The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Madam Satan

  • Madam Satan

    Some Thoughts

    Madam Satan is a fascinating film. Fascinating in the sense that, while it is really not very good at all, it is almost impossible to look away from. And the nagging thought, while watching it, is: what were they thinking?

    Angela (Kay Johnson) as Madam Satan, vamps it up for an unsuspecting Bob (Reginal Denny in a miniskirt)

    This only applies to the second half, of course, because Madam Satan is a little like two different films spliced together. The first fifty minutes or so are the kind of sex comedy which had been so successful for Cecil B DeMille earlier in his career; films like Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). This is nowhere as good as those earlier films, but DeMille was seeking to find his feet in the sound era, following the melodrama of his first talkie, Dynamite (1929), by reverting to familiar territory.

    The second part of Madam Satan is something else entirely, the strangest musical made at MGM before Yolanda and the Thief came along fifteen years later to give it some competition. But while Yolanda is an extremely well-made oddity, Madam Satan is a farrago directed by someone who did not know one end of a musical from the other.

    Trixie (Lillian Roth) parachutes into a men’s sauna and doesn’t seem too put out

    Madam Satan is, considering the money spent on it and the records of the people involved in making it, largely incompetent. For example, the film was edited by DeMille regular Anne Bauchens, who cut all of his greatest films. But Madam Satan is filled empty space, a screen where nothing happens. And there is a moment during the sequence in Trixie’s apartment where Angela goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind her. After three seconds, the door clearly starts to reopen, but there is a cut to a shot inside the bedroom, showing Angela looking out with the door wide open. It is a jarring moment.

    Reginald Denny was a perfectly competent actor, but his line readings in Madam Satan are laboured, especially alongside the manic overacting of Roland Young, who gives the impression of being somewhere he would rather not be and desperately trying to act his way out of it.

    But it is in the extended party scene aboard the zeppelin that Madam Satan achieves genuine lunacy. The entrance of the revellers, the Ballet Mecanique, the auction–none of it makes any sense, and is clumsily staged, with choreography that is saved from looking as poor only because it is so badly photographed by, of all people, Hal Rosson.

    The sex comedy is picks up again at 1500 feet, only to be interrupted as almost the entire cast parachutes to earth, and the death of the Jazz Age is delivered in heavy-handed symbolism.

    The zeppelin awaits the arrival of the revellers, in one of Madam Satan‘s more interesting shots

    And yet, I have watched Madam Satan four times and will probably do so again. Its special effects are genuinely impressive, and its overall effect is mesmerizing. At its heart lie the puzzles of why Angela is wasting her time on an idiot like Bob, and why DeMille did not just try a musical version of The Squaw Man. Oh, the humanity.

  • Cullen Tate

    Cullen Battle Tate (1886-1947) spent most of his twenty-five year career working as an assistant director, starting with Cecil B DeMille’s The Little American (1917). He went on to work with DeMille on a number of other pictures, including Madam Satan.

    Cullen directed three features in 1924 and 1926, and is cited as having co-directed, without credit, My Heart Belongs to Daddy (1942), alongside credited director Robert Siodmak.

  • LeRoy Prinz

    The father of LeRoy Jerome Prinz (1895-1983) owned a dance academy, which might be assumed to have contributed to his son’s career as a dance director. But Jack Cole, who might be considered to know, apparently asserted that Prinz “didn’t know a bloody thing about dancing”. Most of the dances Prinz directed for Madam Satan would seem to support that view, the exception being ‘Low Down’, which is performed by Lillian Roth and LeRoy’s brother Eddie, which it is possible to surmise was choreographed by Eddie himself.

    Knowledge of terpsichore notwithstanding, LeRoy Prinz directed the dances for scores of pictures at Paramount and, later, Warner Bros. His approach was conservative and generally showed little interest in dance skills.

    Prinz was known as a shameless self publicist, claiming that early in life he was a cabin boy, a test pilot (he did serve with distinction as a pilot in the First World War), a dancer in a bordello, an adviser to the Mexican government, and had a working relationship with gangsters including Al Capone. 

  • James Basevi

    The name of James Basevi (1890-1962) is probably less familiar today than that of Cedric Gibbons, but he was, like his erstwhile colleague, one of the most influential of all art directors during the classical Hollywood era. Basevi was to 20th Century-Fox, what Gibbons was to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

    James Badevi was British, but emigrated to Canada, then the USA, after serving in the First World War. He gave up his profession as an architect to design films, joining MGM at its formation in 1924. One of his earliest successes was The Big Parade (1925), where he designed battle sequences that drew on his own wartime experiences. 

    In the 1930s, he was put in charge of MGM’s special effects work, and in this capacity contributed to two musicals: Madam Satan and, most significantly, San Francisco, for which he designed “one of the truly great cinematic illusions”, the earthquake sequence.

    After moving to Fox, Basevi soon established one of the great partnerships between a designer and a director, when he worked with John Ford on The Hurricane (1937). He was the art director on a further seven Ford pictures, including some of his greatest westerns: My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master (1950) and (his final film) The Searchers (1956).

    Basevi also made remarkable contributions to two Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1940s, Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945).

  • Harold Rosson

    Harold G Rosson (1895-1988), commonly known as Hal, was one of Hollywood’s most prestigious cinematographers. He filmed over 150 pictures in a career spanning more than fifty years.

    Rosson began his career in 1908 as a teenager, acting bit-parts for the Vitagraph Studios in his native New York. He subsequently worked for Famous Players-Lasky as a general dogbody, then moved to Hollywood to work as a cinematographer for MGM’s predecessor, Metro Pictures.

    In the 1920s, Rosson frequently photographed Marion Davies, Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. Then he signed a contract with MGM, where he spent the bulk of his career. He had ambitions to be a director, but studio executive Eddie Mannix told him he was far too good as a cameraman to ever be allowed to direct.

    Rosson shot Jean Harlow in four films, and was briefly married to her.

    Rosson photographed twelve MGM musicals, including two of the most venerated, The Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain. He started out with Madam Satan, claiming he learned more fromDeMille than anyone else in the business. He went on to shoot The Prodigal, The Cuban Love Song, The Cat and the Fiddle, No Leave, No Love, Living in a Big Way, On the Town, I Love Melvin and Dangerous When Wet. He also did uncredited work on The Chocolate Soldier. 

  • Mitchell Leisen

    Fans of classical Hollywood films will know James Mitchell Leisen (1898-1972) as the director of Easy Living (1937), Midnight (1939), Hold Back the Dawn (1941) and Frenchman’s Creek (1944). Some may recall that he was the director who drove Billy Wilder to direct his own scripts, so that he did not have to watch Leisen doing it.

    What is less well remembered is Mitchell Leisen’s work as an art director. He worked in this capacity several times with Cecil B DeMille, including on Madam Satan, in collaboration with Cedric Gibbons. He also acted as an assistant director on that picture. 

  • Percy Wenrich

    Percy Wenrich (1880-1952) began writing melodies for fun as a teenager and had his first work self-published at the age of 17. Later on, others were moved to publish his compositions, which supplemented his income as a for-hire pianist. His first really successful song came in 1908/9, and within a few years had written the male quartet standard ‘Moonlight Bay’. 

    Wenrich did not write much directly for films, though ‘Moonlight Bay’ is frequently used as incidental music. Abe Lyman and his Orchestra perform ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ in Madam Satan (marching doughboys had sung it briefly in Marianne) and Mickey Rooney dances to ‘Moonlight Bay’ in Babes in Arms. 

  • John Howard Lawson

    John Howard Lawson (1894-1977) is usually discussed today as one of the Hollywood Ten, the group of Hollywood professionals, mostly writers, who were imprisoned for contempt of congress. Newsreel footage of Lawson’s appearance before HUAC, with J Parnell Thomas pounding the gavel and shouting “That is not the question, that is not the question” is the one most frequently played when the McCarthy Era is under discussion. And, unlike his nine colleagues, Lawson’s career never recovered from the blacklist; as he said, “I’m much more notorious, and extremely proud of that”.

    Before HUAC, however, Lawson was a celebrated playwright and screenwriter, and one of the original organizers of the Screen Writers Guild. It was shortly after signing a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that Lawson worked, without credit, on the screenplay for Madam Satan.

  • Elsie Janis

    It is difficult to attach a label to Elsie Jane Bierbower (1889-1956). She was, amongst other things, a stage and screen actor, a singer, a screenwriter, a lyricist, NBC’s first female announcer, an author, and one of the first people to entertain troops on the frontline, when she became known as ‘the sweetheart of the American Expeditionary Force’.

    As ‘Baby Elsie’, Janis started singing at church aged two and a half. She made her stage debut aged six, in a professional production of East Lynne. Next came vaudeville, where she demonstrated her skill at impersonating celebrities. In 1906, she appeared on Broadway for the first time. By 1914, Janis was writing songs for herself and for other performers, including Vernon and Irene Castle. 

    After the United States joined in the First World War, Janis  and a small troupe toured the battle zones; she even learned some French so she could entertain French troops. 

    She wrote a memoir in 1925, and by 1930 was writing for the cinema. She worked on the screenplay for Madam Satan, as well as contributing songs written in collaboration with Jack King.

    During the Second World War, Janis toured for the troops again, even performing with Bob Hope, who was following where she had led.

    Show business glamour was maintained to the very end. When Janis died in 1956, her friend Mary Pickford was at her bedside. 

  • Jeanie MacPherson

    Abbie Jean MacPherson (1886-1946) acted in over 140 silent films and directed a couple, but is remembered for her work as a screenwriter, and in particular for writing 30 of Cecil B DeMille’s pictures.

    MacPherson made her debut in 1908 in D W Griffith’s The Fatal Hour, and amassed all-but-one of her acting credits between then and 1917. In 1913, at the age of only 27, she wrote, directed and starred in The Tarantula, playing a Mexican young woman with a psychopathic bent.

    After joining the Lasky Studio and acting in a couple of films for DeMille, he persuaded her to concentrate on writing. This led to, amongst other titles, Old Wives for New (1918), Male and Female (1919), The Ten Commandments (1923), The Plainsman (1936) and Union Pacific (1939).

    One of the DeMille pictures worked on by MacPherson was Madam Satan. Not her finest hour, but possibly her craziest. 

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