James Francis McHugh (1894-1969), like many other contributors to the Great American Songbook, had worked as a song plugger before producing his own hits.
He worked in partnership with many lyricists, but perhaps most fruitfully with Dorothy Fields. Amongst the many standards they produced were ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ and ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’.
Fields and McHugh numbers were used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At. Songs written with other lyricists are featured in Two Girls and a Sailor, A Date With Judy (notably ‘It’s a Most Unusual Day’) and Looking for Love.
Born into a showbiz family, Dorothy Fields (1904-74) worked on the stage for a few years before finding her true vocation as a songwriter. She was one of the few women to find success on Tin Pan Alley, and undoubtedly the greatest of them. She wrote the songs for Roberta in 1933 and for Sweet Charity in 1966, and it is astonishing to consider that ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘The Rhythm of Life’ came from the pen of the same writer. Few songwriters had the same ability to adapt to changing musical styles.
Fields’s early work found little success, but she came into her own after partnering with composer Jimmy McHugh. Together, they wrote a string of popular hits, including ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’ and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’.
Fields and McHugh wrote the songs used by MGM in Love in the Rough, and later contributed to Flying High, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Till the Clouds Roll By, Big City, The Strip and Lovely to Look At, the studio’s updated version of Roberta, on which she worked with Jerome Kern.
Numbers by Fields working in collaboration with other composers also featured in Mr Imperium, Excuse My Dust and Texas Carnival.
Fields co-wrote the book for the stage show adapted into Annie Get Your Gun.
Mathilde Comont (1886-1938) started working in French films for the Gaumont studio in 1908, later working for Max Linder.
After moving to Hollywood, Comont found regular work, most notably playing the Prince [sic] of Persia in The Thief of Bagdad (1924). She notched up around sixty supporting roles for various studios, including two appearances in Metro musicals, Call of the Flesh and The Cuban Love Song.
In 1977, Margaret Booth (1898-2002) received an honorary Oscar in tribute to her 62-year Hollywood career, during most of which she was arguably the industry’s greatest editor. Remarkably, she carried on working for another eight years.
Like many major Hollywood figures, Booth started out with D W Griffith, working as a negative cutter. She subsequently worked for Louis B Mayer, transferring with him to the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. She was appointed as Supervising Editor in 1939, and stayed there until her shameful dismissal in 1986. During that time, as Booth described it, she worked only in the projection room, never the cutting room (though it is believed she did uncredited cutting on Ben Hur (1959). She has been described as “the final arbiter on every picture the studio made”, and was responsible, amongst other things, for the butchering of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951).
The first MGM musical edited by Margaret Booth was The Rogue Song. This was followed by New Moon, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Reckless. After that, she technically supervised the editing of every musical, but made a particularly significant contribution to The Wizard of Oz and Gigi.
As late as 1982, aged 84, Booth worked as supervising editor on the Columbia-released musical Annie.
John Colton (1887-1946) was a successful playwright who was enticed to Hollywood by MGM in 1927, to write titles for some of their last silent films. This was not taxing work, with Colton’s name in the credits being more valuable than anything he wrote.
The Broadway hit Rain, co-written by Colton with Clemence Randolph, was filmed by MGM in 1928 as Sadie Thompson, but the author was not invited to work on it. Other films based on Colton’s plays were The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949).
Colton contributed to conventional screenplays after the introduction of sound, including for three MGM musicals: The Rogue Song, Call of the Flesh and The Cuban Love Song. All three lent themselves to the interest in exotic settings that Colton demonstrated in his plays.
Lawrence Mervil Tibbet [sic] (1896-1960) was one of the great American opera stars, and also one of the most glamorous. He combined a deep baritone voice, of the quality required by a leading singer at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, with good looks and acting ability. These attributes made it inevitable that, with the advent of sound, Hollywood would come calling. Tibbett had already performed many of the great operatic roles, and developed a successful radio and recording career, when he signed a contract with MGM in 1930.
Tibbett’s career in films did not last long. He starred in four Metro musicals, made a couple of pictures for Fox, and then returned full-time to the stage. But his Hollywood career was by no means a failure. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his debut performance in The Rogue Song, something achieved by few actors. Unfortunately, The Rogue Song, MGM’s first all-Technicolor musical, is now a lost film.
Following this success, Tibbett did not embarrass himself in his other assignments, New Moon, The Prodigal and The Cuban Love Song (in which he duetted with himself).
By the end of his career, Tibbett had been a leading man at the Met for 27 seasons and established himself in the operatic pantheon.
Paul Neal (1896-1969) began working in Douglas Shearer’s sound department at MGM in 1929, and went on to record and mix sound for a variety of studios. He worked with a range of important filmmakers, including John Ford (The Whole Town’s Talking, 1935), Frank Borzage (History is Made at Night, 1937), William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939) and Henry Hathaway (The Dark Corner, 1946).
Neal recorded sound on five Metro musicals: Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady and The Cat and the Fiddle.
Screenwriter Helen Elizabeth MacGlashan (1890-1969) began writing scenarios in the early 1910s, but maintained a parallel career as an actor until 1926. A trusted colleague of Irving Thalberg, she was dispatched to Italy to rescue the out-of-control production Ben-Hur (1925).
Meredyth met her third husband, director Michael Curtiz, at the Warner Bros studio while she was working for First National, and advised him about his pictures even after she returned to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She reviewed all his scripts and frequently amended the dialogue.Meredyth’s final screen credit was for the screenplay for Curtiz’s The Unsuspected (1947).
Meredyth contributed to four of MGM’s early musicals. She co-wrote the story from which Chasing Rainbows was adapted and worked on the scenario, and went on to write the adaptation for In Gay Madrid. Some sources show Bess Meredyth and Wells Root as authors of a fictional work called The Southerner, on which the 1930 musical was based. All that seems certain, however, is that they are credited for the film’s dialogue continuity. Finally, Meredyth wrote the screenplay for The Cuban Love Song.
Herbert Pope Stothart (1885-1949) is a composer whose name is less familiar today than, say, Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner, but in Hollywood’s golden age he was ranked alongside them for his work at MGM.
Stothart had a successful career writing stage musicals, most notably Rose-Marie, but was invited to join Metro in 1929. He signed a contract and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Scores by Stothart were prominent in some of the studio’s most important pictures of the 1930s and 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille (1936), The Good Earth (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Mrs Miniver (1942), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Yearling (1946). In all, Stothart wrote over 100 scores.
Stothart worked on many of MGM’s musicals. He and Clifford Grey wrote the songs for Devil-May-Care and contributed numbers to Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, In Gay Madrid, The Florodora Girl, Call of the Flesh, New Moon and Madam Satan.
He worked with other lyricists on A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Here Comes the Band, Maytime, The Firefly (composing ‘The Donkey Serenade’), Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, The Chocolate Soldier and I Married an Angel.
Stothart was the musical director on some of these films and also on The Cat and the Fiddle, Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, The Wizard of Oz (picking up an Oscar), New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Girl, Cairo, Thousands Cheer, Kismet, The Unfinished Dance. Musical direction usually involved writing incidental music.
And, of course, Metro produced two versions of Stothart’s greatest stage success, Rose-Marie, and he worked on the first version.
Albert Parsons Lewin (1894-1968) was one of the more exotic figures working behind the scenes in Hollywood’s golden age. He joined MGM in 1924 as a writer. Trusted by Irving Thalberg, he was made head of the story department, and subsequently a production supervisor and trusted adviser to Thalberg. He became a full-fledged producer after Thalberg’s responsibilities were reduced.
An intellectual in a doggedly non-intellectual world, Lewis later became a somewhat eccentric auteur, writing, producing and directing a series of oddities, most notably Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951).
Producer responsibilities were often vague at Metro during the years of Thalberg’s pomp, but Lewin was certainly responsible for The Cuban Love Song. He is also believed to have worked as producer on Devil-May-Care.
