While sound department head Douglas Shearer always ensured he received a credit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were hit-and-miss in their approach to crediting his staff.
Standish John Lambert (1905-59) worked for the studio for at least twenty years, and does not appear to have ever received an onscreen credit. He and his brother Kenneth Lambert joined the studio in the mid-30s as electrical engineers, but Standish appears to have transitioned to the sound department at some point.
Some sources (IMDb) have him listed as working on Going Hollywood in 1933, but that seems unlikely. The earliest pictures cited by the AFI catalogue are from 1944. Clearly Lambert must have been doing something during the previous nine or ten years, but it is impossible to say what.
Most of Lambert’s known contributions are for sound and effects mixing, on pictures like Mrs Parkington (1944), Cry ‘Havoc’ (1944), The Clock (1945) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1945). Later, he worked as sound director on half a dozen pictures, including Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949).
The MGM musicals with Lambert as sound mixer were Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh and The Harvey Girls. He was sound director on Luxury Liner.
Leonard George Hayton (1908-71) was an important figure in the music department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the Golden Age of the studio’s production of musicals.
Hayton started out as a pianist and arranger with Paul Whiteman in the late 1920s, which led to a friendship with Bing Crosby when he was one of the Rhythm Boys. It was Crosby who had arranged for Hayton to conduct the orchestra when he made Going Hollywood at MGM in 1933. He then returned to working with Crosby on radio and recording for several years.
In 1940, MGM signed Hayton as a musical director, and he remained with the studio until 1953. He composed for or acted as MD on a range of non-musical pictures, including H M Pulham Esq (1941), Maisie Gets Her Man (1942) and Battleground (1950). But it was in musicals that he made his greatest mark.
Hayton’s MGM musicals were: Born to Sing, This Time for Keeps (composer), Best Foot Forward, Meet the People, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Living in a Big Way, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, On the Town (winning an Oscar), Singin’ in the Rain and Easy to Love. After leaving MGM, Hayton returned to arrange and conduct numbers for his wife, Lena Horne, in Meet Me in Las Vegas.
Lennie Hayton won another Oscar towards the end of his life, for Hello, Dolly (1968).
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.
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:
Robert Shirley (1904-81), like most of the engineers in Douglas Shearer’s sound department, never received onscreen credit for his work, despite working on some of Metro’s prestige projects. These included Strange Interlude (1932), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
Shirley’s musicals were They Learned About Women, Reckless, The Wizard of Oz (though everyone seems to have worked on that), Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Thrill of a Romance, Anchors Aweigh, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Two Sisters from Boston,Easy to Wed, Holiday in Mexico and, to round things off nicely, Singin’ in the Rain.
Napoleon Bonaparte Kubuck (1893-1953) notched up over 660 film and TV appearances, most of them uncredited.
Phelps was in twenty MGM musicals: They Learned About Women, The Florodora Girl, A Lady’s Morals, Flying High, Dancing Lady, Reckless, A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie, The Bohemian Girl, The Great Ziegfeld, Sweethearts, Balalaika, Little Nellie Kelly, Born to Sing (a rare onscreen credit), Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and That Midnight Kiss.
Beatrice Hagen (1917-99) claimed a minor place in film history by providing the voice of Snow White in the French version of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As well as being a Disney voice actor (she played Mickey’s nephews), she was a ubiquitous chorus girl in musicals from a number of studios.
For MGM, Hagen made uncredited appearances in The Broadway Melody, Flying High, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Maytime, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, Ziegfeld Girl, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, The Harvey Girls and Texas Carnival.
No one had a longer connection with MGM musicals than Arthur Freed (1894-1974), starting at the very beginning with The Broadway Melody in 1929 and ending in 1960 with Bells Are Ringing. Of course, his role changed significantly during that period.
Freed had not been working long as a lyricist at MGM when he and composer Nacio Herb Brown were assigned the task of producing the first bespoke score for a film musical. Following the success of The Broadway Melody, Freed’s songs were a mainstay of the studio’s musical output for a quarter of a century. He and Brown contributed numbers to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Marianne, Lord Byron of Broadway, Montana Moon, Dancing Lady, Going Hollywood, Student Tour, Broadway Melody of 1936, San Francisco, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Two Girls on Broadway, Hullabaloo, Little Nellie Kelly, Lady Be Good, Born to Sing, Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St Louis, Three Little Words, Pagan Love Song, Singin’ in the Rain and The Affairs of Dobie Gillies
He also worked without Brown on the 1930 Good News and on A Lady’s Morals, The Prodigal, Hollywood Party, A Night at the Opera, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Bathing Beauty, Anchors Aweigh, Ziegfeld Follies, Yolanda and the Thief and Love Me or Leave Me.
During the 1930s Freed spent time on Metro’s sound stages, watching the staging of his songs and learning about the craft of creating film musicals. He also devoted time to ingratiating himself with studio head Louis B Mayer, making known his ambition to become involved in the production side of the process. Finally, in 1938, Mayer decided to give Freed his chance.
Arthur Freed initiated the filming of The Wizard of Oz and was its de facto producer, although only credited as associate producer; Mayer safeguarded the project by appointing the more experienced Mervyn LeRoy as producer.
Having shown what he could do, Freed was made a full producer and worked on 39 musicals and a handful of non-musicals during the next thirty years. The musicals were Babes in Arms, Little Nellie Kelly, Strike Up the Band, Lady Be Good, Babes on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Panama Hattie, Cabin in the Sky, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Best Foot Forward, Meet Me in St Louis, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Easter Parade, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Pagan Love Song, An American in Paris, Royal Wedding, Show Boat, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, It’s Always Fair Weather, Kismet, Invitation to the Dance, Silk Stockings, Gigi and Bells Are Ringing.
The Freed Unit became MGM royalty and made most of the musicals upon which the studio’s current reputation rests. Opinions vary as to the extent to which Freed can take credit for this achievement, and the unit did produce a few duds. But, at the very least, Arthur Freed was the catalyst for a body of work of unrivalled sophistication and artistry.
