The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • William V Mong

    In 1924, a newspaper said of former stage actor William V Mong (1875-1940): “That middle initial of William V. Mong’s name must indeed stand for versatility. For in his sixteen years upon the screen he has played hundreds of characters, ranging from heroes to villains of deepest dye, all nationalities.”

    This does not tell half the story. As well as accumulating over 200 acting appearances on screen, Mong wrote and/or directed dozens of films in the 1910s and early 20s. In the early days, he established the first scenario department at the Selig Company (“a second-hand desk, two pencils and a pen”).

    As a sideline, he had a ranch and bred pedigree pigs.

    One of Mong’s many credits was as the father of the heroine in Metro’s In Gay Madrid.

  • Eugenie Besserer

    Playing Auntie Em in the first screen adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) was the first of over 200 appearances by Eugenie Besserer (1868-1934).

    Born in France, Besserer was raised in Canada. Left an orphan, she ran away and found an uncle who lived in New York, and who agreed to take her in.

    Besserer worked on the legitimate stage for a number of years, and was 42 when she made her first film. Perhaps for that reason, she developed something of a specialism in playing mothers, culminating in the role of Mrs Rabinowitz, Al Jolson’s mother, in The Jazz Singer (1927).

    In her one MGM musical, Besserer played Doña Generosa, matriarch of the House of Troy in In Gay Madrid.

  • Jack Dart

    Jack Dart Richards (1916-76) was a child actor who made a handful of appearances in Hollywood pictures in 1929-30.

    One of these, now lost, was in The Rogue Song.

  • Ruth Metzger

    In old Hollywood, actors would sometimes show up in one or two pictures, then disappear, leaving behind no clue as to how they came to stand briefly in the spotlight. One such was Ruth Metzger (dates unknown).

    IMDb states that she appeared in Honky Tonk (1929), a Sophie Tucker musical, and in The Rogue Song. No specific character is named in either case.

    Presumably someone had a basis for inputting this information, but it is difficult to be certain that Ruth Metzger actually existed.

  • James Bradbury Jr

    James Horatio Bradbury Jr (1894-1936) was the son of two actors and made his stage debut while still a child.

    After serving in the First World War, Bradbury settled in Hollywood, where he maintained a steady career as a character actor and supporting player. In the silent era, he combined higher-quality pictures such as Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928) with many low-budget westerns.

    After the introduction of sound, Bradbury played one of the bandits in The Rogue Song, but the general quality of his parts declined and he eventually took his own life, self-immolating in a failed attempt at suicide by gas.

  • Burr McIntosh

    William Burr McIntosh (1862-1942) was a man of many parts: writer, publisher, photographer, entrepreneur. And silent film actor.

    McIntosh had already achieved success publishing The Burr McIntosh Monthly, an early example of the pinup magazine, when he turned to screen acting.  He starred in a series of 14 two-reel shorts playing J Rufus Wallingford, a con man.

    The high point of McIntosh’s acting career was his performance as Lillian Gish’s cruel father in D W Griffith’s Way Down East (1920).

    McIntosh’s sole outing in an MGM musical was as Count Peter in the lost film, The Rogue Song.

  • Kate Price

    Katherine Duffy (1872-1943) emigrated to America from Ireland as a child, and began a stage career in 1890. 

    It is claimed in some sources that she made her screen debut in 1902, but no film is named nor evidence provided. More certain is that she made shorts for the New York Kalem Company in 1910. Later, she worked in Florida, partnered with a young Oliver Hardy.

    Price relocated to Hollywood in 1917 and found regular character work at a variety of studios. In 1926 she played the matriarch of the Kelly family in The Cohens and the Kellys, the first in a popular series of seven ethnic comedies.

    Kate Price is thought to have made around 300 shorts and features, one of which was MGM’s The Rogue Song, in which she played the maidservant Petrovna. 

  • Edward Martindel

    Edward Martindel (1876-1955) was a Broadway actor and singer who started making films in 1915. His early pictures were made in New York, but he seems to have relocated to Hollywood in around 1920.

    Martindel was always a supporting player, though generally in credited roles. One of the exceptions was his appearance as Mr Thayer in Children of Pleasure.

  • Billy May

    IMDb states that an actor named Billy May appeared uncredited in Free and Easy, and suggests that the Billy May in question is Edward William May Jr (1916-2004), a jazz trumpeter who found his greatest success as a composer and orchestrator. Billy May worked with some of the top orchestras of the Big Band era, including Glenn Miller’s. He also arranged songs for, amongst others, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Bobby Darin. In addition, May worked with humourist Stan Freberg on many of his comedy records.

    However, this particular Billy May would only have been aged 14 at the time, and unlikely to be the performer in the MGM picture, whose identify remains a mystery.

  • Theodore Lorch

    Theodore Lorch (1873-1947) translated stage experience into a 170-film career as a character. His appearance as Chingachgook in an early version of The Last of the Mohicans (1920) did not foreshadow his many later appearances in shorts starring the Three Stooges.

    Lorch made appearances uncredited in Free and Easy and Reckless. 

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