The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Going Hollywood

  • Going Hollywood

    Some Thoughts

    Going Hollywood has the potential to be a good musical, but does not quite get there. It has its moments, but fights a losing battle against the unusually lacklustre direction of Raoul Walsh, whose strengths the musical form does not play to.

    Bill Williams (Bing Crosby) is understandbly shocked to find Sterling Holloway in his living room
    Bill Williams (Bing Crosby) is understandbly shocked to find Sterling Holloway in his living room

    Star Marion Davies would go on to make half a dozen more pictures, but she was in her mid-thirties by now, and her heart never seems to be in te portraying yet another ingenue. Her appearance in blackface as the world’s most unconvincing ‘mammy’ is a low point. Davies’s singing is kept to an absolute minimum, with all the heavy lifting done by co-star Bing Crosby, on loan from Paramount at Davies’s specific request. Which is a pity, because the film has the best score of any of her musicals, with Freed and Brown in good form.

    "Why are we here?" could be the question on the lips of Jill (Patsy Kelly) and Sylvia (Marion Davies)
    “Why are we here?” could be the question on the lips of Jill (Patsy Kelly) and Sylvia (Marion Davies)

    MGM found itself in September 1933 shooting two pictures set in Hollywood. The other was Bombshell (1933), which has all the verve and insider knowledge that is lacking in Going Hollywood. The dead hand of William Randolph Hearst is probably a factor here: satire was not really his forte. And Marion Davies was no longer able to compete with twenty-two year old Jean Harlow.

    The film’s musical highlights are ‘Going Hollywood’ and ‘Temptation’. The former is the big production number set at Grand Central Station, in which dance director Albertina Rasch seems to throw everything apart from the kitchen sink into the mix. Crosby sings ‘Temptation’, one of Freed and Brown’s best songs, into the sultry eyes of Fifi D’Orsay, achieving a depth of emotion that was generally lacking from his easy-listening style of crooning.

    The comedy in Going Hollywood is left in the capable hands of Ned Sparks and Patsy Kelly, though both find slim pickings in Donald Ogden Stewart’s sub-par screenplay; it is difficult to believe he would go on to write Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). On the subjects of comedy, Sterling Holloway also provides a few minutes of his always entertaining zaniness.

    Conroy (Ned Sparks) doesn't mind encouraging Sylvia, but there is no way he is returning her smile
    Conroy (Ned Sparks) doesn’t mind encouraging Sylvia, but there is no way he is returning her smile

    Going Hollywood  is not exactly a bad film; it is just not a particularly good one.

  • Walter Wanger

    Walter Feuchtwanger (1894-1968) studied at Dartmouth College and then went into theatrical production in New York. It was during his military service during the First World War that he had his introduction to filmmaking, when he was assigned to work on producing propaganda films.

    After the war, Wanger met Jesse Lasky, who hired him to work at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) in New York. He eventually became General Manager of Production, and produced the Marx Brothers’ first pictures, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). 

    Wanger left Paramount in 1931 and, after an abortive attempt at independent production, joined Columbia, where he was responsible for The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). He then had a short spell at MGM, producing Queen Christina (1933) and one musical, Going Hollywood. It was after this that he finally achieved independence, releasing productions through Paramount, and then United Artists.

    Pictures produced by Wanger over the next quarter of a century included John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and The Long Voyage Home (1940), Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). His career ended when he joined Twentieth Century-Fox for the debacle of Cleopatra (1963).

  • Lennie Hayton

    Leonard George Hayton (1908-71) was an important figure in the music department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the Golden Age of the studio’s production of musicals.

    Hayton started out as a pianist and arranger with Paul Whiteman in the late 1920s, which led to a friendship with Bing Crosby when he was one of the Rhythm Boys. It was Crosby who had arranged for Hayton to conduct the orchestra when he made Going Hollywood at MGM in 1933. He then returned to working with Crosby on radio and recording for several years.

    In 1940, MGM signed Hayton as a musical director, and he remained with the studio until 1953. He composed for or acted as MD on a range of non-musical pictures, including H M Pulham Esq (1941), Maisie Gets Her Man (1942) and Battleground (1950). But it was in musicals that he made his greatest mark.

    Hayton’s MGM musicals were: Born to Sing, This Time for Keeps (composer), Best Foot Forward, Meet the People, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Living in a Big Way, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, On the Town (winning an Oscar), Singin’ in the Rain and Easy to Love. After leaving MGM, Hayton returned to arrange and conduct numbers for his wife, Lena Horne, in Meet Me in Las Vegas.

    Lennie Hayton won another Oscar towards the end of his life, for Hello, Dolly (1968).

  • Eric Little

    Eric Little (dates unknown) was a lyricist who contributed to West End musicals in the 1920s, which suggests that he was British. Later, he wrote the lyrics for the Rudy Vallee hit ‘My Time is Your Time’.

    MGM used the song as part of the Radio Rogues’ medley in Going Hollywood,

  • Leo Dance

    Public knowledge about Leo Dance (dates unknown) seems to rest entirely on the fact that he composed the song ‘My Time is Your Time’, which became a hit for Rudy Vallee in 1929.

    A few years later, the song was included in the medley performed by the Radio Rogues in MGM’s Going Hollywood.

  • Gus Kahn

    Gustav Gerson Kahn (1886-1941) was one of Tin Pan Alley’s most prolific and successful writers of popular songs.

    Khan started out writing for vaudeville performers in the 1910s before forming the first of many partnerships with composers. In 1924, he wrote his first standard, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’.

    Contributing to many Broadway scores throughout the 1920s, he also moved into writing for films, and by 1933 was effectively working full time for Hollywood. Khan’s lyrics featured in Flying Down to Rio (1933), Kid Millions (1934) and Captains Courageous (1937).

    Khan worked most frequently with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contributing to Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West and Bitter Sweet.

    Khan’s contributions to the Great American Songbook include ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’, ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.

    Gus Kahn was played by Danny Thomas in a Warner Bros musical biopic, I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951).

  • Paul Gregory

    Paul Gregory (1904-42) made his Broadway debut as a teenager, and a few years later was cast as the ‘Native American’ character Wanenis in the original production of Whoopee! (1928).

    Gregory was one of several cast members who travelled to Hollywood to make the film version of Whoopee! in 1930. He remained there for a few years and made three other features.

    Gregory was an occasional songwriter, and collaborated on ‘You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)’, which was performed by the Three Radio Rogues in Going Hollywood.

    There is scant information about Gregory’s short live after Hollywood, though he appears to have returned to New York. He is frequently confused, including by the AFI, with producer Paul Gregory (1920-2015).

  • Ross Columbo

    Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolfo Colombo (1908-34) was the child of Italian immigrants. He started learning the violin at a young age and was hired professionally when just thirteen.

    In 1928, he performed with the Gus Arnheim orchestra in a Vitaphone musical short, which led to a few acting roles. He also continued with Arnheim, branching into singing. He was a crooner, like his friend and colleague Bing Crosby.

    Columbo was managed by Con Conrad, and collaborated with him in writing a number of songs. One of these, ‘You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)’, was parodied by the Three Radio Rogues in MGM’s Going Hollywood.

    Ross Columbo died young as the result of a tragic shooting accident. His mother was in poor health and Columbo’s girlfriend at the time of his death, Carole Lombard, assisted in hiding his the fact of his death from her for ten years.

  • Gladys DuBois

    Gladys Louise DuBois (1907-71) was an actor and songwriter who acted in a couple of Pre-Code musicals. She is best-known today for contributing songs, including the title number, to Mae West’s I’m No Angel (1933).

    DuBois co-wrote the lyrics to ‘You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)’, which featured in the Three Radio Rogues’s medley in Going Hollywood.

  • Con Conrad

    Songwriter Conrad K Dober (1891-1938) started out as a cinema pianist, first in Harlem, then in Keith vaudeville theatres.

    Conrad’s first song was published in 1912, and he found his greatest success during the 1920s, co-writing hits such as ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’. During this period he wrote regularly for Broadway shows.

    From 1929, Conrad worked in Hollywood, contributing songs to musicals by a variety of studios, his biggest hit being ‘The Continental’, written for Astaire and Rogers’s The Gay Divorcee (1934).

    Numbers co-written by Con Conrad can be heard in MGM’s Going Hollywood and The Great Ziegfeld.

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