The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Dancing Lady

  • Paul Marquardt

    German-born Paul Alfred Marquardt (1889-1960) was a composer who worked for many years as an arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and for other studios. Although rarely receiving an onscreen credit, Marquardt made a substantial contribution to MGM’s musical history.

    He orchestrated the music for many non-musical films, including Anna Karenina (1935), Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), The Women (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), Rebecca (1940),Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), High Noon (1952) and Friendly Persuasion (1957). Marquardt also composed original scores in the 1930s, including for The Sign of the Cross and A Farewell to Arms (both 1933). He worked on well over 350 films between 1930 and 1957.

    The first of Marquardt’s 39 MGM musicals was The Cuban Love Song, collaborating with Charles Maxwell. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco. Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, Rosalie, Everybody Sing, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz, Sweethearts (in which he also appeared as a conductor), The Wizard of Oz (credited for orchestral and vocal arrangements), Babes in Arms, At the Circus, Balalaika, New Moon, Hullabaloo, Rio Rita, I Married an Angel, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Follies, Holiday in Mexico, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Royal Wedding and Show Boat.

  • Mary Halsey

    Mary Halsey (1913-89) also worked under the name Mary Jane Halsey, but, in over forty feature films, she never achieved a credit.

    On the positive side, she was not, unlike many of her peers, restricted solely to playing chorus girls. She was a nurse in The Falcon’s Brother, and featured prominently in Cat People (both 1942), as the receptionist who hears the scream in the swimming pool.

    Having said that, Halsey appeared in six Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals, and was a chorus girl in all of them. They were Flying High, Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow (technically a Maxim’s girl), Broadway Melody of 1936 and The Great Ziegfeld. The outlier was her last musical for the studio, Rosalie.

    Halsey worked for the Red Cross during the Second World War. 

  • Edna Callahan

    Edwina G Callahan (1912-2007) was, unlike many of her contemporaries in studio chorus lines, a dancer with training. She had begun dancing professionally while still in high school and was working regularly on the stage by her late teens. 

    Callahan made her screen debut, aged 18, in Fox’s weird and wonderful Just Imagine (1930), and made an appearance the following year in MGM’s Flying High.

    Callahan’s film career was over by 1937, but she had by then been in four more Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance and Rosalie (her final film).

    In the 1930s, Callahan was briefly married to cinematographer Gregg Toland.

  • Max Barwyn

    Max Barwyn (1884-1955) made his first screen appearance in 1926 and went on to over 70 more. He was one of those supporting players who looked like he belonged in the service industries, and played waiters more than two dozen times. From left-fields, just for a change, he was cast as Napoleon Bonaparte in Brigadier Gerard (1927), which may have equipped him for his multiple roles as a maitre d’. 

    Barwyn acted in nine MGM musicals, starting with the 1930 New Moon.  He was then in Dancing Lady, The Night is Young, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, The Chocolate Soldier (a rare credited role) and Rhapsody.

  • Linda Parker

    Linda Parker (1915-69) was the younger sister of Cecilia Parker, the actor best-remembered for playing Marian Hardy in the Andy Hardy series.

    In 1930, Linda ‘joined’ her sister to play Siamese twins in Lon Chaney’s sound remake of The Unholy Three. They were immediately asked to repeat the trick in A Lady’s Morals. 

    Linda Parker had uncredited  parts in four other Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Student Tour and Naughty Marietta (which also featured Cecilia).

  • Robert A Golden

    Robert Joseph Anthony Golden (1897-1942) started out as an assistant director on Harold Lloyd pictures, including Dr Jack (1922) and Safety Last! (1923). He is also known to have worked as Lloyd’s double.

    Golden’s subsequent work as AD, often uncredited, included seven MGM musicals, beginning with Hallelujah in 1929. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz and Ziegfeld Girl.

    Golden directed one picture, a Polly Moran comedy called Honeymoon, in 1928.

  • Eddie Prinz

    Edward A Prinz (1901-67) was the younger and lesser-known brother of LeRoy Prinz and, like his brother, was a dancer and choreographer.

    The most high-profile film Prinz worked on, though without credit, was Gone with the Wind (1939). He was credited as a dancer on Madam Satan, performing in the ‘Low Down’ number with Lillian Roth. And on Dancing Lady, he was credited with directing the dance ensembles.

  • Jimmy McHugh

    James Francis McHugh (1894-1969), like many other contributors to the Great American Songbook, had worked as a song plugger before producing his own hits.

    He worked in partnership with many lyricists, but perhaps most fruitfully with Dorothy Fields. Amongst the many standards they produced were ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ and ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’.

    Fields and McHugh numbers were used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At. Songs written with other lyricists are featured in Two Girls and a Sailor, A Date With Judy (notably ‘It’s a Most Unusual Day’) and Looking for Love.

  • Dorothy Fields

    Born into a showbiz family, Dorothy Fields (1904-74) worked on the stage for a few years before finding her true vocation as a songwriter. She was one of the few women to find success on Tin Pan Alley, and undoubtedly the greatest of them. She wrote the songs for Roberta in 1933 and for Sweet Charity in 1966, and it is astonishing to consider that ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘The Rhythm of Life’ came from the pen of the same writer. Few songwriters had the same ability to adapt to changing musical styles.

    Fields’s early work found little success, but she came into her own after partnering with composer Jimmy McHugh. Together, they wrote a string of popular hits, including ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’ and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’.

    Fields and McHugh wrote the songs used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At, the studio’s updated version of Roberta, on which she worked with Jerome Kern.

    Numbers by Fields working in collaboration with other composers also featured in Mr Imperium, Excuse My Dust and Texas Carnival.

    Fields co-wrote the book for the stage show adapted into Annie Get Your Gun.

  • Margaret Booth

    In 1977, Margaret Booth (1898-2002) received an honorary Oscar in tribute to her 62-year Hollywood career, during most of which she was arguably the industry’s greatest editor. Remarkably, she carried on working for another eight years.

    Like many major Hollywood figures, Booth started out with D W Griffith, working as a negative cutter. She subsequently worked for Louis B Mayer, transferring with him to the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. She was appointed as Supervising Editor in 1939, and stayed there until her shameful dismissal in 1986. During that time, as Booth described it, she worked only in the projection room, never the cutting room (though it is believed she did uncredited cutting on Ben Hur (1959).  She has been described as “the final arbiter on every picture the studio made”, and was responsible, amongst other things, for the butchering of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951).

    The first MGM musical edited by Margaret Booth was The Rogue Song. This was followed by New Moon, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Reckless. After that, she technically supervised the editing of every musical, but made a particularly significant contribution to The Wizard of Oz and Gigi.

    As late as 1982, aged 84, Booth worked as supervising editor on the Columbia-released musical Annie. 

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