) with Buster Keaton.

    Boasberg contributed to seven MGM musicals. He co-wrote So This Is College, (and also composed song lyrics, then worked on It’s a Great Life and Chasing Rainbows. Free and Easy reunited him, in less auspicious circumstances, with Keaton, and he provided additional dialogue for The Florodora Girl.

    Back in his comfort zone, Boasberg script-doctored for the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, and then wrote most of the scripted jokes for A Day at the Races. Joe Adamson, in his book about the Marx Brothers, wrote of Boasberg that his “monumental ingenuity at packing sentences with insanities was matched only by his monumental indifference to the logical progression of a plotline”.

  • Polly Moran

    Pauline Theresa Moran (1893-1952) was a seasoned vaudeville performer when she became a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty in 1914. After years of slapstick with Sennett she signed with MGM and was teamed with Marie Dressler for the first time in 1927, a partnership that lasted nine pictures in total.

    Moran appeared alongside Dressler in two numbers in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. She was the fraternity cook in So This Is College, then sparring again with Dressler in Chasing Rainbows. Her final musical for Metro was Hollywood Party, as Henrietta Clemp, wife of the multi-est millionaire in Oklahoma.

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