The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • Curly Howard

    Jerome Lester Horwitz (1903-52) was, by general consent, the greatest of the six performers who, at various times, comprised the Three Stooges. His brother Moe and vaudeville performer Larry Fine were permanent presences in the trio, but Curly, somewhat reluctantly, took over when  original member Shemp Howard decided to leave. 

    Curly Howard had been a watcher-on of his brothers’ performances when they were a part of the act called Ted Healy and his Three Stooges, and was drafted in when Shemp grew tired of working with the difficult Healy. He was required to cut his hair down to the scalp, something he hated for the rest of his life.

    But Curly was considered the most naturally gifted comedian in the act, and introduced many of its best-loved bits of business: the mock-Brooklyng pronunciation (“Soitanly!), the manic laugh (“Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk”) and much of the physical buffoonery, which he could improvise at will.

    Curly appeared in almost 100 Three Stooges shorts between 1933 and 1947, when ill-health, culminating in a stroke, ended his career.

    The Three Stooges never made their own feature film during Curly’s tenure, but he did make brief appearances in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Dancing Lady and Hollywood Party.

  • DeWolf Hopper

    William D’Wolf Hopper (1858-1935) was a vaudeville and musical theatre performer who found fame through the recitation of Ernest Thayer’s mock-heroic poem ‘Casey at the Bat’.

    Hopper, who made his professional debut in 1878, aspired to be a leading man in serious drama, but his height and bulk (6 feet 5 inches and around 230 pounds) ruled that out. But he had a deep bass voice, and found success in musicals. He starred on Broadway in more than thirty shows. 

    It is estimated that Hopper recited ‘Casey at the Bat’ around ten thousand times. A recording exists, as well as a short sound film made in the Phonofilm process in 1923.

    Hopper starred in a number of silent films, including an unlikely-looking Don Quixote in a 1915 adaptation of Cervantes’s novel.

    In 1930, Hopper took part with other vaudeville veterans in filming a section of The March of Time. The film was never completed, but Hopper’s performance can be seen in Broadway to Hollywood. 

    Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper numbered among DeWolf Hopper’s six wives.

  • Tenen Holtz

    Alex Elihu Tenenholtz (1887-1971) was a stalwart of Yiddish theatre, both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in his adopted home in the United States. In 1925 he established a Yiddish theatre company with Cecilia Adler, the half-sister of Luther and Stella, and in 1926 was offered a contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

    In one of his early films, The Mask of Comedy (1926), he appeared with Norma Shearer, and over the next few years he acted with most of Hollywood’s top women actors: Marion Davies (The Cardboard Lover [1928]), Marie Dressler (Bringing Up Father [1928]), Joan Crawford (The Duke Steps Out [1929]), Blanche Sweet (The Woman Racket [1930]), Loretta Young (Three Girls Lost [1931]), Kay Francis (British Agent [1934]) and Carole Lombard (Nothing Sacred [1937]).

    Holtz also appeared uncredited in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Hollywood Party and Let Freedom Ring. 

    When Hotz’s career was reduced to Poverty Row productions in the late 30s, he took up chicken farming instead. He returned to acting, predominantly on television, in 1959.

  • Robert Greig

    Australian Robert Greig (1879-1958) played a film butler on at least twenty-three occasions, which is as close as you can get to being a butler without actually butling. He also played valets, doormen and at least two major domos. 

    More importantly, Greig was a key member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, appearing in six of the director’s films, including The Lady Eve (1941, as Burrows, the butler). In Sullivan’s Travels (1941, again playing a butler named Burrows), he was given a key speech, commenting on his employer’s plan to disguise himself as a poor man: “Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned”.

    After a successful career in Australia, Greig had emigrated to the United States and acted on Broadway. He repeated his role as Hives the butler, with the Marx Brothers, in Animal Crackers when the play was filmed in 1930. He worked with them again in Horse Feathers (1932).

    Greig worked with Lubitsch on Love Me Tonight and Trouble in Paradise (both 1932) and in top-class screwball comedies such as Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Easy Living (1937). He stepped back to the Revolutionary War with John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and to the ancient Middle East in The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

    Robert Greig appeared in four MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Rose-Marie (the only credited role), The Great Ziegfeld (as the protagonist’s butler) and I Married an Angel.

  • Barney Fagan

    Bernard J Fagan (1850-1937) acted, sang, composed, choreographed and directed throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

    As a performer, Fagan was particularly noted for his clog dancing and for minstrelsy, including blackface. As a composer, his songs are noted by historians of music as important contributions to the development of ragtime. In later life, Fagan performed in and directed musical theatre, including an appearance in the first production of Samson Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer in 1925.

    Fagan’s only film appearance was when he performed a soft-shoe shuffle for the abandoned MGM musical The March of Time in 1930. The footage was used three years later in Broadway to Hollywood.  

  • Nelson Eddy

    Nelson Ackerman Eddy (1901-67) was one of MGM’s first great musical stars. An operatic baritone, he appeared in fifteen musicals, playing the lead in all but the first three. In eight of them, he was partnered with Jeanette MacDonald.

    From a poor background, Eddy was a boy soprano who went on to have various jobs while indulging his love of music. He engaged in amateur productions, was noticed by the press and, by the age of 23, was working for the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company, and also sang with the Savoy Company. 

    Eddy spent some time in Europe, acquiring voice training, then returned to the USA and concentrated on concert performances. He was appearing in Los Angeles when Hollywood knocked on his door. He signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the studio did not initially know what to do with him. He made his debut in Handlebars (1933), a musical short, and sang without credit in Broadway to Hollywood. In the same year he appeared as himself in Dancing Lady and Student Tour.

    Then MGM struck gold.Just before his option with Metro ran out, he was teamed with MacDonald in Naughty Marietta. The picture made a sizeable profit and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. This led to their re-teaming in Rose-Marie, Maytime, Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, New Moon, Bitter Sweet and I Married an Angel.

    In addition, Eddy starred in Rosalie, Let Freedom Ring, Balalaika and The Chocolate Soldier. He only appeared in a handful of films after leaving MGM, most notably The Phantom of the Opera (1943) at Universal. His last film was Northwest Frontier (1947), made at Republic and partnering him again with his Balalaika co-star, Ilona Massey. He continued to give live performances for the rest of his life, dying after a stroke experienced while on stage.

    Not even his best friends would pretend that Nelson Eddy could act; he was stiff, with a very limited range of line readings. But there is always something engaging about his performances, which always seem good-humoured and lacking in self-importance. This is especially the case in his films with Jeanette MacDonald, which constituted the Golden Age of MGM’s operetta cycle.

  • Claire Du Brey

    Claire Violet Dubreyvich (1892-1993) had ideas of becoming a nurse before becoming an actor. One of her earliest films was Thomas Ince’s extraordinary pacifist epic Civilization (1916). By the time she retired in 1961, she had made well over 200 pictures, as well as many television appearances.

    In the silent era, Du Brey was rarely the leading player, but was cast in prominent supporting roles. The introduction of sound posed no difficulties for her and she continued to find regular work in character roles. At the same time, she established herself as a Hollywood agent, in partnership with the actor Anna Q Nilsson.

    Du Brey was not often given the opportunity to shine, though her playing of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1934) stands out. She played the wife of the coward Bob Ford in Jesse James (1939), and was in Lust for Life (1956).

    She appeared in two MGM musicals, separated by over twenty years: Broadway to Hollywood and Les Girls.

    Claire Du Brey lived another forty years after retiring, and became one of Hollywood’s first centenarians. 

  • Ruth Channing

    Eva Louise Moynahan (1904-92) only appeared in about ten films before giving up her career so she could, as was normal at the time, ‘devote herself to her family’. But she was able to look back on a career that connected her, albeit without credit, with a few memorable pictures.

    Channing had wanted to be a dancer, but an injury put paid to that, and she devoted herself to acting instead. After gaining experience on the stage, she was cast in Working Girls (1931), a minor but engaging picture directed by Dorothy Arzner. 

    In 1934, Channing appeared in two solid MGM classics, The Thin Man and the musical The Merry Widow. She had previously been in two other of the studio’s musicals: Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party.

    By 1935, her career was over.

  • Tad Alexander

    John A Alexander (1922-2012) lived to be ninety years old. For just five of those years, he was a film actor.

    Alexander made his stage debut aged 7, in a Los Angeles Theatre, in a play starring Ruth Chatterton. In 1931, he acted in Ambassador Bill, faced with the challenge of keeping up with star Will Rogers’s improvisations. By 1939, he had made eleven films, including Strange Interlude (1932), playing Robert Young as a boy. His final appearance was in a musical short called Show Kids (1935), in which he starred, and after which he retired. In later life, he was both a concert pianist and an engineer.

    In 1933, Alexander has an uncredited role in Broadway to Hollywood.

  • May Robson

    Australian-born Mary Jeanette Robison (1858-1942) grew up in London and emigrated to New York in 1877. She went on to become one of the ‘great ladies’ of the American stage and, later in life, pursued a successful screen career.

    Robson developed her craft in comedic and character roles on the stage from 1883, and by 1911 had established her own touring company. She made some film appearances in the 1900s, and in 1920 was in John Barrymore’s New-York-made version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

    But in 1927, after being widowed for the second time, Robson moved to Hollywood and devoted herself to film acting. She played the Matron in Chicago (1927) and, in 1933, was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for playing Apple Annie in Capra’s Lady for a Day. She was Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), but her most frequently revived role was as Aunt Elizabeth in Bringing Up Baby (1938). 

    May Robson acted in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Dancing Lady and Reckless. 

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