The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Reckless

  • Henry Kolker

    The dates of Joseph Henry Kolker are either 1870-1947 or 1874-1947 (definitely not, as he claimed himself, 1884). He was born either in Germany or Massachusetts. 

    What we do know is that he was a professional actor by 1895, and worked extensively on Broadway from 1904. By 1914, he was both acting in and directing moving pictures in New York. He directed eighteen films in total, and wrote one of them, The Third Generation (1920).

    In a thirty-three year film career (including a six-year break from 1919), Koler appeared in over 160 features, usually in credited character roles. 

    In Baby Face (1933), Kolker was a banker seduced by Barbara Stanwyck in her ascent to the top. He played the family doctor in Imitation of Life (1934), and was Melvyn Douglas’s controlling father in Theodora Goes Wild (1936). As Friar Laurence, he provided the sleeping potion to Norma Shearer’s Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1937), and he played the crooked politician in DeMille’s Union Pacific (1939).

    Kolker’s final appearances were in Edgar G Ulmer’s Bluebeard (1944) and, after a break, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947).

    Henry Kolker was in four MGM musicals: uncredited in The Cat and the Fiddle and Reckless, and credited in Here Comes the Band and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

  • Donald Ogden Stewart

    Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) began writing after graduating from Yale and military service during the First World War. He found success writing satirical comedy, and became a member of the Algonquin Round Table. In the 1920s he wrote plays that were performed on Broadway, and published a novel.

    Stewart’s first work for the cinema was Brown of Harvard (1926), an adaptation of a Rida Johnson Young story. This was followed by contributions to around 40 Hollywood screenplays, including Dinner at Eight (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Holiday (1938), Love Affair (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay) and An Affair to Remember (1957).

    His work on An Affair to Remember was uncredited because Stewart had by then been blacklisted owing to his membership of the Communist Party. He and his wife eventually moved to the UK, where Stewart wrote for the cinema and for television. He remained there for the rest of his life.

    Stewart worked on the screenplays of three Metro musicals: Going Hollywood, Reckless (uncredited) and Smilin’ Through.

  • Merrill Pye

    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.

  • David O Selznick

    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).

  • Harold Adamson

    Harold Campbell Adamson (1906-80) co-wrote a musical while at Harvard, where he was spotted by composer Vincent Youmans and invited to write the lyrics for a 1930 Broadway musical called Smiles. 

    Adamson then partnered with composer Burton Lane, while continuing to write with other composers. He and Lane then went to Hollywood, planning a short visit, but both stayed many years and worked on dozens of films.

    As well as Lane, Adamson wrote with many others, including Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Fain and Jimmy McHugh. He made a return to Broadway in the 1940s, writing lyrics for several shows.

    Harold Adamson songs were used in thirteen Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl, The Big Store, Thousands Cheer, Two Girls and a Sailor, Bathing Beauty, A Date with Judy, Everything I Have is Yours, Jupiter’s Darling and Seven Hills of Rome.

  • Burton Lane

    Burton Levy (1912-97) began writing songs while still a teenager, dropping out of school to do so. By the time he was 18, he had composed music for songs performed in Broadway shows, working regularly with Harold Adamson.

    Working for Irving Berlin Inc, Lane was sent to Hollywood with Adamson in 1934, and subsequently took up residence there. The pair worked together until 1936, writing songs for a number of studios. Lane then partnered with Ralph Freed (Arthur’s younger brother) at Paramount, followed by Frank Loesser. His final screen partnership was with Alan Jay Lerner in the 1950s.

    Lane composed the music for a number of Broadway musicals, the most successful being Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965).

    Notable songs composed by Lane include ‘How About You?’, ‘Old Devil Moon’, ‘I Hear Music’ and ‘ How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?’

    Lane songs were used in seventeen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Thousands Cheer, Meet the People, This Time for Keeps, Royal Wedding, Everything I Have is Yours, Torch Song, Give a Girl a Break and Jupiter’s Darling.

  • P J Wolfson

    Pinkus Jacob Wolfson (1909-73) was a trained pharmacist who took to writing novels. His first, Bodies Are Dust, was published in 1931.

    The book’s success secured Wolfson an offer to write for the screen, and he started at Universal, forming a partnership with Allen Rivkin. They wrote around ten screenplays together in two years. Altogether, Wolfson worked on around thirty-five films in 23 years. He also worked as producer on half a dozen pictures, later moving into television.

    Wolfson co-wrote Mad Love (1935), and two Fred Astaire pictures at RKO (Shall We Dance and Damsel in Distress (both 1937). He also worked on the George Steven comedy Vivacious Lady (1938). In 1939 he directed for RKO a film with the sensational title Boy Slaves, an exposé of child labour.

    Wolfson co-wrote two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Reckless.

  • Charles C Wilson

    Charles Cahill Wilson (1894-1948) was the type of stage actor with Broadway experience who was welcomed by Hollywood in 1929.

    He started out as dialogue director on Lucky Boy (1929), a George Jessel musical in which he also took a small role. He worked in that capacity on one further picture, in 1933, but otherwise restricted himself to acting., appearing in around 250 films in just seventeen years.

    Wilson was usually uncredited, but he did feature prominently in It Happened One Night (1934), playing Clark Gable’s irascible editor. This was one of several times he worked with Frank Capra; he played Charlie Dawson in Meet John Doe (1941).

    Wilson also played the DA in the first version of The Glass Key (1935) and was Jim Green in James Whale’s Show Boat (1936). In 1945 he made an appearance in the Fritz Lang masterpiece Scarlet Street, and the following year was uncredited in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

    Wilson acted without credit in four MGM musicals:  Dancing Lady, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

  • Irene Thompson

    Irene Thompson (1910-70) had been doing extra work when she was spotted by Mack Sennett and featured in four of his comedy shorts.

    She appeared in fifteen other pictures, but was uncredited. Thompson usually played chorus girls, including in MGM’s Dancing Lady and Reckless. Her third appearance in a Metro musical was in Born to Dance, where she played a guest at the Lonely Hearts Club. She had also played a stage actor in Twentieth Century (1934).

    Thompson married cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr and raised a family. After his death, she went to work in Hawaii, in the hotel business.

  • George J Folsey

    No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.

    Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.

    He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.

    At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films. 

    Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.

    Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).

    The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.

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