The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: New Moon (1940)

  • 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.

  • Gino Corrado

    Italian-born Gino Corrado Liserani (1893-1982) had the occasional featured role during the silent period, such as Aramis in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Iron Mask (1929). He also made appearances in Intolerance (1916) and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). In talking pictures, however, Corrado rarely strayed beyond restaurants and cafés, playing uncredited diners, chefs and no fewer than 86 waiters. He even served at table in Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca (1942).

    Corrado appeared in fifteen Metro musicals, starting with a credited role in Lord Byron of Broadway. He was then uncredited as a waiter in The Merry Widow, followed by A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, New Moon, Bitter Sweet (a waiter), I Married an Angel, I Dood It (another waiter), Yolanda and the Thief (yet another waiter), Two Sisters from Boston (credited as Ossifish), Holiday in Mexico, Fiesta, Words and Music (a final waiter) and An American in Paris.

    After retiring from acting, Corrado opened a restaurant.

  • Herbert Stothart

    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.

  • John Miljan

    John Miljan (1892-1960) was a supporting actor who appeared in over 200 films during his thirty-four-year career. He made regular appearances in Cecil B DeMille pictures, notably as General Custer in The Plainsman (1936).

    Miljan’s four MGM musicals began with Devil-May-Care, as Ramon Novarro’s nemesis. He played himself in the Hollywood-set Free and Easy, and was with Novarro again in In Gay Madrid. His final appearance was as Pierre Brugnon in the remake of New Moon.

  • Buster Keaton

    Signing a contract with MGM was probably the worst decision ever made by Joseph Frank Keaton (1895-1966). It brought an end to the period in which he vied with Chaplin to be the greatest, most gifted comic star of the silent screen, and led to dark years of alcoholism and frustration before his rediscovery by later generations.

    Keaton was at least permitted to remain silent in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, performing the ‘Dance of the Sea’ in bizarre drag. The following year he starred in Free and Easy, his first talking feature, and filmed a caveman sequence for the abandoned The March of Time. He was also required to shoot French, Spanish and German versions of Free and Easy.

    Ten years later Keaton appeared uncredited in the MacDonald-Eddy New Moon, and in 1949 he had a supporting role in In the Good Old Summertime. 

    Keaton also contributed as a gag writer to A Night at the Opera, At the Circus, Go West, Easy to Wed, In the Good Old Summertime and Excuse My Dust.

  • George Magrill

    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.    

  • Charles Maxwell

    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.

  • Adrian

    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.

  • Oliver T Marsh

    Oliver Taylor Marsh (1892-1941) was an MGM company man for most of his career, and arguably achieved his greatest successes with some of the nineteen musicals he photographed, most of which were directed by Robert Z Leonard and W S Van Dyke.

    Marsh’s earliest efforts were Marianne, In Gay Madrid and The Florodora Girl. He protographed the 1930 New Moon and also worked uncredited on the 1940 remake. He returned to the genre after the 1932 hiatus and shot Dancing Lady. The following year he worked with Lubitsch on The Merry Widow and moved immediately from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland.

    Marsh photographed the Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld and the destruction of San Francisco in the film of the same name. Maytime was the first of his five MacDonald-Eddy operettas, and he also worked with MacDonald on The Firefly and with Eddy on Rosalie. The Girl of the Golden West was followed by an Academy Award, with Allen Davey, for their Technicolor work on Sweethearts. 

    Following the ridiculous Ice Follies of 1939, Marsh was with Jeanette MacDonald again for Broadway Serenade. He rounded off his career with Broadway Melody of 1940, Bitter Sweet (again Oscar-nominated for Technicolor) and Lady Be Good, made shortly before his untimely death.

  • Robert Z Leonard

    Robert Zigler Leonard (1889-1968), commonly known as Pop, turned to directing in 1914 after a short career as a leading man, and was a workhorse producer-director at MGM from 1926 until 1957. He worked in pretty much every genre tackled by the studio, and was one of its most prolific directors of musicals, working on fifteen between 1929 and 1952.

    Leonard directed and co-produced Marianne in 1929, one of his many collaborations with Metro’s female stars. A few years later he made In Old Madrid, then became the first person to direct Fred Astaire on film in Dancing Lady.

    The Great Ziegfeld was the second musical to win the Best Picture Oscar, and Leonard was also nominated for his direction.

    Leonard worked on five Jeanette Macdonald-Nelson Eddy vehicles–Naughty Marietta (uncredited), Maytime, Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts (uncredited) and New Moon–as well as two MacDonald solo pictures, The Firefly and Broadway Serenade.

    Ziegfeld Girl returned him to the world of the Broadway impresario, and, after a gap of eight years, he was reunited with that film’s star, Judy Garland, for In the Good Old Summertime. Leonard then directed a new generation of musical performers in Nancy Goes to Rio (Jane Powell), Duchess of Idaho (Esther Williams) and Grounds for Marriage (Kathryn Grayson.

    Leonard’s final musical outing was Everything I Have is Yours in 1951. 

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