The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Million Dollar Mermaid

  • Adrienne D’Ambricourt

    Adrienne Dumontier (1878-1957) had a successful career on the French stage prior to the First World War, working at the Comédie-Française. She emigrated to the United States after the war, and by 1922 was active on Broadway.

    D’Ambricourt made a few silent films at New York studios, but travelled to Hollywood, along with many others, in 1929, starting out with a featured role in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). She went on to play French character roles, often uncredited, in around seventy pictures. These included Design for Living (1933), Peter Ibbetson (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), The Song of Bernadette (1943) and To Have and Have Not (1944).

    During the early 1930s, D’Ambricourt also featured prominently in French-language versions of pictures, including MGM’s A Lady’s Morals, released in France with the more sensible title of Jenny Lind.

    D’Ambricourt acted in seven Metro musicals, across a 25-year period. She was credited as the concierge in The Cat and the Fiddle, then uncredited in The Merry Widow, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Two Girls on Broadway, Million Dollar Mermaid and Les Girls, her final film.

    Adrienne D’Ambricourt also terrified generations of French children as the voice of the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

  • Vesey O’Davoren

    Vesey Alfred Davoren (1888-1989) was an Anglo-Irish actor from an upper-class background who started out in the British theatre in 1909. His career was interrupted by the First World War, in which he seems to have had a particularly bad time, sustaining several injuries, the effect of a mustard gas attack, and experiences that must have been traumatizing.

    When he travelled to America in 1920, press reports mentioned him as a British film actor, but there is no indication of what films he might have made before emigrating. 

    While maintaining his theatrical work, O’Davoren developed a parallel career as a largely uncredited character actor in films, making his debut in Winds of the Pampas (1927). He was in approaching sixty feature films, frequently playing a butler, which is slightly ironic, given his roots.

    Notable pictures in which O’Davoren played a small part include Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1937), Stella Dallas (1937), Four Men and a Prayer (1938) and Forever Amber (1947).

    O’Davoren was in three of MGM’s musicals: Going Hollywood, Million Dollar Mermaid and Brigadoon.

    He continued to live in California for almost thirty years after retiring at the age of 72.

  • George J Folsey

    No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.

    Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.

    He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.

    At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films. 

    Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.

    Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).

    The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.

  • Busby Berkeley

    The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.

    IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.

    In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.

    Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.

    Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.

    Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

  • Harry Wilson

    The figures of 350+ film and TV appearances by Harry Wilson (1897-1978) is made more impressive by the fact that Wilson worked almost entirely in the sound era, when the turnover of pictures was not so great as in the silent days.

    British-born Wilson dubbed himself ‘the ugliest man in movies’ (though there was competition), and he was many studios’ go-to actor for convicts and criminal henchmen. He features with Mike Mazurki in Some Like it Hot (1959) as one of George Raft’s goons.

    Wilson appeared uncredited in no fewer than fifteen MGM musicals, across more than thirty years and four decades. In the 1930s he made A Lady’s Morals, The Bohemian Girl, A Day at the Races, Let Freedom Ring and The Wizard of Oz (as a Winkie Guard). In the 40s, Wilson was in Go West, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Luxury Liner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

    His 1950s appearances were in Million Dollar Mermaid, It’s Always Fair Weather, Guys and Dolls and Merry Andrew. And finally, in 1963, Wilson played a roustabout in Billy Rose’s Jumbo. 

    As if Wilson was not busy enough making his own films, he worked for fifteen years as Wallace Beery’s stand-in.

  • Wilson Benge

    George Frederick Benge (1875-1955) was an English actor who made a living in Hollywood mostly playing butlers, valets, footmen and assorted dogsbodies and lackies. Perhaps his finest hour was as Ronald Colman’s slightly-intrepid valet Danny in Bulldog Drummond (1929).

    It’s not clear when Benge relocated to America, but he made the first of his over-200 screen appearances in 1922, as one of Prince John’s henchmen in Robin Hood. He then played his first butler in The Ten Commandments (1923) (in the modern section, not running the Pharaoh’s household).

    Benge was in six Metro musicals: Madam Satan, (as the butler on a zeppelin) Rosalie, Sweethearts, Living in a Big Way, Royal Wedding and Million Dollar Mermaid.

  • Eugene Borden

    Parisian Élysée Eugène Prieur-Bardin (1897-1971) emigrated to America as a teenager, but played many Frenchmen (and sundry other continentals) in a fifty-year career. He started out in The Great Secret (1917), a serial with jeopardy and super-villains, and concluded with one of James Coburn’s sixties’ Flint adventures.

    His contributions to MGM musicals, all uncredited, spanned 27 years. They were in Chasing Rainbows, The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, The Firefly, Thrill of a Romance, Yolanda and the Thief, On the Town, An American in Paris, Million Dollar Mermaid, Dangerous When Wet, Interrupted Melody, It’s Always Fair Weather and Silk Stockings.

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