Andrew Jackson Baxley (1884-1950) appeared in a handful of excellent films during his career as a character actor, including two with Orson Welles (The Magnificent Amberson in 1942 and The Lady from Shanghai in 1947). But there, as in most of his other pictures, he was uncredited.
Baxley was in eight Metro musicals: Free and Easy, The Florodora Girl, Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Strike Up the Band, Thrill of a Romance and Summer Holiday.
Paul Neal (1896-1969) began working in Douglas Shearer’s sound department at MGM in 1929, and went on to record and mix sound for a variety of studios. He worked with a range of important filmmakers, including John Ford (The Whole Town’s Talking, 1935), Frank Borzage (History is Made at Night, 1937), William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939) and Henry Hathaway (The Dark Corner, 1946).
Neal recorded sound on five Metro musicals: Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady and The Cat and the Fiddle.
Lawrence Wells Steers (1888-1951) appeared in around 550 films during his thirty-year career, sometimes credited, more often not.
Twenty-seven of those uncredited roles were in Metro musicals, starting in 1930 with Lord Byron of Broadway. Steers was subsequently in Stage Mother, Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Nobody’s Baby, The Great Waltz, At the Circus, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, Two Girls and a Sailor, Meet the People, Ziegfeld Follies (giving the hattrick of MGM Ziegfeld titles), Yolanda and the Thief, Holiday in Mexico, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, A Date with Judy, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Duchess of Idaho, The Toast of New Orleans and The Great Caruso.
At the height of his career, Gordon Nance (1904-65) was generally billed as Wild Bill Elliott. So named, he featured in dozens of B westerns, mostly produced at Republic and Monogram, the upper end of Poverty Row. Elliott concluded his career playing Lieutenant Andy Doyle in a series of crime pictures for Allied Artists.
In the thirties, Elliott made uncredited appearances in five MGM musicals: Lord Byron of Broadway, Stage Mother, Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party and Reckless.
Napoleon Bonaparte Kubuck (1893-1953) notched up over 660 film and TV appearances, most of them uncredited.
Phelps was in twenty MGM musicals: They Learned About Women, The Florodora Girl, A Lady’s Morals, Flying High, Dancing Lady, Reckless, A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie, The Bohemian Girl, The Great Ziegfeld, Sweethearts, Balalaika, Little Nellie Kelly, Born to Sing (a rare onscreen credit), Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and That Midnight Kiss.
Zelda Paldi (1873-1935) was a journalist, actor, playwright, novelist and occasional scenarist wrote her first screenplays for Cecil B DeMille’s company.
She subsequently went to MGM, where she definitely worked on three musicals: Devil-May-Care, for which she wrote dialogue, and uncredited contributions to Dancing Lady and The Cat and the Fiddle. She is also believed to have worked unofficially on Broadway to Hollywood.
Lucille Faye LeSueur (1904?-77) is often remembered today for the hard-faced, wide-shouldered roles she played in the 1940s and 50s, especially her Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce (1945). But in her early years at MGM she was best-known for playing wild young women, a model established in her breakthrough silent hit, Our Dancing Daughters (1928).
Always driven by the ambition to succeed, Crawford worked hard on developing her speaking voice when sound was introduced, practising elocution and pronunciation. Her success can be gauged from appearance alongside Conrad Nagel in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where, although clearly nervous, her voice stands up well alongside an actor who learned his trade in the theatre. Crawford’s singing and dancing are somewhat forced but, again, reveal a gritty determination to pull off something new.
Crawford did well enough to earn the lead in one of Metro’s first dozen musicals, Montana Moon, which was a commercial success despite its many shortcomings.
It was intended that this be followed up with Great Day, an adaptation of a recent Broadway flop, in which Crawford would be reteamed with Johnny Mack Brown, her Montana Moon co-star. Shooting began in the autumn of 1930, under the direction of Harry Pollard, but was halted abruptly after two weeks, at a cost of $280,000. The reasons for this are unclear, but it may have been a victim of studio reaction to the public’s growing aversion to musicals.
During the 1933 musical revival, Crawford was cast alongside Clark Gable in Dancing Lady, where she at least got to dance alongside Fred Astaire in his first film.
By 1953 Crawford had long ceased being an MGM contract player, but she returned to the studio for a final musical outing in Torch Song, which played more to her melodramatic instincts. Unfortunately, she suffered the indignity of having her singing voice dubbed.
Blanche Payson (1881-1964) was a bit-part player who started out in silence in 1916. Her two roles in Metro musicals were satisfyingly distinct: a wardrobe lady in The Broadway Melody and a jail matron in Dancing Lady.
Sammy Lee (1890-1968), born Samuel Levy, was the first in a line of important choreographers at MGM, though he arguably achieved greater success on Broadway and at Twentieth Century-Fox.
Lee is uncredited on The Broadway Melody, which he might have been quite happy about, given the rudimentary nature of the dance numbers. He had worked on Ziegfeld’s Follies in 1927, but this is not reflected in the style of the fictional Zanfield’s show. Lee and director Harry Beaumont could not, in this first-ever film musical, determine how to make a stage performance cinematic. Nor were the chorines of the quality Lee would have been used to on Broadway.
Lee’s first onscreen credit was for ‘Dances and Ensemble’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he did his best with non-professional dancers Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. He also essayed a pre-Berkeley overhead shot of the chorus.
Lee went on to stage dances for It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, They Learned About Women, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure, Good News, Love in the Rough (which includes an al fresco number performed at a real golf club), A Lady’s Morals, Broadway to Hollywood and Dancing Lady.
A move to Twentieth Century-Fox earned Lee Academy Award nominations for King of Burlesque (1936) and Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). He was back at Metro for Honolulu, Hullabaloo, Cairo, Born to Sing, Meet the People and Two Girls and a Sailor.
Lee had a parallel career as the director of a series of undistinguished shorts.
Karl Max Schneefuss (1892-1962), who worked under the name Charles Maxwell, started his career at MGM as assistant to William Axt, compositing additional music for Marianne.
Most of Maxwell’s career in musicals was spent as an orchestrator, in which capacity he worked on The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady,The Cat and the Fiddle,The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Here Comes the Band , A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie,The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, The Firefly and New Moon.
