Discrepancies between IMDb and the AFI Catalogue are normal when it comes to actors’ work. It is usually claimed that this is because, while the former is crowd sourced and includes short films and television appearances, the former is restricted to feature films and based on scholarly research.
However true this may be (and the AFI listings are full of very unscholarly errors), it cannot account for the fact that French-born Achille Nardelli (1895-1973) was in 194 feature films in forty years, while the AFI lists only twenty-one titles in 27 years. One of them is wrong, and on this occasion I suspect it is the AFI. Its list just does not look like anyone’s career, not least because of the ten-year gap from 1939 to 1949.
Both sources agree that Nardelli was in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and The Toast of New Orleans. IMDb maintains that he was also uncredited in The Merry Widow, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, The Great Caruso, Lili, Deep in my Heart, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, Silk Stockings and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Robert Watson Knucher (1888-1965) started out in vaudeville as a teenager, and also toured the United States with a travelling medicine show. He moved up through appearing in shows at Coney Island, to a Broadway debut in 1918, where he continued to work.
Watson made his first film in 1925 in That Royle Girl, a minor work by D W Griffith. He went on to appear, usually uncredited, in around ninety pictures, including: China Seas (1935), Captains Courageous (1937), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943, and one of nine pictures in which he played Adolf Hitler), The Big Clock (1948, and a rare credited role as one of the employees at Janoth Publications), A Foreign Affair (1948, and Hitler again) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962, his last film and playing Hitler).
Bobby Watson acted in five MGM musicals, though he was credited only in the first, playing the press agent Thompson in Going Hollywood. The uncredited appearances were in Born to Dance, Singin’ in the Rain (as the diction coach in ‘Moses Supposes’), The Band Wagon and Deep in my Heart.
No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.
Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.
He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.
At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films.
Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.
Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie,Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
Four feet and two inches tall, Tutie (or possibly Tufie) Fatella (1898-1968) emigrated with his family from Syria to the United States in around 1911. By the age of 18, he was in Hollywood, starting out on a career as a character actor that would last almost fifty years and about 250 performances.
George’s first film is believed to have been Bobbie of the Ballet (1916), which starred Lon Chaney. In the 1920s he worked regularly with both Chaney and director Tod Browning, being particularly memorable as Cojo in the macabre The Unknown (1927). He also featured in Rex Ingram’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and Scaramouche (1923).
In the sound era, George played a scientist in both Browning’s Dracula and its Spanish version, Drácula (both 1931). He renewed his acquaintance with Bela Lugosi in Edgar G Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). Later appearances included The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Canyon Passage (1946) and a cameo in the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). George’s last big screen appearance was in One-Eyed Jacks (1963), but he continued working in television.
Amongst John George’s many roles were eleven in MGM musicals, all uncredited: The Cuban Love Song, Babes in Toyland, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Let Freedom Ring, At the Circus, Du Barry Was a Lady, Two Sisters from Boston, Big City, Singin’ in the Rain and Deep in My Heart.
Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein (1895-1960) was one of the biggest names in 20th-century musicals, both literally and metaphorically.
Hammerstein and two of his main collaborators, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers, were key to the development of the integrated musical, whereby songs are woven into the plot rather than being simply musical interpolations. In the world of film musicals, there were attempts to achieve this as early as 1930, but it is undeniable that Hammerstein’s work as lyricist, librettist and producer were hugely influential.
Oscar Hammerstein’s career can be divided into distinct halves. During the first part, he partnered with a variety of composers, including Kern (Show Boat, 1927), Rudolf Friml (Rose-Marie, 1924) and Sigmund Romberg (The Desert Song, 1926). Then, in 1943, he joined with Rodgers to produce Oklahoma!. This was the first in a series of seminal musicals, including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949) and The Sound of Music (1959), most of which were filmed (with varying degrees of success).
MGM did not adapt any of Hammerstein’s work with Rodgers, but did film The New Moon (written in 1927 with Romberg) twice, as it did with Rose-Marie. The studio made one of the several versions of Show Boat. Hammerstein songs were also featured in The Night is Young , The Great Waltz and the Romberg biopic Deep in My Heart.
Zsigmund Rosenberg (1887-1951) was a Hungarian-born composer and one of the most celebrated composers of operettas for the American stage.
Romberg arrived in New York in 1909 and eventually found work playing the piano in cafes and restaurants. He published a few songs and came to the attention of the Shubert brothers, who commissioned him to write material for their Broadway revues. He wrote for a number of shows starring Al Jolson.
In the 1920s, Romberg wrote three classic operettas in the Viennese style–The Student Prince (1924), The Desert Song (1926) and The New Moon (1928)–working with various lyricists, including Oscar Hammerstein II. He also wrote film scores and adapted his own work for the screen.
MGM made two versions of New Moon (dropping the definite article) and also adapted Rosalie, Maytime and The Student Prince. He also contributed music to The Night is Young and The Girl of the Golden West.
In 1954, Romberg was the subject of an MGM musical-biopic, Deep in My Heart, which drew extensively on his back catalogue.
Ballard MacDonald (1882-1935) was a Tin Pan Alley lyricist who collaborated with, amongst others, George Gershwin (notably on ‘Somebody Loves Me’). His best-known song, ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,’ belatedly became a hit in the UK when the Laurel and Hardy version from Way Out West was released as a single.
Ballard provided numbers for four MGM musicals. In 1929 he worked with Dave Dreyer on most of the songs for It’s a Great Life. Fifteen years later ‘Somebody Loves Me’ was sung by Lena Horne in Broadway Rhythm.
‘Play That Barbershop Chord,’ a song he co-wrote in 1910, was used in In the Good Old Summertime. Finally, ‘I Love to Go Swimmin With Wimmin,’ written with Sigmund Romberg for the 1921 musical Love Birds, was performed by Gene Kelly and his brother Fred in the Romberg biopic Deep in My Heart.
