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.
Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.
The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.
Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.
Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.
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.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
Benjamin Lewis (1894-1970) was a film editor who spent the whole of his career, forty-three years, working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
He started out working as an assistant editor on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), and obtained his first full credit a year later on The Devil’s Circus (1926), directed by Benjamin Christiansen during his sojourn in Hollywood.
Lewis edited some of MGM’s most prestigious pictures, as well as being a frequent editor on the money-making Andy Hardy series. He worked on Trader Horn (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and The Good Earth (1937, uncredited).
In 1951, Lewis was given the unpleasant task of editing John Huston’s cut of The Red Badge of Courage down to 69 minutes.
Lewis worked on seven MGM musicals, across a thirty-four-year period: Broadway to Hollywood, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Strike Up the Band, Rio Rita, For Me and My Gal, Three Little Words and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
Ben Lewis’s brother was the venerated ‘B’ picture director, Joseph H Lewis.
Edgar McPhail Smith (1857-1938) was a librettist, occasional actor, and songwriter who contributed to an estimated 150 Broadway productions over a period of forty years. Much of his work was for the comedians and impresarios Joe Weber and Lew Fields, and his songs were performed by some of the biggest musical and comedy stars of the day, including Al Jolson and Marie Dressler.
Smith contributed the lyrics to only one standard. ‘Ma Blushin’ Rosie’ was written with John Goldberg, and is featured in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood, which also shows one of Smith’s shows, Whoop-Dee-Do playing at one of Weber and Field’s theatres.
‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl’, written for Dressler, is performed by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Strike Up the Band.
A film career that lasted 88 years. About 285 pictures. The biggest box office draw in the United States in 1939. 1940 and 1941, from age 19 to 21. Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr (1920-2014) was no ordinary film star: he was a phenomenon, utterly unique. He was not, by most accounts, a particularly pleasant person; there are plenty of horror stories about his behaviour and attitudes. But I cannot find that this detracts greatly from his achievements on the screen.
Rooney claimed that he first appeared as part of his parents’ vaudeville act aged 17 months. After they divorced, he went with his mother to Hollywood and made his first film appearance in 1926, and from 1927 to 1934 was the star of over sixty comedy shorts, as a character named Mickey McGuire. He became associated with the name, but was prevented from taking the name as his own, so chose Rooney instead.
Aged 14, Rooney played Puck in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), one of the film’s brighter spots, a fact all the more remarkable when you know he gave much of his performance with a plaster cast on a broken leg.
He played the younger son in an adaptation of Ah, Wilderness (1935), and then was cast as the older son in a rehash of the plot, 1937’s A Family Affair. His character was named Andy Hardy, and Rooney played him in 13 sequels, most of which put plenty of cash into MGM’s coffers (he was by now contracted to the studio)
Rooney starred opposite Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town (1938), and went on to receive a special Oscar known as the Academy Juvenile Award. He was later nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for The Human Comedy (1943).
Rooney did not look like a leading man, and when it became impossible for him to continue playing teenagers, his career went into decline. But, in Jeanine Basinger’s words, he “kept on working and growing, the mark of a professional”. Even as late as 1979, he achieved critical recognition, and another Academy nomination, for Coppola’s The Black Stallion. And he regularly took part in successful Broadway productions. He even tried his hand, without great success, as a producer and director.
Mickey Rooney was in twelve MGM musicals, appearing with Judy Garland in seven of them. They were: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Girl Crazy, Summer Holiday, Words and Music and The Strip.
British-born Dorothy Marian Isbell (1899-1962) was something of a Renaissance woman, successful in a variety of roles, including as an illustrator, actor and, most notably, as a costume designer.
As a teenager, Tree’s love of the theatre prompted her to start designing posters. This became a professional opportunity in 1917 when she was employed to produce posters and programmes for a well-known impresario. She also produced comic illustrations for newspapers and periodicals.
Between 1915 and 1918, Tree starred in around eight British films, including Hindle Wakes (1918), the first version of Stanley Houghton’s 1912 play.
Designing costumes for stage and screen began in the early 1920s, and she also designed for the Folies Bergère. Tree emigrated to the United States in 1926 and worked on Broadway, including designing for pre-Hollywood Mae West. By this time, her designs were having an impact on the wider fashion scene of the Jazz Age.
Tree’s Hollywood career began in 1929, first at Fox, and then eleven years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Pictures she worked on included The Thin Man (1934), David Copperfield (1935), Libeled Lady (1936) and Fury (1936) and The Good Earth (1937).
Dolly Tree designed costumes for fifteen MGM musicals: The Devil’s Brother, The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Rosalie, Listen Darling, Tce Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Let Freedom Ring, At the Circus, Strike Up the Band, Little Nellie Kelly and Go West.
Tree’s career effectively ended in 1942, when divorce led to a drink problem.Her reputation has long rested in the shadows created by Adrian and Orry-Kelly, but there is now a growing awareness of her importance as a designer.
The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.
IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.
In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.
Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.
Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.
Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
Andrew Jackson Baxley (1884-1950) appeared in a handful of excellent films during his career as a character actor, including two with Orson Welles (The Magnificent Amberson in 1942 and The Lady from Shanghai in 1947). But there, as in most of his other pictures, he was uncredited.
Baxley was in eight Metro musicals: Free and Easy, The Florodora Girl, Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Strike Up the Band, Thrill of a Romance and Summer Holiday.
