The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: I Married an Angel

  • Edwin B Willis

    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:

    Broadway to Hollywood

    Stage Mother (ID)

    Dancing Lady (ID)

    Going Hollywood (ID)

    The Cat and the Fiddle (ID)

    Hollywood Party (ID)

    Student Tour (AAD)

    The Merry Widow (AAD)

    The Night is Young (AAD/SD)

    Naughty Marietta (AAD)

    Reckless (AAD)

    Broadway Melody of 1936 (AAD)

    Here Comes the Band (AAD)

    A Night at the Opera (AAD)

    Rose Marie (AAD)

    The Great Ziegfeld (AAD)

    San Francisco (AAD)

    Born to Dance (AAD)

    Maytime (AAD)

    A Day at the Races (AAD)

    Broadway Melody of 1938 (AAD)

    The Firefly (AAD)

    Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (AAD)

    Rosalie (AAD)

    Everybody Sing (AAD)

    The Girl of the Golden West (AAD)

    Listen, Darling (AAD)

    The Great Waltz (AAD)

    Sweethearts

    Honolulu

    Let Freedom Ring

    Ice Follies of 1939

    The Wizard of Oz

    Babes in Arms

    At the Circus

    Balalaika

    Broadway Melody of 1940

    New Moon

    Strike Up the Band

    Hullabaloo (Associate Set Decorator, uncredited)

    Bitter Sweet

    Little Nellie Kelly

    Go West

    Free and Easy

    Ziegfeld Girl

    The Big Store

    Lady Be Good

    The Chocolate Soldier

    Smilin’ Through

    Babes on Broadway

    Born to Sing

    Ship Ahoy

    Rio Rita

    I Married an Angel

    Cairo

    Panama Hattie

    For Me and My Gal

    Seven Sweethearts

    Cabin in the Sky

    Presenting Lily Mars

    Du Barry was a Lady

    Best Foot Forward

    Thousands Cheer

    Swing Fever

    Girl Crazy

    Broadway Rhythm

    Two Girls and a Sailor

    Meet the People

    Bathing Beauty

    Meet Me in St Louis

    Music for Millions

    Thrill of a Romance

    Anchors Aweigh

    Ziegfeld Follies

    Yolanda and the Thief

    The Harvey Girls

    Two Sister from Boston

    Easy to Wed

    Holiday in Mexico

    No Leave, No Love

    Till the Clouds Roll By

    It Happened in Brooklyn

    Living in a Big Way

    Fiesta

    The Unfinished Dance

    Good News

    Summer Holiday

    On an Island With You

    The Pirate

    Easter Parade

    A Date with Judy

    Luxury Liner

    The Kissing Bandit

    Words and Music

    Take Me Out to the Ball Game

    The Barkeleys of Broadway

    Neptune’s Daughter

    In the Good Old Summertime

    That Midnight Kiss

    On the Town

    Nancy Goes to Rio

    Annie Get Your Gun

    Three Little Words

    Duchess of Idaho

    The Toast of New Orleans

    Summer Stock

    Two Weeks with Love

    Pagan Love Song

    Grounds for Marriage

    Royal Wedding

    The Great Caruso

    Excuse My Dust

    Rich, Young and Pretty

    Show Boat

    An American in Paris (winning an Oscar)

    The Strip

    Texas Carnival

    The Belle of New York

    Singin’ in the Rain

    Skirts Ahoy

    Lovely to Look At

    The Merry Widow

    Because You’re Mine

    Everything I Have is Yours

    Lili

    I Love Melvin

    Small Town Girl

    Dangerous When Wet

    The Band Wagon

    Latin Lovers

    The Affairs of Dobie Gillis

    Torch Song

    Kiss Me Kate

    Easy to  Love

    Rose Marie

    The Student Prince

    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

    Brigadoon

    Athena 

    Deep in My Heart

    Jupiter’s Darling

    Hit the Deck

    The Glass Slipper

    Interrupted Melody

    Love Me or Leave Me

    It’s Always Fair Weather

    Kismet

    Meet Me in Las Vegas

    High Society

    The Opposite Sex

    Ten Thousand Bedrooms

    Silk Stockings

    Les Girls

  • Robert Greig

    Australian Robert Greig (1879-1958) played a film butler on at least twenty-three occasions, which is as close as you can get to being a butler without actually butling. He also played valets, doormen and at least two major domos. 

    More importantly, Greig was a key member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, appearing in six of the director’s films, including The Lady Eve (1941, as Burrows, the butler). In Sullivan’s Travels (1941, again playing a butler named Burrows), he was given a key speech, commenting on his employer’s plan to disguise himself as a poor man: “Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned”.

    After a successful career in Australia, Greig had emigrated to the United States and acted on Broadway. He repeated his role as Hives the butler, with the Marx Brothers, in Animal Crackers when the play was filmed in 1930. He worked with them again in Horse Feathers (1932).

    Greig worked with Lubitsch on Love Me Tonight and Trouble in Paradise (both 1932) and in top-class screwball comedies such as Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Easy Living (1937). He stepped back to the Revolutionary War with John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and to the ancient Middle East in The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

    Robert Greig appeared in four MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Rose-Marie (the only credited role), The Great Ziegfeld (as the protagonist’s butler) and I Married an Angel.

  • Nelson Eddy

    Nelson Ackerman Eddy (1901-67) was one of MGM’s first great musical stars. An operatic baritone, he appeared in fifteen musicals, playing the lead in all but the first three. In eight of them, he was partnered with Jeanette MacDonald.

    From a poor background, Eddy was a boy soprano who went on to have various jobs while indulging his love of music. He engaged in amateur productions, was noticed by the press and, by the age of 23, was working for the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company, and also sang with the Savoy Company. 

    Eddy spent some time in Europe, acquiring voice training, then returned to the USA and concentrated on concert performances. He was appearing in Los Angeles when Hollywood knocked on his door. He signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the studio did not initially know what to do with him. He made his debut in Handlebars (1933), a musical short, and sang without credit in Broadway to Hollywood. In the same year he appeared as himself in Dancing Lady and Student Tour.

    Then MGM struck gold.Just before his option with Metro ran out, he was teamed with MacDonald in Naughty Marietta. The picture made a sizeable profit and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. This led to their re-teaming in Rose-Marie, Maytime, Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon, Bitter Sweet and I Married an Angel.

    In addition, Eddy starred in Rosalie, Let Freedom Ring, Balalaika and The Chocolate Soldier. He only appeared in a handful of films after leaving MGM, most notably The Phantom of the Opera (1943) at Universal. His last film was Northwest Frontier (1947), made at Republic and partnering him again with his Balalaika co-star, Ilona Massey. He continued to give live performances for the rest of his life, dying after a stroke experienced while on stage.

    Not even his best friends would pretend that Nelson Eddy could act; he was stiff, with a very limited range of line readings. But there is always something engaging about his performances, which always seem good-humoured and lacking in self-importance. This is especially the case in his films with Jeanette MacDonald, which constituted the Golden Age of MGM’s operetta cycle.

  • 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.

  • W S Van Dyke II

    The reputation of Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II (1889-1943) as ‘One-Shot Woody’ was what enabled him to direct over ninety films in twenty-five years, half of them during the sound era.

    Van Dyke’s mother was an actor, leading to his own early appearances on the stage as a child. Constantly on tour, he claimed to have attended schools in every state. 

    He undertook many jobs during his early years as an adult, before obtaining his first job in the film industry in 1915. He began pretty much at the top, as one of a number of assistant directors under D W Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915). Two years later, after having written a number of films, he directed his first feature, The Land of Long Shadows (1917), based on his own screenplay. 

    Van Dyke’s work in silent films was prolific, but undistinguished. It was as a director of sound pictures that he came into his own. He travelled to Tahiti in 1928 to make White Shadows in the South Seas, MGM’s first feature with recorded sound (music and sound effects). Two years later he shot Trader Horn (1931) mostly in Africa, with some dialogue scenes reshot in Hollywood. 

    Van Dyke went on to become a mainstay of MGM’s production schedule, reputedly Louis B Mayer’s favourite (because most efficient) director. He directed the first Johnny Weissmuller film as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), The Thin Man (1934) and three of its sequels, and Marie Antoinette (1938). 

    He made nine musicals for MGM and, after The Cuban Love Song, all of them starred either Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, or both of them together: Naughty Marietta,(which he also produced), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (also produced by Van Dyke), Rosalie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, I Married and Angel and Cairo.

    Van Dyke was also used regularly to direct reshoots or new scenes for other directors’ pictures, and he did this for Broadway Melody of 1936 and the 1940 New Moon, again with MacDonald and Eddy.

    Woody Van Dyke was a Christian Scientist and, when he learned in 1943 that he was terminally ill, refused medical treatment and took his own life.

  • Bee Stephens

    Erma Beatrice Stephens (1907-88) played a chorus girl in her first film, After Midnight (1927), and she played a chorus girl in her final film, 21 years later (When My Baby Smiles at Me [1948]).

    She also played a chorus girl or dancer in the majority of the fifty-odd pictures that came in between. She was well equipped for this as a career, having begun her dance training aged three.

    Stephens appeared in two musicals for MGM: Flying High and I Married an Angel. 

    After leaving show business behind, Stephens had a long and successful career working for Procter & Gamble.

  • Frank Reicher

    Franz Reichert (1875-1965) was a German actor and director who found his greatest success in the United States. 

    Reicher first appeared on Broadway in 1899, and made his screen debut in 1915, the same year in which he directed his first picture .He then concentrated on directing until 1921, after which he mostly acted in character parts. His most notable role was as Captain Englehorn in King Kong, a role he repeated in Son of Kong (both 1933).

    Reicher acted in three MGM musicals: A Lady’s Morals, I Married an Angel and Song of Love. He was also one of the directors of Wir schalten um auf Hollywood (1931), an alternative, German-language version of The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

  • Alphonse Martell

    French-born Alphonse Martell (1890-1976) had a forty-year career as a character actor in Hollywood, making over 250 films and many television appearances.

    In 1933, Martell became a Poverty Row auteur when he wrote and directed Tarnished Youth (also known as Gigolettes of Paris). 

    Martell played a variety of parts, but his speciality was waiters, in which role he made at least 80 appearances, as well as cropping up many times as a maitre d’. 

    Alphonse acted in twelve Metro musicals across three decades. A Lady’s Morals was followed by Student Tour, A Night at the Opera, Everybody Sing, Broadway Melody of 1940, I Married an Angel, Bathing Beauty, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Rich, Young and Pretty, Show Boat, Lovely To Look At and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

  • Tyler Brooke

    Victor Hugo de Bierre (1886-1943) was an American citizen by virtue of the fact that he was born three hours after his French parents entered the country. He had worked as a bank clerk and begun training to be a lawyer when he decided to give it all up and take to the stage. 

    Having worked as a comedian and dancer, Brooke was appearing in No, No Nanette when Hal Roach signed him in 1925 to work in comedy shorts. He transitioned to features in 1928 with Howard Hawks’s Fazil, and made the move into talking pictures without any problems.

    Brooke appeared in six MGM musicals, beginning with Madam Satan. He was uncredited in New Moon and The Merry Widow, then played the dentist in Here Comes the Band. He was uncredited again in the Wizard of Oz and I Married an Angel. 

    Brooke took his own life in 1943, and the press at the time claimed he had been depressed about unemployment, not having worked since making Little Old New York. IMDb lists eleven appearances following this, including I Married an Angel, so the reports of inactivity may have been exaggerated.

  • Sidney D’Albrook

    Sidney D’Albrook (1886-1948) notched up over 170 film appearances. He started making shorts in 1914, but his first feature was The Gilded Cage (1916). (I draw the last-named film to attention only because it features a character called Lesbia the Goose Girl.) He also appeared as Ambrose, the brother-in-law, in Hal Roach’s series of shorts about the Spat family.

    When the silent period came to a close, most of D’Albrook’s appearances were uncredited. These included five Metro musicals: Call of the Flesh, A Night at the Opera, The Great Waltz, I Married an Angel and The Unfinished Dance.

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