The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Montana Moon

  • Pete Morrison

    George D Morrison (1890-1973) was a star of silent westerns who had actually worked as a cowboy in his youth. He was working as an engine fireman when he started undertaking stunt work for the Essanay Studio in around 1910. 

    Morrison moved to Hollywood and became an early western star, now almost forgotten. With the introduction of sound, his parts became mostly uncredited, and he also returned to stunt work. He appeared as a cowboy in Montana Moon.

    After retiring in 1935, Morrison maintained the western theme by becoming a rancher and sometime deputy sheriff in Colorado.

  • Bud McClure

    Ervin Thomas McClure (1883-1942) acted in over 100 films, virtually all of which were westerns, and in most of which he was uncredited. He rarely had dialogue.

    In 1930, McClure played a cowboy at the party in Montana Moon.

  • Claudia Dell

    Claudia Dell Smith (1909-77) became a chorus girl aged 16, and was soon appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies. 

    Dell was signed by Warner Bros to play opposite Al Jolson in Big Boy and the title character in Sweet Kitty Bellairs (both 1930). Shortly before, she had made an uncredited appearance as Cliff Edwards’s girlfriend in Montana Moon.

    Dell later signed with RKO, and turned to radio when the film roles started to dry up, frequently working on Lux Radio Theatre productions. She was also a newspaper columnist.

  • Lloyd Ingraham

    Lloyd Chauncey Ingraham (1874-1956) made around 300 screen appearances, but it is arguable that only one was of any significance in the context of film history. He plays the judge who sentences The Boy to go to the gallows in Intolerance (1916). 

    Otherwise, it was a career largely uncredited, and which included the role of Joan Crawford’s dad in Montana Moon. 

    Ingraham also directed over 100 shorts and features between 1913 and 1930.

  • Ricardo Cortez

    Jacob Krantz (1900-77) was the son of Jewish parents with East European backgrounds, but he grew up to have features that bore comparison with Latin lovers such as Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro. With this in mind, he took Ricardo Cortez as his screen name.

    By 1923, Cortez was getting featured character parts, and he occasionally played the lead, most memorably as the first Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1931). One of his prominent supporting roles, a year earlier, was with Joan Crawford in Montana Moon. 

    Cortez also directed seven low-budget programmers for 20th Century-Fox between 1938 and 1940.

    His last big screen appearance was in a film that gave a number of other actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age their last hurrah: John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (1958). After a guest spot in an episode of Bonanza in 1960, Cortex became a stockbroker.

    Ricardo Cortez’s brother, Stanley Cortez, was a celebrated cinematographer.

  • Carl Pierson

    Carl Leo Pierson (1891-1977) edited several hundred films during his long career, almost all of which would be categorized as ‘B’ pictures. Indicative of this is the fact that his best-known work is Reefer Madness (1936), the ‘notorious exploitation shocker’.

    Only six years earlier, Pierson had been in the refined setting of Metro’s Culver City studio, editing Montana Moon.

  • William Daniels

    William H Daniels (1901-70) was one of the most eminent cinematographers working during Hollywood’s Golden Age. The American Cinematographer website refers to his “inconspicuously perfect execution”. Daniels’s career lasted fifty years, from silent cinema to the self-conscious kookiness of Move (1970).

    Daniels started out as a camera operator at Universal, but followed Erich Von Stroheim to MGM, where he shot Foolish Wives (1922), Greed and The Merry Widow (both 1925). He then, famously, became Greta Garbo’s cinematographer of choice, shooting sixteen of her pictures. 

    Daniels worked with many major directors, including Clarence Brown, Frank Borzage, Raoul Walsh, George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Ida Lupino and Jules Dassin  In 1950 he won an Oscar for Dassin’s The Naked City.

    Daniels was photographing musicals for MGM for over thirty years, starting with Montana Moon in 1930 and ending with Billy Rose’s Jumbo in 1962.  In between came Broadway to Hollywood, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Broadway Melody of 1938, New Moon, For Me and My Gal and Girl Crazy.

  • Frank Butler

    Frank Russell Butler (1889-1967) was a prominent screenwriter, though his most successful days were at Paramount rather than MGM. 

    Born in  England, Butler started out as an actor at Famous Players-Lasky in 1920, writing his first scenario the following year. His acting career ended with silent cinema, and he directed only one film for Hal Roach: Flying Elephants, with Laurel and Hardy before they had established their comedy duo characters.

    Butler signed on as a writer at Metro in 1929, and worked on four musicals during his time there. He worked with regular collaborator Sylvia Thalberg on Montana Moon and New Moon. He subsequently worked on two scripts for films involving Laurel and Hardy, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl.

    Returning to Paramount, Butler wrote frequently for Bob Hope, including four of the Road pictures. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1942 for two very different screenplays, Road to Morocco and war drama Wake Island. He won two year later for Going My Way (1944).

  • Sylvia Thalberg

    It is hard to avoid describing Sylvia Thalberg (1907-88) as the younger sister of Irving Thalberg and the wife of MGM producer Lawrence Weingarten, though she would, quite understandably, not have welcomed it. Becoming the youngest writer at Hollywood’s biggest studio in 1927 inevitably attracted accusations of nepotism. This, along with writing a novel, led to her leaving Metro in 1933.

    Having published the novel, Thalberg signed a contract with Paramount in 1935. Her last, uncredited, work on a screenplay was in 1937.

    While at MGM, Thalberg worked on two musicals, Montana Moon and New Moon, both times with regular collaborator Frank Butler. Her brother’s opinion of his sister was, according to Douglas Shearer, “talented but lazy”. But that’s brothers for you.

  • Mal St Clair

    Andrew Sarris summarized the career of Malcolm St Clair (1897-1952) thus: his silent films fizzed and his sound films fizzled, it was as simple and tragic as that.

    St Clair was an important writer-director of the silent era, primarily in the field of comedy. Starting out as an actor-writer-director with Mack Sennett, he went on to co-direct a couple of shorts with Buster Keaton, from whom he learned a great deal about comedy technique. St Clair also made a series of more sophisticated comedies at Paramount in the mid-twenties, including the original adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), co-written by Anita Loos herself.

    As Sarris suggests, the quality of St Clair’s pictures declined with the advent of sound, though he continued to work until 1948. One of his early sound films was the MGM musical Montana Moon, which he produced and directed.

    One of St Clair’s more interesting later assignments was directing the silent era comedy sequences for Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), including restaging some of his earlier work.

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