The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • Garry Owen

    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.

  • Frank O’ Connor

    It was quite an achievement for character actor Frank O’Connor (1881-1959) to cram well over 650 film appearances into even a forty-year career. Add in a couple of dozen pictures he directed and seven contributions to screenplays, and you have a very busy man.

    O’Connot starred in his earliest pictures, starting in 1915, but by 1921 he was pursuing a career as a director. Apparently it was an attempt to set up as a producer that ruined him financially, leading to over twenty years playing bits in hundreds of films. 

    But, amidst much dross, O’Connor showed up in some of Hollywood’s greatest pictures: King Kong (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Force of Evil (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Blue Gardenia (1953). Hawks, Capra, Welles, Curtiz, Wilder, Stevens, Ford, Lang: O’Connor kept good company.

    Frank O’Connor made appearances in six MGM musicals: Stage Mother, The Merry Widow, Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West and Little Nellie Kelly.

  • Billy O’Brien

    Like many other child actors, William Stephens O’Brien (1921-44) died young, but in his case heroically, when he was shot down during a mission in the South Pacific.

    O’Brien made his debut aged 5, in a Hal Roach short. A few years later he played in Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929). His first featured role was in The Lone Trail (1932), a Poverty Row western, and he continued to act, usually without credit, until he joined up following the attack on Pearl Harbour.

    In 1933, O’Brien made a brief appearance in Stage Mother.

  • Bert Moorhouse

    In a career lasting over a quarter of a century, character actor Herbert Green Moorhouse (1894-1954) made around 380 screen appearances. Some of these were in featured supporting roles, but later on he was predominantly an uncredited extra.

    Moorhouse made his debut, without credit, in The Cameraman (1928), the last really good film made by Buster Keaton before MGM crushed his spirit. In the same year, Moorhouse was a featured player in two Poverty Row pictures.

    Over the years, Moorhouse played a reporter in Mrs Deeds Goes to Town (1936); a nightclub patron in The Awful Truth (1937); Mary Astor’s dance partner in Midnight (1939); one of Hynkel’s officers in The Great Dictator (1940); another reporter in Sullivan’s Travels (1941); a party guest in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946); a pilot in A Foreign Affair (1948); the nitwit at Paramount who makes Nora Desmond think she is wanted for a fil in Sunset Boulevard (1950); and a newspaper editor in Ace in the Hole (1951).

    Moorhouse acted in fifteen Metro musicals in seventeen years, always uncredited, and starting with Stage Mother. He then played spectators at racetracks in Reckless, A Day at the Races and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. After that came Broadway Serenade, Broadway Melody of 1940, Two Girls on Broadway, Ziegfeld Girl, Thrill of a Romance, Easy to Wed, Till the Clouds Roll By, Living in a Big Way, Words and Music, Nancy Goes to Rio and Duchess of Idaho.

    Moorhouse became very ill in 1954 and took his own life.

  • Greta Meyer

    Greta Meyer (1883-1965) came from a German theatrical family and first appeared on stage, in one of her father’s productions, at the age of three. Later, she acted throughout Europe in plays and operettas. She also acted in a short film in 1917, and a couple of German features in the late 1920s.

    Meyer travelled to America as part of an operetta company, and stayed on after it had completed its run, becoming a US citizen in 1923. She performed widely in Yiddish theatre.

    Tonight or Never was Meyer’s first American film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1931, and in which she recreated a role she had played on Broadway a year earlier.

    Later, she appeared in John Ford’s Flesh (1932) as Jean Hersholt’s wife, and, uncredited, in Ford’s Pilgrimage (1933). She was the disturbed Madeline’s nurse in John M Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939) and uncredited as a masseuse in the all-female The Women (1939).

    Meyer acted in four MGM musicals, first of all uncredited as one of the stage mothers in the audition scene of Stage Mother. After that, she played the type of Mitteleuropean matron that was her speciality in Naughty Marietta (as Frau Schuman, with who Jeanette MacDonald shares her dreams), The Great Waltz and Bitter Sweet (as the cafe owner who sells a niece bottle of Tokay). 

  • Buddy Messinger

    Melvin Joseph Messinger (1907-65) had a successful career in silent shorts, initially as a child actor, and thereafter played uncredited supporting parts.

    Messinger made his debut in When Little Lindy Sang (1916), a rare film for its time in that it starred Ernestine Jones, a talented African-American child actor. The following year he was Captain Smollett in Treasure Island, a film in which the lead parts were all played by children and teenagers, and which also features his sister, Gertrude. He was in several of these ‘Sunset Kiddies’ productions of classic stories and fairy tales made by Fox.

    In 1920-21, Messinger had a recurring role in Goldwyn’s Edgar series, written by Booth Tarkington of Magnificent Amberson’s fame. In 1923-24, he starred as Buddy in his own series of shorts.

    From 1926, Messinger, no longer a child, starred in a series of comedy shorts with the Sunkist Bathing Beauties and a monkey. But after pictures started to talk, he was relegated to uncredited bit parts. Some of the better films of this period included Wild Boys of the Road(1933) and Modern Times (1936). He also appeared briefly in Citizen Kane (1941).

    Buddy Messinger was in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Hullabaloo and The Big Store.

    Later in life, he worked as ab assistant director in films and on television.

  • Alice Lake

    Alice Lake (1895-1967) is a textbook example of an actor who scaled the heights during the silent era, but ended in poverty, all but forgotten.

    Lake started out as a dancer while still in her teens, before making her first films in the mid-1910s. She did a lot of work for Mack Sennett, and often performed with Roscoe Arbuckle. In The Cook (1918) she was the waitress who had to be repeatedly rescued by Arbuckle and Buster Keaton from the attentions of Al St John.

    She also played straight roles in dramas, such as Jack Conway’s Lombardi, Ltd (1919). In 1921, she played Jean Oliver in the original version of The Hole in the Wall.

    Lake had leading roles in over eighty silent pictures, but the quality of her parts declined with the introduction of sound, and after 1933 she made only ten or so uncredited appearances. Two of these were in Metro musicals, Stage Mother and Babes in Toyland. 

  • Tiny Jones

    It is quite unusual that Elizabeth Jones (1875-1952) did not acquire her nickname ironically; she actually was diminutive.

    Jones was a Welsh actor who travelled to the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. She made her first screen appearance for John Ford, in The Iron Horse (1924), and he also directed her last film, The Quiet Man (1952). In between, she was in six other Ford pictures, including as one of the few genuine Welsh performers in How Green Was My Valley (1942).

    Jones worked regularly, always without credit, for some of Hollywood’s other great directors: Erich von Stroheim, including in Greed (1924); Frank Capra in Lady for a Day (1934); William A Wellman, as a resident of Warsaw, Vermont who sneers at Frederic March in Nothing Sacred (1937).

    She was in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942), and worked twice for Orson Welles, in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Macbeth (1948). She was also in two of Joseph Losey’s early pictures, M and The Prowler (both 1951).

    Tiny Jones made around 140 appearances, but only one in an MGM musical, as one of the stage mothers in Stage Mother.

  • Gladden James

    Gladden James (1888-1948) was starring in films as early as 1911, when he made several that were directed by the pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché when she was working in New Jersey.

    James continued to take leading or prominent supporting roles throughout the 1910s and 20s, in well over eighty pictures. But after 1929, he was almost wholly restricted to uncredited bit parts. He was one of the reporters greeting Nobel prizewinner Robert Taylor off the plane in Magnificent Obsession (1934) and the court clerk in Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936).

    Gladden James acted in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and For Me and My Gal, playing the doctor who declares Gene Kelly unfit for active duty.

  • June Gittelson

    June Gittelson (1910-93) was a character actor who appeared most frequently in comedies, with humour very often derived from her physical size. A glance at her IMDb entry will find repeated use of the word “fat”.

    Gittelson made her debut aged just sixteen, in a comedy short called The Glorious Fourth (1927). She was, as throughout her career, uncredited. She played a prisoner in Three on a Match (1932), and in Footlight Parade (1933) was the Myrtle who James Cagney mistakes for a Fanny.

    In 1939 Gittelson was one of the 130 or so women in the cast of The Women. But her most prominent roles tended to be in Three Stooges’ shorts, of which she made half a dozen, and similar short films with other comics.

    Gittelson made appearances in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Student Tour and the 1940 version of New Moon,

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