The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • Tom Ricketts

    British-born Thomas B Ricketts (1853-1939) emigrated to the USA aged seventeen. After a career on the stage as actor and singer, he became a cinema pioneer, making his debut in A Christmas Carol (1908), the first actor to play Ebenezer Scrooge. In the thirty-year career that followed, Ricketts was incredibly prolific, acting in well over 200 pictures, directing around 180 and writing twenty or so.

    In 1911, Ricketts and a partner set up the Nestor Film Company and he directed The Best Man Wins (1911), one of the first films to be made in Hollywood. 

    Ricketts had a busy year in 1914, when he directed 48 pictures. One of them was Damaged Goods, a film about the current hot topic of venereal disease. It starred Richard Bennett and saw the first appearance on film of his three daughters, Barbara, Constance and Joan.

    Ricketts’s directing career ended in 1919, after which he restricted himself to screen acting, eventually becoming one of the oldest actors working in Hollywood. He made his final film, Son of Frankenstein (1939) shortly before he died, aged 86.

    In all that activity, Tom Ricketts only had time for one MGM musical: he played, Mr Lorraine, Fred’s father, in Stage Mother.

  • Lillian Harmer

    Lillian Harmer (1883-1946) had a career as a stage actor, including work on Broadway, before becoming a character actor in Hollywood from 1927. She had acted with May Robson, and later became her companion and secretary.

    Harmer appeared in more than sixty films in a relatively short (fourteen years) career. Her rare credited roles includedCarrie A Nation in The Bowery and the cook in Alice in Wonderland (both 1933).

    In MGM’s musical Stage Mother, Harmer played the uncredited role of Mrs Lorraine, Fred’s mother.

  • Harry Holman

    Harry James Holman (1862-1947) was a veteran vaudeville star, nationally known, according to his New York Times obituary, for his ‘hard-boiled Hampton’ skit. The sketch was preserved in Holman’s first short, Hard Boiled Hampton (1929), which was shot in New York City. (Some sources claim that he played a ‘fat man’ in The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923.)

    Holman retired from vaudeville and spent the last seventeen years of his life working as a character actor in Hollywood, averaging eight appearances a year. He worked with some of the major directors of the time, including parts in six Frank Capra pictures (he is the school principal who dives into the swimming pool in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). He was usually uncredited.

    Harry Holman appeared in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and Broadway Melody of 1938. In the latter he was, quite fittingly, a resident of the theatrical boarding house. 

  • Aggie Herring

    Agnes Herring (1876-1939) was a veteran vaudeville and stage actor who made her first films at the age of 40, for New York City studios. Eventually moving to Hollywood, she appeared in over 120 pictures.

    Herring occasionally had featured roles, such as the heroine’s mother in Harold Lloyd’s Among Those Present (1921), and Mrs Corney in Oliver Twist (1922). She played Violet Dana’s mother in Kosher Kitty Kelly (1926). Generally, however, she played without credit, specializing in (frequently Irish) mothers, cooks and landladies.

    Herring only played in one MGM musical, as Kitty’s landlady in Stage Mother.

  • Lowden Adams

    Charles Augustus Loudon Adams (1881-1959) was an Australian actor who was working on Broadway before moving to Hollywood when he was 50. His first appearance was uncredited, but then he played the butler in John Barrymore’s Topaze (1932).

    This set the pattern for Adam’s career, with almost half of his fifty or so, largely uncredited, roles being as butlers. Many of the others were valets, secretaries, footmen and sundry servants.

    In 1938, just for a change of pace, Adams played one of Richard the Lionheart’s retainers in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

    Adams played butlers in two MGM musicals, Stage Mother and Strike Up the Band.

  • Larry Fine

    Louis Feinberg (1902-75) was the non-Howard Stooge: the member of the Three Stooges who positioned himself between Moe’s violence and Curly’s lunacy, and got poked in the eye a lot for his trouble.

    Fine had been working in vaudeville for a few years when he first became one of Ted Healy’s stooges in 1928. When he, Moe and Curly split up with the erratic Healy, they signed with Columbia and went on to make over 200 shorts and several feature films (latterly with Shemp Howard and other performers after Curly’s death).

    Fine appeared in three MGM musicals in the mid-thirties. He was by himself in Stage Mother (which also featured Healy); with Healy, Moe and Curly in Dancing Lady; and with just Moe and Curly in Hollywood Party.

    Fine was central to an important, though censored, gag in Dancing Lady. Throughout the film he is seen working on a jigsaw puzzle. The excised payoff was that, after adding the final piece, he sees that it is a picture of Adolf Hitler and overturns the table in disgust. If left in, this would have been a very early (1933) anti-Nazi protest by a Jewish actor. The footage has now been restored to some prints of the picture.

  • Elspeth Dudgeon

    Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Siodmak, Mitchel Leisen, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian: Scottish actor Elspeth Dudgeon (1871-1955) worked with some of Hollywood’s best directors in her twenty-four-year fil career.

    She was a particular favourite of James Whale, who used her in six of his films. Most memorably–and whimsically–he cast her as the centenarian Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932), keeping her real sex a secret even from the rest of the cast, and crediting her as John Dudgeon.

    In Sh! The Octopus (1937), Dudgeon played the Nanny whose before-your-eyes transformation into a cackling ‘hag’ was a masterpiece of in-camera special effects.

    Dudgeon spent the last twenty or so years of her life in California, but had previously had a long career on the British stage. Whale’s Waterloo Bridge (1931) was her first, uncredited, screen role.

    She made four appearances in MGM musicals, all of them without credit: Stage Mother, The Night is Young, Bathing Beauty and Till the Clouds Roll By.

  • Nora Cecil

    British actor Nora Cecil (1878-1951) began her acting career on the London stage before moving to the United States and Broadway in her early twenties. 

    She made her screen debut in Maurice Tourneur’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), and went on to appear in over 200 pictures. She worked for Tourneur again as one of Mary Pickford’s teachers in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).

    Cecil came into her own when she grew old enough to play prim or sour-faced ‘spinster types’, like the missionary in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Aunt Emily in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933) and the teacher in Nothing Sacred (1937). She was memorable in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as the landlady who throws out Doc Boone.

    In I Married a Witch (1942) she played Harriet Wooley, one of the nagging women who make miserable the lives of the cursed Wooley men.

    In Cecil’s final film, Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), she played Louisa Ames, the malicious town gossip.

    Nora Cecil was uncredited in six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Two Sisters from Boston and No Leave, No Love.

  • Phillips Smalley

    Wendell Phillips Smalley (1865-1939) was a notable, though somewhat controversial, figure in early American cinema. He was married, until 1922, to the pioneering actor-writer-director Lois Weber, and several hundred films are credited as being co-directed by the pair of them. It is now generally accepted, however, that Weber was the creative force behind the pictures, and that it was Smalley’s jealousy of her achievements, along with his alcohol problem, that led to their divorce. The shared credit seems to have been more to do with the patriarchy than with merit. It is noticeable that he directed nothing after their relationship ended.

    It is indisputable that Smalley acted in around 130 films during his time with Weber, and a similar number afterwards. In the 1920s, he appeared in John Ford’s Cameo Kirby (1923) and had an uncredited role as a waiter in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

    In the 1930s he had mostly uncredited bit parts, including in Stage Mother, as the manager who fires Kitty from the shop, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.

  • Ruth Gillette

    Ruth Gillette (1906-94) started appearing in musical comedies straight after school, making her Broadway debut in the Shubert Brothers’ 1925 production of Gay Paree. 

    Gillette’s first film was MGM’s Stage Mother. She was uncredited and named in documentation only as ‘Blonde’, even though she headlines in  three important scenes. She was also in The Great Ziegfeld, again uncredited, playing Lillian Russell (whom she also portrayed in David Harum [1934] and The Gentleman from Louisiana [1936]). And she was an earthquake survivor in San Francisco.

    Gillette continued acting in films, television and on stage until the age of 80. In 1950, she played Gloria Grahame’s masseuse friend in In a Lonely Place. She later took over from Reta Shaw the role of Mabel in the original Broadway production of The Pajama Game.

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