Harry William Depp (1883-1957) started out as a comedian in vaudeville and travelling theatre companies. By 1907, he was appearing on Broadway, in the first of many productions.
Depp made his film debut in Between Midnight (1916), a Carter DeHaven short, but then travelled to Hollywood for the first of around 140 feature films. Early on, he worked for a number of small studios, always in comedic roles and with a penchant for cross-dressing. He also made appearances for Mack Sennett.
He had many featured roles in the 1920s, but after 1930 tended to have smaller, uncredited parts. He cropped up in Howard Hawks’s Barbary Coast (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). In 1945, Depp played the pharmacist who supplies Gene Tierney with the arsenic needed for suicide.
Harry Depp made uncredited appearances in six Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, The Big Store, Ship Ahoy!, I Dood It and Girl Crazy.
Merrill Manley Pye (1902-75) was an important member of Cedric Gibbons’s unit at MGM from 1925 until 1968, and one who had a significant impact on the look of the studio’s musicals across most of that period.
Pye had studied architecture, which made him a desirable addition to Gibbon’s team. The respect in which he was held is suggested by his first picture, Edmund Goulding’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), where he shares equal credit with Gibbons for Settings.
He was art director, uncredited, on Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and given associate art director credit for David Copperfield (1935). In 1959, Pye was Oscar-nominated for his art direction on Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest, responsible for recreating the Mount Rushmore monument on a sound stage.
But it was in musicals that Pye made his real mark. He started out with the art direction of Dancing Lady, where he has been credited with introducing the Moderne style to MGM’s musical pictures: what has been described as “flat mise-en-scenes surfaces, horizontal accents, tonal values distinction, and smooth and curved lines with glossy surfaces”.
Pye went on to be art director (or associate) on Going Hollywood, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Swing Fever, Bathing Beauty, Ziegfeld Follies, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
But Pye also received another type of credit on some pictures: Musical Presentation. IMDb erroneously interprets this as him having a role in the music department, but it was actually a special credit for a role that involved the overall visual design of a musical number. This involved not only the structural design of sets, but also camera movement through the set, incorporating an element of direction.
Pye carried out this function on musical numbers in Born to Dance, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Honolulu, Strike Up the Band, Bitter Sweet, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, The Chocolate Soldier, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy!, Panama Hattie, For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Broadway Rhythm and Meet the People.
It is notable that Pye’s services in musical presentation were not required on the Freed Unit musicals of the later 1940s and 1950s, where directors like Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli would retain that creative control.
Victor Potel (1889-1947) appeared in around 450 films, most of them made in the 1910s, when they were churned out. He was in 19 releases in 1910, and that was by no means his busiest year.
Potel made around eighty appearances for Essanay as a character named Slippery Slim (including one with the bizarre title Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage [1915]). In another long-running series, he played Slim Hoover, and was a regular in ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s westerns. He also occasionally turned his hand to writing and directing.
The pace of work slowed down over the years, but Potel was always a hard-working character actor in silent and sound features, usually in comic roles. During the 1930s, he was credited and uncredited in equal proportions. His films were mostly programmers, though he appeared in Fury (1936) as the customer who listens trepidatiously while his barber talks about the urge to cut someone’s throat.
In the 1940s, Potel was one of Preston Sturges’s stock company, in nine pictures and credited as the newspaper editor in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943).
Victor Potel showed up in six MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.
Harry Charles Bradley Cockrill (1869-1947) was 60 when he made his first film, but still managed to accumulate well over 200 appearances in the next seventeen years.
Bradley started out as a legitimate actor on the stage, performing regularly on Broadway from the late 1900s. From 1922 to 1927 he performed more than 2,300 times in the original production of Abie’s Irish Rose.
In 1929, Bradley was part of the exodus from New York to Hollywood, making his screen debut in a Paramount short called The Home Edition (1929). Thereafter, he was mostly uncredited, but with the occasional featured role, for example in Warner’s Convention City (1933). He had a prominent role in Heat Lightning (1934) for the same studio. He worked for Capra in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hawks in His Girl Friday (1940).
Bradley was uncredited in four MGM musicals:Dancing Lady, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.
Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.
The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.
Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.
Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.
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:
A film career that lasted 88 years. About 285 pictures. The biggest box office draw in the United States in 1939. 1940 and 1941, from age 19 to 21. Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr (1920-2014) was no ordinary film star: he was a phenomenon, utterly unique. He was not, by most accounts, a particularly pleasant person; there are plenty of horror stories about his behaviour and attitudes. But I cannot find that this detracts greatly from his achievements on the screen.
Rooney claimed that he first appeared as part of his parents’ vaudeville act aged 17 months. After they divorced, he went with his mother to Hollywood and made his first film appearance in 1926, and from 1927 to 1934 was the star of over sixty comedy shorts, as a character named Mickey McGuire. He became associated with the name, but was prevented from taking the name as his own, so chose Rooney instead.
Aged 14, Rooney played Puck in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), one of the film’s brighter spots, a fact all the more remarkable when you know he gave much of his performance with a plaster cast on a broken leg.
He played the younger son in an adaptation of Ah, Wilderness (1935), and then was cast as the older son in a rehash of the plot, 1937’s A Family Affair. His character was named Andy Hardy, and Rooney played him in 13 sequels, most of which put plenty of cash into MGM’s coffers (he was by now contracted to the studio)
Rooney starred opposite Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town (1938), and went on to receive a special Oscar known as the Academy Juvenile Award. He was later nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for The Human Comedy (1943).
Rooney did not look like a leading man, and when it became impossible for him to continue playing teenagers, his career went into decline. But, in Jeanine Basinger’s words, he “kept on working and growing, the mark of a professional”. Even as late as 1979, he achieved critical recognition, and another Academy nomination, for Coppola’s The Black Stallion. And he regularly took part in successful Broadway productions. He even tried his hand, without great success, as a producer and director.
Mickey Rooney was in twelve MGM musicals, appearing with Judy Garland in seven of them. They were: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Girl Crazy, Summer Holiday, Words and Music and The Strip.
The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.
IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.
In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.
Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.
Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.
Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
As if to separate himself from the multitude of his contemporaries who started their show business careers in vaudeville, the teenage Guy Bridges Kibbee (1882-1956) started out entertaining on Mississippi riverboats. He later became a leading man for a variety of stock companies.
The big time came well-on in his career: he made his Broadway debut in 1930, and soon afterwards was signed by Paramount. (He had previously made one short comedy for Warner Bros.) He went on to become one of those immediately-recognizable characters who helped make 30s’ Hollywood as great as it was. His speciality was jovial, a bit dim, occasionally lecherous. The last of these came to the fore in two great Warner musicals, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933).
Kibee had a rare starring role in Babbitt (1934), the Warners’ less-than-faithful adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s prize-winning novel. He also played malleable Governor Hopper in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Dr Gibbs in the film of Our Town (1940).
Guy Kibbee was in four Metro musicals: Flying High, Let Freedom Ring, Babes in Arms and Girl Crazy.
Julia Griffith (1880-1961) started out in the theatre, but became a perennial bit-part player in Hollywood, from her debut as ‘town gossip’ in 1923 to her last appearance as ‘committee woman’ twenty years later. She was usually uncredited.
Griffith can be spotted in four MGM musicals. She was an audience member at the opera in Call of the Flesh, and then a party guest in Hollywood Party. She was back in the audience for A Night at the Opera and later played a committee woman in Girl Crazy.
