The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Madam Satan

  • Judith Arlen

    Laurette Elizabeth Rutherford (1914-68) was the older sister of actor Ann Rutherford, who played one of the O’Hara sisters in Gone with the Wind (1939). Her parents were an opera singer and Lucille Mansfield, a silent film actor.

    Arlen began her acting career with an appearance in MGM’s Madam Satan. She was in four more films, credited in the last two. Though chosen as a WAMPAS Baby Star, she had to watch her younger sister gain greater success. Arlen changed her name to Judith Rutherford and pursued a career in radio and as a recording artist. She also performed as a leading lady in local theatre.

  • Margaret Swope

    Margaret Swope (dates unknown) was a stage actor who worked in both regional theatres and on Broadway during the 1920s and 30s. She was in the original production of Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End in 1934.

    Swope appears to have made only two film appearances. She was uncredited in Madam Satan, then had a featured role in The Last Outpost (1935) for Paramount.

  • Nora Lane

    Nora Schilling (1905-48) was approached by a casting agent asking if she wanted to be in pictures and, unlike many others, actually got a career out of it.

    Lane appeared in at least 80 films in a relatively short career. She made her debut in 1927 and was soon playing lead roles. One of rare uncredited appearances was in Madam Satan.

    She appeared in many westerns, including four Hopalong Cassidy pictures. In Western Frontier (1935), Lane even got to play the villainous leader of an outlaw gang.

    Sadly, Nora Lane’s husband died unexpectedly in 1948 and she committed suicide a few weeks later.

  • Ann Roth

    Ann Roth (1913-79) performed in a vaudeville act with her sister Lillian, to whom she was very similar, but her acting career never took off in the same way.

    Ann appeared in a handful of films, including some that starred Lillian, Animal Crackers, Madam Satan (where she acts some serious panic as the zeppelin starts to go down) and Sea Legs (all 1930).

  • Earl McCarthy

    Francis Earl McCarthy (1906-33) was a bit-part player in Hollywood from 1925, when he started in comedy shorts for a Poverty Row studio.

    He had a run in 1927-28 playing Hairbreadth Harry in a series of shorts based on the comic strip character. McCarthy was playing solid supporting roles in features at the time of his early death, apparently caused by a heart attack. 

    McCarthy was uncredited as one of the zeppelin revellers in Madam Satan.

  • Katherine DeMille

    Canadian-born Katherine Lester DeMille (1911-85) was in an orphanage in 1922 when she was adopted by Cecil B DeMille. This led to the good fortune of being given the role of a princess in a major Hollywood picture (The Crusades [1935]) as a birthday present.

    DeMille began her acting career on the stage, and worked as a film extra under the name Kay Marsh, in an attempt to avoid nepotism. This did not prevent her father from casting her as one of Henry VIII’s wives in Madam Satan.

    Her birth mother was Italian, and DeMille’s dark features helped to secure her the role of Pancho Villa’s wife in Viva Villa! (1934). She secured a contract at Paramount and, later, at Twentieth Century-Fox. Her career was unspectacular, but she tended to garner good reviews, and certainly got by on more than her family connections. She rarely played the lead, but one of the exceptions was her last credited role in The Judge (1949), made for Ida Lupino’s Emerald Productions

  • Bud Geary

    Sigsbee Maine Geary (1898-1946) was a character who made over 250 screen appearances, almost all without credit. His credited roles were at the start of his career, and included Will Scarlett in Robin Hood (1922), where he was billed as Maine Geary.

    During the sound era, Geary played in mostly low-budget pictures and serials (including many westerns), and maintained a parallel career as a stunt performer. Geary was the prison guard escorting James Cagney to the electric chair in Angels with Dirty Faces (1939), and a storm trooper in The Great Dictator (1940).

    Bud Geary had uncredited roles in seven MGM musicals: Madam Satan, Flying High, Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco and Ship Ahoy. 

  • Sethma Williams

    Sethma Williams (1915-2014) was a dancer who had a brief career, then gave it all up to raise a family.

    One of her earliest appearances must have been Madam Satan, in which she danced aboard the zeppelin, aged about 15.

    Williams acted in a handful of films during the 1940s and early 50s, culminating with the role of a dancer in My Favorite Spy (1951).

  • Rita and Rubin

    Dancer Jessie K Bailey (1913-??) and her husband, Ernest Benjamin Harris Rubins (1905-84), were what Variety called a “class adagio routine” under the name Rita and Rubin.

    They married in 1929, when Rita was sixteen, and appeared in a number of films during the 1930s and early 40s. Two of these were Madam Satan, in which they were part of the ‘Ballet Mécanique’, and A Night at the Opera.

  • June Knight

    Margaret Rose Valliket (1913-87) is the mysterious Marie Valli, whose sole credit on IMDb is Madam Satan, playing, quite aptly, Confusion.

    Shortly afterwards, she changed her name to June Knight and went on to a successful career on Broadway and, to a lesser extent, in Hollywood. Her one other MGM musical was Broadway Melody of 1936, in which she was the first person to sing ‘I Gotta Feelin’ You’re Foolin’’.

    Knight made a habit of launching standards, introducing ‘Just One of Those Things’ and ‘Begin the Beguine’ in Broadway shows. She also sang Cole Porter’s ‘A Picture of Me Without You’, with its memorable couplet “Picture Central Park without a sailor/Picture Mr Lord minus Mr Taylor”.

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