The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Going Hollywood

  • Kate Smith

    Kathryn Elizabeth Smith (1907-1986) was born in Virginia and became known as ‘the Songbird of the South’. Her wholly untrained voice spanned two and a half octaves.

    After singing as an amateur from the age of eight, Smith found professional engagements, leading to performing in a Broadway show in 1926. Her weight led to her being represented as a rival to Sophie Tucker.

    Smith was the original Pansy Sparks in Flying High on Broadway, and the butt of cruel jokes by Bert Lahr. The MGM adaptation replaced her with Charlotte Greenwood, her physical opposite.

    She was a recording artist and, from 1931, appeared regularly on the radio, becoming a major star. She co-wrote her radio theme song, ‘When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain’, with Howard Johnson and Harry M Woods, and it was parodied by Jimmy Hollywood of the Three Radio Rogues in Going Hollywood. 

    During the Second World War, Smith became closely associated with Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ and, bizarrely, became involved in campaigning on moral grounds against Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity (1944). Her last recorded appearance was in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in in 1968.

  • Reg Connelly

    The people who wrote ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ deserve to be better known. One of them was Reginald John Connelly, a British songwriter and music publisher who, with his partner Jimmy Campbell, wrote the song immortalized by Otis Redding, and also the perennial ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’.

    The Campbell Connelly company was established in the mid-twenties and published hits by its owners and other songwriters, becoming internationally successful. Connelly later began composing for British films, including musicals starring Jessie Matthews

    Songs written by Reg Connelly were used in two MGM musicals. ‘Just an Echo in the Valley’ was a hit in 1932, and was sung the following year by Bing Crosby in Going Hollywood. Later, ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’ featured in Holiday in Mexico.

  • Donald Ogden Stewart

    Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) began writing after graduating from Yale and military service during the First World War. He found success writing satirical comedy, and became a member of the Algonquin Round Table. In the 1920s he wrote plays that were performed on Broadway, and published a novel.

    Stewart’s first work for the cinema was Brown of Harvard (1926), an adaptation of a Rida Johnson Young story. This was followed by contributions to around 40 Hollywood screenplays, including Dinner at Eight (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Holiday (1938), Love Affair (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay) and An Affair to Remember (1957).

    His work on An Affair to Remember was uncredited because Stewart had by then been blacklisted owing to his membership of the Communist Party. He and his wife eventually moved to the UK, where Stewart wrote for the cinema and for television. He remained there for the rest of his life.

    Stewart worked on the screenplays of three Metro musicals: Going Hollywood, Reckless (uncredited) and Smilin’ Through.

  • Raoul Walsh

    Albert Edward Walsh (1887-1980) had a fifty-two-year career as a film director and made around 130 feature films and a dozen or so shorts. His first feature was The Life of General Villa (1914), co-directed with Christy Cabanne, which he also co-wrote and in which he played Pancho Villa as a young man. 

    Walsh started out as an actor on the stage in 1909, before commencing film work. In 1915, he played John Wilkes Booth in D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Probably his best-known acting role–and his last–was in Sadie Thompson (1928), which he again wrote and directed. He had already directed dozens of pictures by the time sound was introduced, and in 1930 he made The Big Trail, the expensive Fox western that was a commercial failure and launched John Wayne into an unsuccessful first attempt at stardom.

    Raoul Walsh played an important part in edging Humphrey Bogart into the top rank, moving him from supporting player in The Roaring Twenties (1939) and They Drive by Night (1940) to a career-defining starring role in High Sierra (1940). He also made multiple films with James Cagney (including the classic White Heat [1949]) and Errol Flynn. He also directed three Clark Gable pictures in the 1950s. 

    Walsh is rarely listed alongside the acknowledged greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as Ford, Hawks and Wyler. But he was a gifted and versatile director.

    In 1933, Walsh directed his sole MGM musical, Going Hollywood.

  • Hector V Sarno

    Ettore Vittorio Sarno (1880-1953) was an Italian-born actor known to have worked for New York-based film companies from around 1912. His first feature film is thought to have been Under the Gaslight (1914). 

    Sarno appeared in at least 200 features and shorts, mostly credited roles during the sound era, but more often uncredited after 1929, when he was largely restricted to ‘ethnic’ parts. He can be seen in King of Kings (1927), Lucky Star (1929), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Cloak and Dagger (1946) and The Egg and I (1947).

    Sarno was a Mexican waiter in MGM’s Going Hollywood and the Gypsy leader at the beginning of Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. IMDb also suggests he appeared in Balalaika, which seems likely given its setting.

  • The KMBC Texas Rangers

    Both IMDb and the AFI cite a singing group called the Rangers as appearing in MGM’s Going Hollywood. This would appear to be the octet usually known as the KMBC Texas Rangers, a group that performed western songs on a Kansas City, Missouri radio station. The group also appeared in a number of 1930s ‘B’ westerns.

    The lineup of the Texas Rangers changed, and it is currently difficult to be certain about which singers participated in Going Hollywood. They are likely to have been Clarence ‘Idaho’ Hartman, Gomer ‘Tenderfoot’ Cool, Joe ‘Monty’ Strand, Herbie ‘Arizona’ Kratoska, Fran ‘Irish’ Mahaney, Robert ‘Captain Bob’ Crawford and Edward ‘Tucson’ Cronenbold.

  • Vesey O’Davoren

    Vesey Alfred Davoren (1888-1989) was an Anglo-Irish actor from an upper-class background who started out in the British theatre in 1909. His career was interrupted by the First World War, in which he seems to have had a particularly bad time, sustaining several injuries, the effect of a mustard gas attack, and experiences that must have been traumatizing.

    When he travelled to America in 1920, press reports mentioned him as a British film actor, but there is no indication of what films he might have made before emigrating. 

    While maintaining his theatrical work, O’Davoren developed a parallel career as a largely uncredited character actor in films, making his debut in Winds of the Pampas (1927). He was in approaching sixty feature films, frequently playing a butler, which is slightly ironic, given his roots.

    Notable pictures in which O’Davoren played a small part include Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1937), Stella Dallas (1937), Four Men and a Prayer (1938) and Forever Amber (1947).

    O’Davoren was in three of MGM’s musicals: Going Hollywood, Million Dollar Mermaid and Brigadoon.

    He continued to live in California for almost thirty years after retiring at the age of 72.

  • Miki Morita

    Morita Mitsugi (1896-1985) was a Japanese character actor in Hollywood at a time when stereotyping was the order of the day and difficult to resist.

    Morita left Japan when he was eighteen and worked at a variety of jobs in the United States and Canada. Some sources claim he appeared in silent films, but the first appearance cited by the AFI catalogue is in 1933. He had a prominent role in Nagana (1933). In fact, it is understood that he was originally slated to play the Japanese research scientist Noguchi Hideo in a biopic, but the idea was dropped. Instead, he played second fiddle to Melvyn Douglas in a story about the fight to cure sleeping sickness.

    After that, Mikita was restricted to playing uncredited supporting roles, frequently as butlers, valets and assorted servants. He vigorously rejected a featured role in Marie Galante (1934) because he believed it showed Japan in a bad light.

    Morita was a gifted actor, and his brief appearances in films such as Front Page Woman (1935) and It Couldn’t Have Happened (1936) were singled out for mention by some reviewers. In even the smallest role, he would fight against the stereotype, for example, when engaging in jujitsu with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (1937).

    Miki Morita appeared as a florist in Going Hollywood at MGM.

  • Mary Lange

    Mary Thelma Lange (1912-73) travelled from Pennsylvania to New York City as a nineteen-year-old to join the Ziegfeld Follies. She was spotted by a Hollywood scout and invited to go West. 

    In Hollywood, Lange became a Goldwyn Girl, appearing in Roman Scandals (1933). She went on to play uncredited chorus girls in a dozen or so pictures for Goldwyn and a variety of other studios. For a change of pace, she was a lady in waiting in The Affairs of Cellini (1934).

    In 1938, Lange got married and gave up performing to raise a family.

    She appeared as chorus girls in three MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, Broadway Melody of 1936 and, back where she started, The Great Ziegfeld. 

  • Jane Keckley

    Jennifer L Corrie (1876-1963) gained considerable stage experience in stock companies and vaudeville before starting out in films in 1911. Her earliest appearances were in shorts, including a number of westerns, before her feature debut in The Parson of Panamint (1916).

    Keckley appeared in over 160 feature films and shorts, and was a regular in bit parts for Cecil B DeMille. She played uncredited character parts in The Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Magnificent Obsession (1935), Show Boat (1936), Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). She featured in dozens of ‘B’ westerns, ending her career in a Tim Holt programmer.

    Keckley showed up in just one MGM musical, as a teacher in Going Hollywood.

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