While sound department head Douglas Shearer always ensured he received a credit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were hit-and-miss in their approach to crediting his staff.
Standish John Lambert (1905-59) worked for the studio for at least twenty years, and does not appear to have ever received an onscreen credit. He and his brother Kenneth Lambert joined the studio in the mid-30s as electrical engineers, but Standish appears to have transitioned to the sound department at some point.
Some sources (IMDb) have him listed as working on Going Hollywood in 1933, but that seems unlikely. The earliest pictures cited by the AFI catalogue are from 1944. Clearly Lambert must have been doing something during the previous nine or ten years, but it is impossible to say what.
Most of Lambert’s known contributions are for sound and effects mixing, on pictures like Mrs Parkington (1944), Cry ‘Havoc’ (1944), The Clock (1945) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1945). Later, he worked as sound director on half a dozen pictures, including Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949).
The MGM musicals with Lambert as sound mixer were Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh and The Harvey Girls. He was sound director on Luxury Liner.
Charles Sullivan (1899-1972) was a ubiquitous character actor in American films between 1925 and 1966, accumulating around 550 appearances on the big screen.
Notable appearances include King Kong (1933, where he was also Robert Armstrong’s stunt double), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Glass Key (1942), State of the Union (1948) and The Last Hurrah (1958).
Sullivan can be seen, uncredited, in fourteen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Student Tour, San Francisco, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Music for Millions, Easy to Wed, Living in a Big Way, Big City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Rose Marie and It’s Always Fair Weather.
Australian Frank Sidney Hagney (1894-1973) had a long and industrious Hollywood career: 48 years and around 450 films. Out of all that work, it is unlikely he would have predicted that every Christmas millions of people would watch him pushing Mr Potter’s wheelchair in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
Hagney was a professional cyclist and boxer in Australia before moving to the United States and beginning his film career in 1919. During the 1920s he had many featured roles in low-budget pictures, and appeared uncredited as the army recruiter in Keaton’s The General (1926). The majority of his roles were in westerns.
By the late 1930s, Hagney was mostly playing uncredited bit parts, in films that included The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Northwest Passage (1940), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), Unconquered (1947), The Big Clock (1948), All the King’s Men (1949), The Wild One (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
Hagney acted without credit in ten Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Naughty Marietta, Swing Fever, Meet the People, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, Easy to Wed, On the Town, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive (his final film).
Garry Owen (1902-51) was a hard-working character actor who laboured in the fields of programme pictures, usually without credit, over 180 times. But, unlike many of his peers, he was granted two standout appearances.
In 1936, Howard Hawks cast him as Mike Owens, the tragic figure in Ceiling Zero whose brain damage symbolizes the dangers inherent in early aviation. And, at the opposite end of the scale, Frank Capra gave him the final shot and the last line in his adaptation of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944): “I’m not a cab driver, I’m a coffee pot!”.
Owen acted in six Metro musicals, starting with Stage Mother. This was followed by Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh, Ziegfeld Follies, No Leave, No Love and On an Island With You.
British-born Margaret Bert (1896-1971) was not an especially prolific Hollywood character actor; fewer than 200 appearances in 35 years is nothing special. But she was a stalwart of the MGM musical, showing up without credit in thirty-one of them.
It is unclear when Bert emigrated to the United States, but her earliest-known credit is The Blackbird, a Tod Browning crime story with Lon Chaney. She was always uncredited and almost always in small, background parts, though she did have more to do as the heroine’s mother in Sarge Goes to College (1947) and its sequel, Campus Sleuth (1948).
Bert was frequently cast as nurses, flitting around while others did the acting, and this was the case in her first three MGM musicals, Stage Mother, Reckless and San Francisco. These were followed by Bitter Sweet, Little Nellie Kellie, Rio Rita, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Unfinished Dance, Summer Holiday, Easter Parade, Luxury Liner, Words and Music, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Annie Get Your Gun, Summer Stock, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain, Skirts Ahoy, Because You’re Mine, Everything I Have is Yours, I Love Melvin, Give a Girl a Break, Easy to Love, Rose Marie, The Student Prince, Brigadoon, The Glass Slipper and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
James Francis Durante (1893-1980) had what in Britain might be called a Marmite personality: some people loved him, others hated him. For some, a little went a long way. (Personally, I’m a fan.) But what is undeniable is that Jimmy Durante had the longest career of any performer starring in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals. It began in 1931, ended in 1962, and included eleven pictures across all four decades.
Durante started out in show business playing ragtime piano, and developed humour out of the musical performance. This led to vaudeville, and then radio, with time spent as part of a three-man comedy act.
He made his film debut in 1930, at Paramount’s New York studios. By the following year he was in Hollywood, working for Metro. Jimmy Durante, throughout his career, moved seamlessly between films, Broadway, radio, records and, later on, television. In 1934, for example, he made films in New York because he was appearing on Broadway in Jumbo, which he would film twenty-eight years later.
Durante was sometimes the leading man in films; for instance, Palooka (1934), where he got top billing over Lupe Velez. More often, however, he was third or fourth billed, providing comic support.
Durante’s first MGM musical, this time billed below Lupe Velez, was The Cuban Love Song. This was followed by Broadway to Hollywoodand Hollywood Party (playing versions of himself), then Student Tour, Two Girls and a Sailor, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, It Happened in Brooklyn, This Time for Keeps, On an Island with You and, finally, Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
Durante’s last big screen appearance was in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), but he continued to work on television.
George William Broderick O’Farrell (1882-1955) had the rare privilege of making his first film in his hometown (Angelenos excluded, of course). Portland in Oregon was home to the American Lifeograph Company, the brainchild of some local filmmakers. It only produced about five pictures in as many years (1915-20), but still gave O’Farrell his break in The Golden Trail (1920), which was co-directed by Jean Hersholt. The company’s facilities were also used by other filmmakers.
O’Farrell eventually relocated to Los Angeles, and by 1949 had appeared in more than 200 films. He was in some very good features, but always uncredited.
He turned up in seven MGM musicals. Love in the Rough was followed by Flying High, Nobody’s Baby, Born to Sing, Ship Ahoy, Music for Millions and Two Sisters from Boston.
Some confusion surrounds Harry Burns, who played the gardener in Love in the Rough.
IMDb asserts confidently that he was born in 1887, died in 1948, and in between was married to actor Dorothy Vernon. It says he was an actor who made 15 films between 1915 and 1920, took a ten-year break, then made another 39 appearances between Love in the Rough and 1948, two of which were in Music for Millions and It Happened in Brooklyn. IMDb also claims Burns was the father of Bobby Vernon, even though Bobby was only ten years younger, but we will not go there.
According to the AFI Catalog, Harry Burns acted in a couple of pictures in 1923-24, but was mainly a director at that time, notably of a series of films starring Joe Martin the Chimp (no space here, but Joe is worth looking up).
As a further complication, the New York Times reported, in 1939 (not 1948), the death of “Harry Burns, former film director for William Fox and other early film producers and one-time publisher of Filmograph”. It notes that, at the time of his death, he had been working as an extra and was a champion for better treatment for extra players, and that his widow was Dorothy Vernon.
Which leads to a second IMDb entry, for director Harry Burns (1882-1939), also married to Dorothy Vernon.
It seems pretty clear that there were two men called Harry Burns making films in the same period and, probably the 1887-1948 version who made appearances in two MGM musicals. The silent pictures attributed to him by IMDb must belong to the 1882-1939 Harry Burns (especially given that one of them starred the aforesaid Joe Martin the Chimp.
He was also the one married to Dorothy Vernon. He may well have been the father of Bobby Vernon, but, if so, was a father at the age of 15.
Robert Shirley (1904-81), like most of the engineers in Douglas Shearer’s sound department, never received onscreen credit for his work, despite working on some of Metro’s prestige projects. These included Strange Interlude (1932), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
Shirley’s musicals were They Learned About Women, Reckless, The Wizard of Oz (though everyone seems to have worked on that), Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Thrill of a Romance, Anchors Aweigh, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Two Sisters from Boston,Easy to Wed, Holiday in Mexico and, to round things off nicely, Singin’ in the Rain.
