Harry Lillis Crosby Jr (1903-77) was one of the most successful and influential singers in the world during the middle decades of the twentieth century. He was a prolific recording artist–at least 1600 songs, possibly nearer 2000–and a star of radio, television, concert hall and big screen.
Crosby joined his first band–as a drummer–in 1923, and performed in various acts until being spotted by a member of the Paul Whiteman organization. He and his friend Miles Rinker were hired as singers and found themselves performing with one of the biggest bands in the country, with an international reputation. Out of this came the three-person Rhythm Boys, who appeared in the Universal musical revue King of Jazz (1930).
Crosby went solo in 1931 and, alongside the other strands of his career (including recording the best-selling single of all time), he became a film star, accumulating over 80 credits up to 1979. Most of his films were musicals, or comedies with music (for example, the Road pictures he made with Dorothy Lamour and Bob Hope). But he also took on straight roles, culminating in an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as a singing priest in Going My Way (1944).
Bing Crosby made scores of musicals, but most of them were at his home studio, Paramount. He only made two for MGM, one at the beginning of his screen career and one late on. They were Going Hollywood and High Society.
Sylvia Bruce teaches French at Briarcroft School, but dreams of another life. Listening to crooner Bill Williams on the radio [Our Big Love Scene], she decides to pack a bag and set off to find life, love and music.
Sylvia Bruce (Marion Davies) wishes on a star
In New York, Bill Williams has to record a song [Beautiful Girl] before leaving for Hollywood. He will be travelling with his French co-star, Lili Yvonne. Sylvia sneaks into Bill’s room to thank him for the way his music has changed her life.
Bill wants to board his train without anyone knocking, so he can avoid the big send-off arranged by his publicist, Jack Thompson. But at Grand Central Station, he is besieged by reporters and fans. Bill makes a run for it [Just an Echo in the Valley], with the crowd in pursuit [Going Hollywood].
On the train, Bill finds Bert Conroy, the director of the film, Ernest Pratt Baker, who is financing it, and Sylvia, who shocks Bill by telling him she loves him.
Later, Bill is surprised again when he finds that Lili has hired Sylvia to be her maid. This is short-lived, because Bill tells the jealous Lili that Sylvia loves him, leading Lili to slap Sylvia.
Crooner Bill Williams (Bing Crosby) seems pleased to see Sylvia on the train
Later, in Hollywood, on the first day of filming, Bert already thinks both the picture and Lili are “a bust”. Sylvia meets Jill Barker, who is trying to break into movies. Sylvia becomes Jill’s roommate at Ailoha Bungalow Court., where she dreams about Bill [We’ll Make Hay While the Sun Shines].
Later, on the set, Sylvia turns up as an extra in blackface. Bill apologizes for the way Lili treated her on the train. Lili finds them together and slaps Sylvia again.
Ernest gets Sylvia and Jill jobs in the chorus. On location, Lili performs her number [Cinderella’s Fella], which Bert thinks is terrible. Lili quits, but Bill persuades her to change her mind.
During a break [medley], Sylvia impersonates Lili Cinderella’s Fella]. Lili slaps Sylvia for the third time, but this time Sylia hits back. Ernest asserts himself and gives the lead in the picture to Sylvia. Bill invites Sylvia to dinner [After Sundown]. Bill tells Sylvia he is through with Lili. but is irritated when Sylvia will not go back to his apartment with him. He drops her off, but forgets his hat. Sylvia takes the hat to him, but finds he is with Lili.
Sylvia tracks down Bill and Lili Yvonne (Fifi D’Orsay) in a Mexican dive
Next day, Ernest warns Bert that Lili is trying to get Bill to walk off the picture. Bill does not understand why Sylvia is avoiding him. She tells him he is a fake, like everything else in Hollywood. Bill goes on a bender with Lili, ending up in Mexico, and the studio decides to replace him. Sylvia and Jill track him down, and Sylvia reminds him that he said he loved her. She asks Bill to come back with her, but Lili restrains him [Temptation].
Back at the studio, they are about to start filming with a replacement when Bill arrives [Our Big Love Scene]. Sylvia and Bill kiss.
Merrill Manley Pye (1902-75) was an important member of Cedric Gibbons’s unit at MGM from 1925 until 1968, and one who had a significant impact on the look of the studio’s musicals across most of that period.
Pye had studied architecture, which made him a desirable addition to Gibbon’s team. The respect in which he was held is suggested by his first picture, Edmund Goulding’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), where he shares equal credit with Gibbons for Settings.
He was art director, uncredited, on Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and given associate art director credit for David Copperfield (1935). In 1959, Pye was Oscar-nominated for his art direction on Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest, responsible for recreating the Mount Rushmore monument on a sound stage.
But it was in musicals that Pye made his real mark. He started out with the art direction of Dancing Lady, where he has been credited with introducing the Moderne style to MGM’s musical pictures: what has been described as “flat mise-en-scenes surfaces, horizontal accents, tonal values distinction, and smooth and curved lines with glossy surfaces”.
Pye went on to be art director (or associate) on Going Hollywood, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Swing Fever, Bathing Beauty, Ziegfeld Follies, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
But Pye also received another type of credit on some pictures: Musical Presentation. IMDb erroneously interprets this as him having a role in the music department, but it was actually a special credit for a role that involved the overall visual design of a musical number. This involved not only the structural design of sets, but also camera movement through the set, incorporating an element of direction.
Pye carried out this function on musical numbers in Born to Dance, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Honolulu, Strike Up the Band, Bitter Sweet, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, The Chocolate Soldier, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy!, Panama Hattie, For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Broadway Rhythm and Meet the People.
It is notable that Pye’s services in musical presentation were not required on the Freed Unit musicals of the later 1940s and 1950s, where directors like Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli would retain that creative control.
Slavoljub Vorkapić (1894-1976) is one of the more fa
scinating and unexpected figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Born in Serbia, Vorapich studied to be a painter, and was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris in the late 1910s. He travelled to the United States in 1920, and found work as an actor, predominantly for the director Rex Ingram (he played Napoleon in Scaramouche [1923]).
In 1928, Vorkapich directed, with the collaboration of Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, a short and influential experimental film called The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, allegedly with a budget of $98. The prowess in editing demonstrated in the film led to employment in Hollywood, initially by Paramount, and then RKO and MGM. He came to specialize in montage sequences, in which action over a lengthy period of narrative time is compressed into a few minutes of screen time in what he called “symphonies of visual movement”. Vorkapich would be brought in specifically to shoot and edit these, often expressionistic, sequences. He developed and utilized techniques in pacing action for maximum psychological impact on the viewer.
Vorkapic was also adept at in-camera special effects, such as the collapse of Wall Street at the end of The Conquerors (1932) and the locust attack in The Good Earth (1937).
He made propaganda shorts during the Second World War, and then took up academic posts in California, and later in Yugoslavia. This was also where he directed his only feature film, Hanka (1955). He lectured on what he saw as the autonomous visual language of cinema, and never hesitated to criticize directors of high reputation, including Eisenstein and Ford, for what he considered incompetence.
Vorkapich’s work at MGM can be seen in the musicals Dancing Lady, San Francisco, Maytime, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts.
Quite why he was seen as simpatico with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is unclear.
Producer John William Considine Jr (1898–1961) had a more erudite background than most of his colleagues in the upper echelons of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, having studied at Stanford, Yale, Oxford and the University of Heidelberg. He was the son of a successful theatrical impresario.
Considine started out writing and producing at Fox, and directing one picture, Disorderly Conduct (1932). He also wrote the original story for Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930). He joined MGM in 1932, and stayed at the studio for the rest of his career. He retired when he was 45, owing to health problems.
Considine’s first picture at MGM was Flesh (1932), directed by John Ford. Subsequent successes included Mad Love (1935, one of MGM’s rare stabs at the horror film), Boy’s Town (1938) and A Yank at Eton (1942).
Considine only produced two MGM musicals: Dancing Lady (in tandem with David O Selznick) and Broadway Melody of 1936.
David Selznick (1902-65, the ‘O’ was just an initial he adopted), was one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most successful independent producers, though his time at the top was not lengthy. His name will always be linked with Gone with the Wind (1939), the epic Civil War saga, and with Rebecca (1940), Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film. The two productions made him the only producer to win Best Picture Oscars in successive years.
Selznick was born into a film family (his father was also a producer). Early on, he worked for MGM, Paramount and RKO before striking out on his own. Highlights of this studio period were What Price Hollywood? (1932), King Kong (1933), Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1935) and Anna Karenina (1935).
For Selznick International he produced Nothing Sacred (1937), Intermezzo (1939), Spellbound (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946). Later on, he produced and then suppressed the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece Gone to Earth (1950), reshooting sections, re-editing it and releasing it under another title. The film was not seen as intended until a restoration in 1985.
Selznick’s last major production was A Farewell to Arms (1957).
During his time with MGM, Selznick produced two musicals: Dancing Lady and Reckless (for which he also wrote the original story under the name Oliver Jeffries).
The lyrics of Lorenz Milton Hart (1895-1943) were sophisticated, erudite, witty, conversational and amongst the finest contributions to the Great American Songbook. He stands with Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin as one of the foremost lyricists of the mid-twentieth century.
In 1919, Hart met Richard Rodgers, and they formed a partnership that produced 26 of the most inventive Broadway shows of the late-1920s and 1930s These included A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Babes in Arms (1937), (The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and Pal Joey (1940).
Hart and Rodgers worked in Hollywood for a period in the early 30s, with notable work for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933).
Hart’s erratic behaviour eventually led to a rift with Rodgers, culminating in the latter working with Oscar Hammerstein II on Oklahoma! (1943). Hart died not long after the show’s premier.
Lorenz Hart’s lyrics can be heard in eleven MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady in 1933. The others were Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Words and Music (a less-than-accurate dramatization of the Rodgers and Hart partnership), Torch Song, Love me or Leave Me and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
There were better composers of popular music in the mid-twentieth century than Richard Charles Rodgers (1902-77), but none was as popular, prolific and influential. He was the first person to be awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Pulitzer.
Rodgers’s career hinges on two partnerships with great, but very different, lyricists: Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. He met Hart while still a teenager, and they started out writing amateur shows, until contributing to their first Broadway show, Poor Little Ritz Girl in 1920. Rodgers had to work at other jobs to make a living, and was considering giving up music until the songs he and Hart wrote for a benefit show in 1925 received high praise from the critics. There was particular admiration for ‘Manhattan’, now an American standard.
Rodgers and Hart wrote Broadway shows throughout the late 1920s before moving to Hollywood, where they scored a particular success with songs for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932). Another string of Broadway shows ran from 1935 till Hart’s death in 1943.
Rodgers had, by that time, already begun working with Hammerstein, with Oklahoma! (1943) establishing a new style of integrated musical. They went on to write some of the most successful shows on Broadway and throughout the world of musical theatre.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer never filmed any of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, so it is Rodgers’s collaborations with Hart that feature in ten of the studio’s musicals: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Meet the People, Words and Music (a highly-fictionalized Rodgers and Hart biopic), Torch Song, Love Me Or Leave Me, This Could be the Night and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
Although none of their songs were used by MGM, the influence of Rodgers and Hammerstein can clearly be seen in the greater integration of music and plot from the late 40s onwards.
