The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: The Cuban Love Song

  • The Cuban Love Song

    Some Thoughts

    The Cuban Love Song is the story of a selfish man who manages to both have his cake and eat it, yet manages to be enjoyable in spite of this.

    Is Nenita (Lupe Velez) going to be amenable to the sweet talking of Terry (Lawrence Tibbett)? Of course she is.
    Is Nenita (Lupe Velez) going to be amenable to the sweet talking of Terry (Lawrence Tibbett)? Of course she is.

    This was, as well as being MGM’s last musical for a couple of years, the final film under Lawrence Tibbet’s contract with the studio. He handles himself very well in what is essentially a romance with music. Contemporaries may have smiled at well-known sex pot Lupe Velez playing a virginal peanut vendor, but she pulls it off, and her scenes with Tibbett are very believable, as is her faked bravura when she knows Tibbett has to leave her.

    This is a pre-code musical with some pretty blatant out-of-wedlock sex, though the fact that Velez dies might have made Will Hays feel slightly better about it. The man, of course, ends up with a son and in a clinch with Karen Morley, who has little to do in the picture other than be a good egg, but she does it very well.

    Crystal (Karen Morley) is told about Nenita, but she tells Terry she already knows
    Crystal (Karen Morley) is told about Nenita, but she tells Terry she already knows

    The optical printer had been in widespread use since 1927, and enabled The Cuban Love Song to achieve its most memorable sequence, when Lawrence Tibbett duets with himself, performing both baritone and tenor vocals. It was his last song in a film for four years, and it is a worthy one.

    There are a couple of good Fields-McHugh numbers in the film, but these are augmented by two genuine Cuban songs, one of which is reprised by Cuban artist Ernesto Lecuono, triggering a Proustian moment for our hero. The other is well-performed by Velez and nicely staged by W S Van Dyke, directing the first of the eleven musicals he worked on. Overall, his direction is fluid, with camera movement working in support of the narrative.

    Lawrence Tibbett performs with himelf years before Gene Kelly thought of it
    Lawrence Tibbett performs with himelf years before Gene Kelly thought of it

    Mention must be made, finally, of Jimmy Durante, energetic as always in his supporting  role, and playing the most unlikely-looking member of the US Marine Corps.

  • Paul Marquardt

    German-born Paul Alfred Marquardt (1889-1960) was a composer who worked for many years as an arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and for other studios. Although rarely receiving an onscreen credit, Marquardt made a substantial contribution to MGM’s musical history.

    He orchestrated the music for many non-musical films, including Anna Karenina (1935), Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), The Women (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), Rebecca (1940),Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), High Noon (1952) and Friendly Persuasion (1957). Marquardt also composed original scores in the 1930s, including for The Sign of the Cross and A Farewell to Arms (both 1933). He worked on well over 350 films between 1930 and 1957.

    The first of Marquardt’s 39 MGM musicals was The Cuban Love Song, collaborating with Charles Maxwell. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco. Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, Rosalie, Everybody Sing, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz, Sweethearts (in which he also appeared as a conductor), The Wizard of Oz (credited for orchestral and vocal arrangements), Babes in Arms, At the Circus, Balalaika, New Moon, Hullabaloo, Rio Rita, I Married an Angel, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Follies, Holiday in Mexico, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Royal Wedding and Show Boat.

  • Rafael Hernández

    Rafael Hernández Marín (1892-1965) was a Puerto Rican songwriter who spent much of his career in Mexico and Cuba.

    Hernández was a multi-instrumentalist who performed with bands in Puerto Rico and the USA. He relocated to Mexico in 1932 and, at the age of 40, enrolled in the National Music Conservatory, presumably on the basis that there is always more to learn.

    Songs by Hernández are featured in two Metro musicals. In The Cuban Love Song, Lupe Velez sings ‘Buchipluma na’ ma’, and Xaviet Cugat and his Orchestra perform ‘Cachita’.

  • Paul Hervey Fox

    Paul Hervey Fox (1894-1956) was a dramatist, novelist and screenwriter of modest abilities and moderate success.

    One of Fox’s Broadway productions was successful enough to secure him an invitation to work in Hollywood. In 1930, he wrote Prince of Diamonds for Columbia, and the following year he contributed dialogue to MGM’s The Cuban Love Song, perhaps seen as qualified by his marriage to Cuban writer Elsie de Sola. (In a bizarre incident in 1923, they had handed over their new-born daughter to a founding hospital. She grew up to be the celebrated writer Paula Fox.)

    Alcohol impeded Fox’s career. Though he contributed some interesting stories, most notably for the Kay Francis pre-code vehicle Mandalay (1934).

  • Moisés Simons

    Moisés Simón Rodríguez (1889-1945) was a Cuban composer and band leader who is best remembered today for writing the song ‘El Manisero’, known in English as ‘The Peanut Vendor’.

    Simons began his professional career as a pianist and musical director, before establishing his own jazz band in 1924. As a composer, he was part of the Afrocubanismo movement which foregrounded Black identity within Cuban culture. 

    Simons composed ‘El Manisero’ in 1930, and it went on to sell millions of copies as sheet music and in recordings by a variety of artists. In 1931, the song was used prominently in MGM’s The Cuban Love Song.

  • C Gardner Sullivan

    Charles Gardner Sullivan (1884-1965) was a prolific screenwriter with around 200 credits, the great majority of which were from the silent era. He was noted for the unusual amount of directorial detail included in his screenplays. Producer Jesse Lasky, speaking of Sullivan’s collaboration with Cecil B DeMille on films like The Buccaneer (1938) and Union Pacific (1939), described him as “the methodical giant who composed sequences of short shots and elaborately prepared camera angles that were calculated to give DeMille pictures a tremendous sense of visual place”.

    It was while working as a journalist that Sullivan began contributing story ideas to film studios. The first accepted would seem to have been Her Polished Family (1912), though this is not included by IMDb.

    When Lee Surrenders (1912) was filmed by Thomas Ince, beginning a long collaboration between Sullivan and the producer/director. In 1914, the writer relocated to Hollywood and joined Ince’s permanent staff. He worked on some of Ince’s most successful pictures, and co-wrote Civilization (1916), the big-budget anti-war film. It was a subject he would return to fourteen years later, when he supervised the screenplay for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

    By 1920, Sullivan was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood and, for a time, ran his own production company. 

    Sullivan made one contribution to MGM’s musicals, co-writing, with Bess Meredyth, the screenplay for The Cuban Love Song. 

  • John Lynch

    John G Lynch (1870-1936) was a successful business person operating a chain of theatres on the East coast who, in his mid-forties, contributed a story to a New York picture company and began a new career.

    Within a few years he was working for the Thomas Ince Corporation in Hollywood, churning out stories and occasional screenplays. When he died in 1936, he was working as an editorial supervisor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

    Lynch is credited with Adaptation on The Cuban Love Song, but it is unclear what he adapted, since the picture appears to be an original story.

  • W S Van Dyke II

    The reputation of Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II (1889-1943) as ‘One-Shot Woody’ was what enabled him to direct over ninety films in twenty-five years, half of them during the sound era.

    Van Dyke’s mother was an actor, leading to his own early appearances on the stage as a child. Constantly on tour, he claimed to have attended schools in every state. 

    He undertook many jobs during his early years as an adult, before obtaining his first job in the film industry in 1915. He began pretty much at the top, as one of a number of assistant directors under D W Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915). Two years later, after having written a number of films, he directed his first feature, The Land of Long Shadows (1917), based on his own screenplay. 

    Van Dyke’s work in silent films was prolific, but undistinguished. It was as a director of sound pictures that he came into his own. He travelled to Tahiti in 1928 to make White Shadows in the South Seas, MGM’s first feature with recorded sound (music and sound effects). Two years later he shot Trader Horn (1931) mostly in Africa, with some dialogue scenes reshot in Hollywood. 

    Van Dyke went on to become a mainstay of MGM’s production schedule, reputedly Louis B Mayer’s favourite (because most efficient) director. He directed the first Johnny Weissmuller film as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), The Thin Man (1934) and three of its sequels, and Marie Antoinette (1938). 

    He made nine musicals for MGM and, after The Cuban Love Song, all of them starred either Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, or both of them together: Naughty Marietta,(which he also produced), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (also produced by Van Dyke), Rosalie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, I Married and Angel and Cairo.

    Van Dyke was also used regularly to direct reshoots or new scenes for other directors’ pictures, and he did this for Broadway Melody of 1936 and the 1940 New Moon, again with MacDonald and Eddy.

    Woody Van Dyke was a Christian Scientist and, when he learned in 1943 that he was terminally ill, refused medical treatment and took his own life.

  • The Cuban Love Song

    The Crew

    W S Van DykeDirector
    John LynchAdaptation
    C Gardner SullivanScreenplay
    Bess MeredythScreenplay
    John ColtonAdditional Dialogue
    Gilbert EmeryAdditional Dialogue
    Robert E HopkinsAdditional Dialogue
    Paul Hervey FoxAdditional Dialogue
    Albert LewinProducer
    Herbert StothartComposer
    Dorothy FieldsLyricist
    Jimmy McHughComposer
    Moïses SimonsSongwriter (uncredited)
    Rafael HernándezSongwriter (uncredited)
    Harold RossonCinematographer
    Margaret BoothEditor
    Cedric GibbonsArt Director
    AdrianCostume Designer
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    Paul NealSound Recording Engineer (uncredited)
    Jack MintzAssistant Director (uncredited)
    Paul MarquardtArranger (uncredited)
    Charles MaxwellArranger (uncredited)

  • Jayne Shadduck

    Jayne Dunham Francis Shadduck (1915-93) was barely 17 when MGM hired her to provide baby sounds in The Cuban Love Song. 

    This was followed by a ten-year career combining small parts in some decent films (for example, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933) and Annie Oakley (1935) with voice work for Walt Disney. She provided the voices of Mickey Mouse’s nephews, Morty and Ferdie, in a number of short cartoons.

    Shadduck was also an aviator at a time when this was rare for women.

    After leaving show business, Shadduck lived in Hawaii and spent years being, by the account of her son, the mother from hell.

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