The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • Vincent Youmans

    Vincent Millie Youmans (1898-1946) was a prolific Tin Pan Alley composer. Not a lot of his work is remembered today, but he did write a handful of hardy perennials.

    At the level of individual songs, Youmans wrote the music for ‘I Want to Be Happy’ and ‘Tea for Two’. Of his stage musicals, No, No, Nanette (1927) has endured.

    Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not use a lot of Youman’s work, but he did compose the beautiful ‘Without a Song’ for The Prodigal. His 1927 Broadway hit Hit the Deck was filmed by MGM in 1955, with many of Youmans’s numbers retained.

    Probably the most frequently revived screen musical with Youmans’s music is RKO’s proto-Astaire/Rogers picture Flying Down to Rio (1933).

  • Harry A Pollard

    Harry Adolphus Pollard (1879-1934) was a stage actor who made his film debut in 1910. A few years later, he became an early auteur, writing, directing and starring in many films with his wife, Margarita Fischer.

    Pollard gave up acting in 1916, though he still managed to clock up over eighty credits. In 1920, he directed the much-praised science fiction serial The Invisible Ray, and in 1926 co-wrote and directed the first in the successful The Cohens and the Kellys series. 

    As an actor, Pollard had blacked-up to play Uncle Tom in 1913. Fourteen years later, he directed another version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), this time with Black stage actor James B Lowe in the role. He also directed the first, part-talkie version of Show Boat (1929).

    Pollard’s sole MGM musical was The Prodigal, which was billed as a ‘Harry Pollard Production’.

    Pollard directed his final film, a William Haines comedy, the following year.

  • The Prodigal

    The Crew

    Harry A PollardDirector
    Bess MeredythStory and Scenario
    Wells RootStory and Scenario
    Vincent YoumansSongwriter
    Edward EliscuSongwriter (uncredited)
    Billy RoseSongwriter (uncredited)
    Henry BishopComposer (uncredited)
    John Howard PayneLyricist (uncredited)
    Herbert StothartSongwriter
    Howard JohnsonLyricist
    Jacques WolfeLyricist
    Paul BernProducer (uncredited)
    Harold RossonCinematographer
    Margaret BoothEditor
    René HubertCostume Designer
    Cedric GibbonsArt Director
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director

  • Charles R Moore

    Hattie McDaniel famously said “I’d rather play a maid than be one”. The actor Charles Randolph Moore could have said much the same about being a railway porter. He played the role at least 38 times, in well over one-third of his total appearances. He also played more than his fair share of lift operators. 

    Moore worked for some of Hollywood’s top directors, including William A Wellman, Josef von Sternberg, Victor Fleming, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and William Wyler. He was a member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, and acted in six of his pictures. In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), he was the cook who was shaken to pieces in the speeding land yacht.

    In all three of Moore’s MGM musicals–The Prodigal, Reckless and Two Girls on Broadway–Moore played a porter.

  • Jules Cowles

    Julius D Cowles (1877-1943) was aYale-educated, experienced Shakespearean actor who made his film debut in 1914. He was also an accomplished writer.

    Cowles played supporting roles throughout the 1920s, including Zambo (in blackface) in The Lost World and Yankee Joe in Lord Jim (both 1925). He was predominantly associated with ‘heavy’ roles; one newspaper headline ran “A Mean Looker But Really He’s A Perfect Gent”.

    In the 1930s, the importance of Cowles’s parts diminished and he was more frequently uncredited. He turned up, without credit, in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Hullabaloo and I Dood It.

  • John Larkin

    John Larkin Smith [?] (1877-1936) had a long career in minstrel shows and vaudeville, and was billed as ‘Jolly John Larkins–the Rajah of Mirth’. He toured the world as leader of the Dandy Dixie Minstrels.

    It was only in the final six years of his life that he devoted himself to films, in the usual menial role reserved for Black actors, and almost never playing to his comedic strengths. In this mode, he was the loyal family retainer to the Southern family in The Prodigal.

    Larkin acted in two further Metro musicals: Stage Mother (as a porter) and The Great Ziegfeld (uncredited, but at least as a named character, Sam).

    His last film, made in the year of his death, was Warner’s all-Black The Green Pastures (1936).

  • Gertrude Howard

    Gertrude Howard (1892-1934) was, like so many Black women, restricted to a limited range of acting opportunities, and most frequently cast as maids. This did, however, bring her screen immortality of a kind, as she played the maid to whom Mae West uttered the line “Beulah, peel me a grape” in I’m No Angel (1933).

    After some stage work, Howard made her first film in 1925. In 1931, she played a servant in MGM’s The Prodigal.

    Howard, who was described in 1927 as the highest-paid “colored actress” in Hollywood, died at only 41, and Mae West helped fund her funeral.

  • Susanne Ransom

    Susanne Ransom

    Susanne Ransom (1925-2010) lived to a good age and spent a few years of it as a child actor in Hollywood.

    Ransom made her debut in Madonna of Avenue A (1929), directed by Michael Curtiz, and her last appearance just eight films later, in All This, And Heaven Too (1940).

    In 1930 she made a rare credited appearance in The Prodigal.

  • Wally Albright

    Walton Algernon Albright Jr (1925-99) appears to have been a Hollywood child actor who came out of the experience unscathed and went on to have a productive life outside show business.

    Albright made his screen debut aged 3 and had notched up over sixty appearances by the age of 15. He had a handful of roles as an adult, but also pursued other interests. In 1957, he won a title at the National Water Ski Championships in the Trick category. He also ran a successful trucking business.

    In 1931, Albright appeared in MGM’s The Prodigal. A few years later he was part of Our Gang for half a dozen pictures. He also featured,as a teenager, in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), playing the boy at the migrant camp who pretends his family eats chicken.

  • Theodore von Eltz

    Julius Theodore von Eltz (1893-1964) was a typical Hollywood workhorse. In more than 200 pictures spread over 40+ years, he evolved from silent leading man to character actor to bit-part player, always giving of his best in whatever he did.

    Eltz made his stage debut aged 19, appearing on Broadway a number of occasions, and made his first film in 1915. Probably his best-known and most frequently revived role was as Arthur Geiger, the bookseller, pornographer and corpse in The Big Sleep (1946).

    Eltz was in two MGM musicals in the 1930s. He played the caddish Carter Jerome in The Prodigal and, six years later, was uncredited in The Firefly.

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