It was in the nature of classical Hollywood that an actor could appear in 25 feature films, work with actors like James Cagney, Fred Astaire and Barbara Stanwyck, and under directors including Michael Curtiz, Frank Capra, Jacques Tourneur, Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk, yet almost never play a character with a name, let alone a credit.
Such was the career of Tom Costello (1892-1954), who appeared briefly in In Gay Madrid.
Canadian-born Nicholas Caruso Cosentino (1906-59) made appearances in three films between 1928 and 1932. The middle one was In Gay Madrid, as one of the students in the House of Troy.
It can be inferred that Bruce Coleman (1910-78) had issues with his weight from the fact proffered by IMDb that his nickname was Chubby. Moreover, in his debut film, In Gay Madrid, he played a character named Corpulento.
Coleman only appeared in one other picture, and apparently spent most of his life in California.
David Charles Scott (1911-83)was an actor who, aged 19, had a featured role as Ernesto in In Gay Madrid. He is known to have made two other features, released in 1935 and 1936.
What Scott did for the remaining forty-seven years of his life is unknown.
Herbert Clark (1904-63) was a Broadway actor who appeared in three films in 1929-30. One of these was In Gay Madrid, in which he played the student Octavio.
Clark had the misfortune to become engaged in 1926, only to be informed by his father that his fiancée was, in fact, his half-sister. The vital information was initially provided in a telegram: “Katherine Clark is your sister. Am mailing letter containing full explanation”.
Irma Margaret Kobiela (1917-2005) worked in New York, and later in Hollywood, as a child actor. Her career lasted from 1922 to 1933.
Price had the featured role of Jacinta, who is tied up and locked in a wardrobe (!) in In Gay Madrid.
In 1924, a newspaper said of former stage actor William V Mong (1875-1940): “That middle initial of William V. Mong’s name must indeed stand for versatility. For in his sixteen years upon the screen he has played hundreds of characters, ranging from heroes to villains of deepest dye, all nationalities.”
This does not tell half the story. As well as accumulating over 200 acting appearances on screen, Mong wrote and/or directed dozens of films in the 1910s and early 20s. In the early days, he established the first scenario department at the Selig Company (“a second-hand desk, two pencils and a pen”).
As a sideline, he had a ranch and bred pedigree pigs.
One of Mong’s many credits was as the father of the heroine in Metro’s In Gay Madrid.
Playing Auntie Em in the first screen adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) was the first of over 200 appearances by Eugenie Besserer (1868-1934).
Born in France, Besserer was raised in Canada. Left an orphan, she ran away and found an uncle who lived in New York, and who agreed to take her in.
Besserer worked on the legitimate stage for a number of years, and was 42 when she made her first film. Perhaps for that reason, she developed something of a specialism in playing mothers, culminating in the role of Mrs Rabinowitz, Al Jolson’s mother, in The Jazz Singer (1927).
In her one MGM musical, Besserer played Doña Generosa, matriarch of the House of Troy in In Gay Madrid.
In Gay Madrid is a strange title for a film that is almost entirely set in Santiago, over 300 miles from Madrid, typical of MGM’s cavalier attitude to naming its earliest musicals. It is a campus musical with a Spanish setting, like Good News with duelling.
The film reunited Ramon Novarro and Dorothy Jordan immediately after Devil-May-Care (they would work together once more in Call of the Flesh). Novarro was by now proving himself a very competent actor in talking pictures, though his accent sometimes throws off his line readings. His early scene with Claude King, playing his father, is nicely underplayed to comedic effect.
Jordan’s performance is less satisfying, all played on one note and with long pauses. But then most of her scenes are stolen by the much lovelier performances of Novarro and Beryl Mercer, playing her aunt.
The worst piece of casting is Lottice Howell as Goyita. Howell’s voice is okay, but she is nobody’s idea of a seductive nightclub singer. It is unsurprising that this was her last musical outing for MGM.
Robert Z Leonard’s direction is much more confident than it was in Marianne, with a less static camera. He continues the tendency, begun in Devil-My-Care, for Ramon Novarro’s musical films to be integrated. With the exception of Lotice Howell’s opening nightclub number, all of the songs are performed in non-theatrical settings to non-diegetic music, and arise naturally from the actions of the characters. All have lyrics that reflect on or develop the narrative.
One of the best sequences is the garden scene where Ricardo helps his friend (a large young man with the unlikely name of Corpulento) to serenade a girl. The action takes place within a large three-dimensional space and Leonard’s camera placement ensures that we always know where we are and whose point of view we are seeing.
The Ahlert-Turk and Stothart-Grey partnerships provided the words and music, with the latter pair being joined by Xavier Cugat, who would later make a successful series of appearances in front of the camera.
Francesc d’Assís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu (or Xavier Cugat i Mingall for short, 1900-1990), was one of the more idiosyncratic performers to work on musicals at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, reliably introducing an element of camp to every film he appeared in.
Born in Catalonia, Cugat and his family emigrated first to Cuba, and then to the United States in 1915. His beginnings in show business were as a classical violinist. He took time out to work as a cartoonist, and then formed his own band, which ended up performing at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Specializing in Latin music, Cugat, clutching his signature chihuahua while conducting or performing, became known as the ‘King of Rumba’.
Cugat’s first involvement in a Metro musical was behind the scenes, working with Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey on a couple of numbers for In Gay Madrid. Fourteen years later he made his debut on screen for Metro (having made a few musicals at Paramount), in Two Girls and a Sailor. Here, as on every other occasion, he played a fictionalized version of the band leader Xavier Cugat.
Cugat appeared in four Esther Williams vehicles: Bathing Beauty, On an Island with You, This Time for Keeps and Neptune’s Daughter. He also supported Jane Powell in Holiday in Mexico, A Date with Judy and Luxury Liner, and showed up in No Leave, No Love.
