Norwegian-born Henry Olaf Hansen (1887-1960) made his first film appearance in 1911 and worked regularly for almost fifty years, most notably as a long-serving member of the John Ford Stock Company.
Tenbrook was one of the many doughboys in Marianne and subsequently made appearances in Naughty Marietta, Let Freedom Ring, Easter Parade, The Belle of New York and Singin’ in the Rain.
George Magrill (1900-52) was a bit-part player and occasional stunt performer whose work spanned cute cartoon animals and a range of henchmen, hooligans and thugs. When you accumulate around 500 films on your cv, it’s inevitable that some of them will be MGM musicals; in Magrill’s case, thirteen of them.
Magrill began with Marianne in 1929 and ended with Three Little Words in 1950. In between came New Moon, The Merry Widow, The Bohemian Girl, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Great Waltz, New Moon (again), Meet the People, Music for Millions, Yolanda and the Thief and Good News.
Sherry Hall (1892-1984) appeared in more than 250 features, almost always without credit.
His Metro musicals were Marianne, Hollywood Party, Student Tour, Here Comes the Band, San Francisco, Born to Dance, Hullabaloo, Words and Music, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Three Little Words and The Strip.
The actor born Julian La Faye (1906-79) became a successful second-tier star, notably alongside John Wayne in Flying Tigers (1942). He started his film career playing bits in MGM musicals: Marianne (doughboy), Devil-May-Care (Bonapartist), The Rogue Song (Bandit) and New Moon Russian soldier).
After developing his career, Carroll returned as straight man to the Marx Brothers in Go West, and went on to feature prominently in Lady Be Good, Rio Rita and Fiesta.
Carroll’s last appearance was in Orson Welles’s film maudit The Other Side of the Wind (1975, released 2018).
Drew Demorest (1893-1949) was a small-part player who on occasion wore costumes designed by his wife, Henrietta Frazer.
Demorest made appearances in The Broadway Melody (uncredited, but fittingly playing Turpe the costumer), Marianne (as a doughboy), They Learned About Women (with onsceen credit as Edwards), Free and Easy (as Robert Montgomery’s valet), Children of Pleasure (as a songwriter) and as a French officer in The Firefly. All of these were uncredited.
Joseph White Farnham (1884-1931) is the permanent holder of two cinematic records. He was the only person to receive an Academy Award for writing title cards, for The Fair Co-Ed (1927), Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Telling the World (both 1928). And he was the first winner of an Academy Award to die.
Farnham’s more ignominious claim to fame is that it was he who reduced Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) to the bowdlerized version we have today. Von Stroheim said it “was like seeing a corpse in a graveyard…I found a thin part of the backbone and a little bone of the shoulder”.
Farnham’s brief career in talking pictures was less prestigious and/or deplorable, but did include work on six Metro musicals. He wrote a skit for The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and titles for Marianne (both without credit). He then contributed dialogue to So This Is College, Montana Moon, Good News and Love in the Rough. Farnham also appeared as himself in Free and Easy.
Ernie Alexander (1890-1961) was typical of Hollywood’s hardworking bit players. Out of over 200 mostly uncredited performances, sixteen were in Metro musicals.
Beginning as a doughboy in Marianne, Alexander was a student in So This Is College, a servant in Hollywood Party, and a townsman in Babes in Toyland.
Alexander’s contribution to Here Comes the Band was lost in the edit, but he came back with an elevator operator in Rose-Marie and a racetrack usher in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
He was a revolutionary in The Great Waltz, a photographer in Broadway Serenade and an expectant father in Little Nellie Kelly. He played a pageboy in Lady Be Good and stagehands in Ship Ahoy and For Me and My Gal.
He delivered flowers in Du Barry Was a Lady and finally acquired a name as Charlie the bellboy in I Dood It.
Finally, Alexander was back in uniform as a commissionaire in Swing Fever.
William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures was essentially a vanity project for the production of films starring Marion Davies. That films like Marianne are far more than vanity projects is largely owing to Davies’s talents as a comic performer.
Marianne is a sound remake of a silent film, also starring Davies, that had been made only a few months earlier. Apart from her brief appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 , it was Davies’s talking debut and, whatever the merits of the film, it is a small triumph for her personally. She overcame the stammer which had made her fearful of speaking on screen. More than that, she uses a French accent, sings, and shares screen time with a pig. She even demonstrates her skills as a mimic, impersonating Maurice Chevalier and Sarah Bernhardt.
The film itself is overlong at approaching two hours, but technically more proficient than many contemporaneous talkies. It is also the first Metro musical to combine a non-backstage setting with a bespoke songlist. (Hallelujah was intended by King Vidor to include only traditional songs and its two Irving Berlin numbers were included against his wishes.) Three songwriting partnerships contributed these songs: Ahlert and Turk (four numbers), Klages and Greer (two), and Freed and Brown (one).
Marianne is not an integrated musical in the sophisticated sense of the Freed unit’s output in the 1950s, but its musical numbers do arise naturally from the action. The title song, ‘Marianne,’ is performed three times. André sings it in French and the words specifically relate to his departure and his wish that Marianne remain faithful to him. Later, the words are spoken in English by Marianne herself, to explain why she cannot go with Stagg. Finally, Stagg sings to Marianne, saying “The words could be mine as well as his, couldn’t they?”. This is a sophisticated use of a song to develop the story.
Similarly, ‘Just You, Just Me’ has lyrics appropriate to Stagg’s final attempt to persuade Marianne to go with him. He sings the love song to her alone, but while surrounded by dancing couples singing a completely different song. Again, director Robert Z Leonard is employing a sophisticated technique for the period, utilizing sound rather than simply recording it and incorporating a song to move the story forward.
Elsewhere, Cliff Edwards and Benny Rubin make the first of their many appearances as vocal and comic support to a musical’s star players. Edwards subsequently had a chart hit with a recording of ‘Just You, Just Me’.
Songs
| Songs | Songwriters | Performers |
| Marianne | Fred E Ahlert, Roy Turk | George Baxter; Marion Davies; Lawrence Gray |
| When I See My Sugar | Fred E Ahlert, Roy Turk | Cliff Edwards |
| Blondy | Arthur Freed, Nacio Herb Brown | Lawrence Gray |
| Just You, Just Me | Ray Klages, Jesse Greer | Lawrence Gray; Marion Davies; Cliff Edwards |
| Hang On to Me | Ray Klages, Jesse Greer | Cliff Edwards |
| Oo-La-La-La-La | Fred E Ahlert, Roy Turk | Marion Davies |
| The Girl from Noochateau | Fred E Ahlert, Roy Turk | Benny Rubin |
| Louise | Fred E Ahlert, Roy Turk | Marion Davies |
Karl Max Schneefuss (1892-1962), who worked under the name Charles Maxwell, started his career at MGM as assistant to William Axt, compositing additional music for Marianne.
Most of Maxwell’s career in musicals was spent as an orchestrator, in which capacity he worked on The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady,The Cat and the Fiddle,The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Here Comes the Band , A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie,The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, The Firefly and New Moon.
