Judith Voselli (1895-1966) was born in Barcelona, but was playing supporting roles on Broadway throughout the early 1920s, including several musical comedies.
Vosselli made her first film in 1926, and worked regularly until 1935. Three of her films were MGM musicals. One of these, The Rogue Song, gave her one of her best roles, as the scene-stealing Tatiana. She also made appearances in A Lady’s Morals and Naughty Marietta.
Blanche Irene Sewell (1898-1949) died far too young, but had become one of the most talented of all Hollywood editors and a seminal influence on the MGM musical style . After training under pioneer Viola Lawrence, Sewell became a full-fledged editor at MGM in 1925 and spent the rest of her career there.
She was the sister-in-law of Walt Disney, and it is generally accepted that she tutored him on the principles of editing and was very influential, in particular, on the form of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Sewell cut some of Metro’s most memorable pictures of the 1930s, including Grand Hotel, Red Dust and Queen Christina. In the 1940s, she edited twenty films, fourteen of which were musicals.
Sewell’s involvement with musicals began in 1930 with Children of Pleasure, after which she cut Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie and Listen Darling.
In 1939, Sewell was chosen to edit The Wizard of Oz, and it was claimed that this was in the hope she could bring to it some of the magic that Disney had produced in Snow White.
After this cameBroadway Melody of 1940, Go West, Ziegfeld Girl, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Du Barry Was a Lady, Best Foot Forward, Bathing Beauty, Easy to Wed, It Happened in Brooklyn, Fiesta andThe Pirate. Sewell’s last work, shortly before her death, was on Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Edward Santree Brophy (1895-1960) was one of the most recognizable character actors in Golden Age Hollywood, both physically and vocally. He made his first screen appearance in 1920, but mostly worked as a unit manager or assistant director during the twenties.
After standing in for an absent actor in Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) (on which he was working as unit manager), Brophy’s acting career took off, aided by several other supporting roles with Keaton. He specialized in cops, gangsters and sidekicks, notably Goldie Locke in the Falcon series. His distinctive New York accent also won him the voice role of Timothy Q Mouse in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
Brophy made a couple of uncredited appearances in MGM musicals: with Keaton again, in Free and Easy, and in Broadway to Hollywood. He was then credited as Zeke, one of the settlers who tramp-tramp-tramps with Nelson Eddy in Naughty Marietta.
In keeping with Brophy’s Runyonesque personality, it is fitting that he is alleged to have died while watching a boxing match.
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.
Herbert Pope Stothart (1885-1949) is a composer whose name is less familiar today than, say, Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner, but in Hollywood’s golden age he was ranked alongside them for his work at MGM.
Stothart had a successful career writing stage musicals, most notably Rose-Marie, but was invited to join Metro in 1929. He signed a contract and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Scores by Stothart were prominent in some of the studio’s most important pictures of the 1930s and 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille (1936), The Good Earth (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Mrs Miniver (1942), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Yearling (1946). In all, Stothart wrote over 100 scores.
Stothart worked on many of MGM’s musicals. He and Clifford Grey wrote the songs for Devil-May-Care and contributed numbers to Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, In Gay Madrid, The Florodora Girl, Call of the Flesh, New Moon and Madam Satan.
He worked with other lyricists on A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Here Comes the Band, Maytime, The Firefly (composing ‘The Donkey Serenade’), Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, The Chocolate Soldier and I Married an Angel.
Stothart was the musical director on some of these films and also on The Cat and the Fiddle, Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, The Wizard of Oz (picking up an Oscar), New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Girl, Cairo, Thousands Cheer, Kismet, The Unfinished Dance. Musical direction usually involved writing incidental music.
And, of course, Metro produced two versions of Stothart’s greatest stage success, Rose-Marie, and he worked on the first version.
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.
Beatrice Hagen (1917-99) claimed a minor place in film history by providing the voice of Snow White in the French version of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As well as being a Disney voice actor (she played Mickey’s nephews), she was a ubiquitous chorus girl in musicals from a number of studios.
For MGM, Hagen made uncredited appearances in The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Maytime, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, Ziegfeld Girl, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, The Harvey Girls and Texas Carnival.
Florence Arnot (1910-95) had a strange career arc, which is epitomized by her roles in MGM musicals. She was uncredited as Flo in The Broadway Melody, then played the second female lead (below Bessie Love) in They Learned About Women. After that, there were just uncredited appearances as a jilted lover in Lord Byron of Broadway and as a Casquette girl in Naughty Marietta.
It is ironic that Doran’s career never really took off, given that she was married for a time to Joseph Sherman, a senior member of Metro’s publicity department.
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.
The costumes he designed for The Wizard of Oz, which included the iconic ruby slippers, were unquestionably the high point of the career of Adrian Adolph Greenburg (1903-59), known simply as Adrian. But his designs were included in hundreds of MGM features, mostly between 1928 and 1941, including 34 other musicals. These included eleven Jeanette MacDonald pictures: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon and Bitter Sweet.
Adrian was very active during 1929-31, designing for Marianne, Devil-May-Care,The Rogue Song, Montana Moon, In Gay Madrid, Madam Satan, New Moon andThe Cuban Love Song.
Dancing Lady reunited Adrian with Joan Crawford a year after the white mousseline de soie dress he created for her in Letty Linton (1932) was copied commercially and sold over 500,000 units.
Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Great Waltz and Honolulu led up to the triumph ofThe Wizard of Oz. Adrian then worked on Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl andThe Chocolate Soldier before leaving MGM in 1941 to open his own fashion business.
He continued to freelance for a variety of studios and returned to Metro for a final musical, the aptly-named Lovely to Look At.
