The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Children of Pleasure

  • Cliff Edwards

    The man who contributed greatly to the 20s’ ukelele craze. The performer who performed ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in its feature film debut. The voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940). Just three of the reasons why Clifton Avon Edwards (1895-1971), or ‘Ukelele Ike,’ ought not to be quite as forgotten as he is.

    Edwards was a successful vaudeville and café performer, allegedly dubbed ‘Ukelele Ike’ by a waiter who could never remember his name. He became a ubiquitous figure in the early Metro musicals, appearing in over a third of the studio’s productions in 1929-31.

    Edwards’s rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, though lacking Gene Kelly’s familiar phrasing, was good enough to earn the song a reprise in the hastily-devised finale, in which also appeared.

    His first acting role was as Soapy, one of the doughboys in Marianne. He then added musical support in So This is College and performed a speciality number in They Learned About Women. Lord Byron of Broadway saw him in the, not really challenging, role of a vaudeville singer, after which he was way out west as one of the hero’s buddies in Montana Moon. 

    Edwards made an uncredited appearance as himself in Children of Pleasure and has a featured role as the Coach’s assistant, Pooch Kearney, in the 1930 version of Good News. He was then one of Lawrence Tibbett’s hobo pals in The Prodigal.

    The film musical hiatus of 1932 soon followed, and Edwards only appeared in one further musical for Metro, as Minstrel Joe in The Girl of the Golden West. 

    At his height, in the late 1920s, Cliff Edwards was earning $4000 a week. By the time of his death, he was an indigent charity patient in a Hollywood hospital; his body was unclaimed for several days because no one knew who he was. 

  • Lawrence Gray

    Lawrence Gray (1898-1970) was a jobbing actor who began in silent pictures and whose good looks made him an amenable leading man for, amongst others, Gloria Swanson, Colleen Moore and Norma Shearer. His singing voice was also good enough to win him parts in four early MGM musicals: Marianne, It’s a Great Life, Children of Pleasure and, opposite Marian Davies for the second time, in The Florodora Girl. 

    The parts on offer started to decline and Gray retired in 1936. He and his wife moved to her native Mexico, where he worked in the distribution side of the film industry. 

  • Irving Thalberg

    The Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg (1899-1937) was the creative engine room of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the studio’s creation in 1925 until his early death. In twelve years he supervised over 400 pictures, including virtually all of its prestige productions, without ever choosing to take an on-screen credit. 

    Thalberg had some level of involvement with most of MGM’s musical output from The Broadway Melody in 1929 until A Day at the Races, on which he was working at the time of his death; it was he who brought the Marx Brothers to Metro, reviving their flagging careers at the cost of comedic purity.

    Thalberg effectively launched the musical genre as the driving force behind The Broadway Melody. He showed his inclination for experimentation-within-limits by okaying Hallelujah even though King Vidor warned him it would make no money.

    Thalberg brought Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbet from the Metropolitan Opera and gifted stardom to Jeanette MacDonald. He persuaded Luise Rainer to take the small role in The Great Ziegfeld that won her an Oscar.

    Although business-oriented, Thalberg was prepared to devote time and money to producing high-quality work, and he made profits as a result. His impact on the early development of the MGM musical is impossible to quantify, but a philosophy of excellence can certainly be seen in the work that followed, especially in the golden age of the early 1950s.

  • Richard Schayer

    Richard Schayer (1880-1956) helped to write over 100 films during a forty-year career, and perhaps staked his claim to a place on the lower levels of immortality by co-writing the treatment that became Universal’s The Mummy (1932). 

    While at MGM, Schayer worked on four of the studio’s early musicals. He wrote the treatment for Hallelujah, developing King Vidor’s basic idea. In the same year he adapted a French play from 1851 into the Roman Novarro swashbuckler Devil-May-Care. He then displayed his versatility by scripting Free and Easy for Buster Keaton and turning a recent Crane Wilbur play into Children of Pleasure. 

    By 1932, Schayer was a member of the Laemmles’ team at Universal.

  • Harry Beaumont

    Harry Beaumont (1888-1966) is not a well-known name, despite having directed the first feature-length musical and a winner of the best picture Academy Award. Originally an actor, he turned to film directing in 1916.

    In 1923 Beaumont directed The Gold Diggers, a play which was also the source of Warners’ Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). Perhaps his most notable achievement outside musicals was Metro’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928), which had a synchronized score.

    Irving Thalberg must have considered Beaumont a safe pair of hands when assigning him to The Broadway Melody, an ambitious and not inexpensive project. His reputation today is as a journeyman director grinding out assignments, but Richard Barrios points out, in A Song in the Dark (1995), that Beaumont was present at every script conference. Studio records indicate that his contribution to the picture’s dialogue was greater than that of the credited James Gleason.

    In 1930 Beaumont directed three further musicals for MGM, Lord Byron of Broadway (brought in to beef up William Nigh’s work), Children of Pleasure and The Florodora Girl, before moving on to other things. Never more than a journeyman director, Beaumont carved himself a small, if often overlooked, niche in cinema history with The Broadway Melody,  

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