Little seems to be known about David Cox (1906-19??), who designed costumes at MGM before moving to work with Dolly Tree at Fox in 1932. He is, nonetheless, a featured artist at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where a costume designed for Bessie Love to wear in The Broadway Melody is among the exhibits.
Cox also designed for The Hollywood Revue of 1929, It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Call of the Flesh, Good News and Love in the Rough.
Arthur Lange (1889-1956) was a prolific composer of songs, scores and incidental music for dozens of films at a variety of studios.
At MGM Lange began by composing and arranging music for the Buster Keaton ‘underwater’ sequence in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he also appeared onscreen conducting the orchestra. Lange also made an appearance as himself in Free and Easy. He was subsequently the musical arranger onSo This Is College, and composed and arranged forThe Great Ziegfeld and Let Freedom Ring.
Originally Alfred Breitenbach, German-born Fred Fisher (1875-1942) wrote the popular ‘Peg O’My Heart’ and many other Irish-themed ballads. He also co-wrote ‘Whispering Grass’ with his equally-successful daughter, Doris Fisher.
Songs by Fisher, usually written in collaboration with others, are featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, So This Is College, Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure, For Me and My Gal and In the Good Old Summertime. He also contributed a number to The March of Time.
Martin Broones (1892-1971) was a prolific, if little-remembered, composer who worked in theatre, radio, television and moving pictures. He was also the creator and first director of MGM’s music department.
Broones only composed songs for two of Metro’s earliest musicals: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and So This is College. For the latter, he collaborated on the number ‘Campus Capers’ with his wife, the actor and eccentric dancer Charlotte Greenwood.
Henrietta Frazer (1889-1966, née Henriette Gant) is not one of the big names of costume design. The only reference to her in Dressed A Century of Hollywood Costume Design is for helping Marion Davies spend $52,000 a year on clothes for her pictures.
It is a reasonable assumption that Frazer designed Davies’s military-style costume for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Her other musical credits are for Hallelujah and So This Is College.
Joseph White Farnham (1884-1931) is the permanent holder of two cinematic records. He was the only person to receive an Academy Award for writing title cards, for The Fair Co-Ed (1927), Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Telling the World (both 1928). And he was the first winner of an Academy Award to die.
Farnham’s brief career in talking pictures was less prestigious, but did include work on six Metro musicals. He wrote a skit for The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and titles for Marianne (both without credit). He then contributed dialogue to So This Is College, Montana Moon, Good News and Love in the Rough. Farnham also appeared as himself in Free and Easy.
Pauline Theresa Moran (1893-1952) was a seasoned vaudeville performer when she became a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty in 1914. After years of slapstick with Sennett she signed with MGM and was teamed with Marie Dressler for the first time in 1927, a partnership that lasted nine pictures in total.
Moran appeared alongside Dressler in two numbers in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. She was the fraternity cook in So This Is College, then sparring again with Dressler in Chasing Rainbows. Her final musical for Metro was Hollywood Party, as Henrietta Clemp, wife of the multi-est millionaire in Oklahoma.
Anna McKim (1911-79) made her name as an actor of great talent in Scarface (1932) and flourished for a time at Warner Bros. But only a couple of years earlier she had been a regular member of the chorus line in no fewer than eleven of Metro’s early musicals. She is prominent in all her appearances, largely owing to her unique beauty and a screen presence that would be fully revealed by Howard Hawks.
Dvorak is cited by some sources as assistant choreographer to Sammy Lee, who certainly was the dance director on most of her MGM appearances. This would certainly explain her prominence.
Dvorak starts off big in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in a two-shot with Jack Benny. She gets to speak two words (“Pardon me”) and slap Benny in the face. After playing a student in So This Is College, she was back in the chorus line in It’s a Great Life, supporting the Duncan Sisters.
After that, Dvorak was in Devil-May-Care, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, Free and Easy and Children of Pleasure. She was another student in Good News, another chorus girl in Love in the Rough and, finally, a party-goer in the zeppelin in Madam Satan. In later films she was also working on choreography with Sammy Lee.
Dvorak also worked on The March of Time before it was abandoned.
Principal Crew
| Charles Reisner | Director |
| Christy Cabanne | Director (uncredited) |
| Norman Houston | Director (uncredited) |
| Al Boasberg | Dialogue |
| Robert Hopkins | Dialogue |
| Joseph Farnham | Skit writer (uncredited) |
| Harry Rapf | Producer (uncredited) |
| Irving Thalberg | Producer (uncredited) |
| John Arnold | Cinematographer |
| Max Fabian | Cinematographer |
| Irving G Ries | Cinematographer |
| John M Nickolaus | Cinematographer (uncredited) |
| William Gray | Editor |
| Erté | Art Director |
| David Cox | Costumes |
| Erté | Costumes (uncredited) |
| Henrietta Frazer | Costumes (uncredited) |
| Joe Rapf | Costumes (uncredited) |
| Richard Day | Settings |
| Cedric Gibbons | Settings |
| Douglas Shearer | Sound |
| Arthur Freed | Lyricist |
| Nacio Herb Brown | Composer |
| Ray Klages | Composer |
| Jesse Greer | Lyricist |
| Martin Broones | Composer |
| Andy Rice | Lyricist |
| Louis Alter | Composer |
| Jo Trent | Lyricist |
| Fred Fisher | Songwriter |
| Gus Edwards | Composer |
| Joe Goodwin | Lyricist |
| Arthur Lange | Arranger |
| Ray Heindorf | Arranger |
| Ernest Klapholz | Arranger |
| Sammy Lee | Dances and ensembles |
| Joyce Murray | Speciality dancer |
Sammy Lee (1890-1968), born Samuel Levy, was the first in a line of important choreographers at MGM, though he arguably achieved greater success on Broadway and at Twentieth Century-Fox.
Lee is uncredited on The Broadway Melody, which he might have been quite happy about, given the rudimentary nature of the dance numbers. He had worked on Ziegfeld’s Follies in 1927, but this is not reflected in the style of the fictional Zanfield’s show. Lee and director Harry Beaumont could not, in this first-ever film musical, determine how to make a stage performance cinematic. Nor were the chorines of the quality Lee would have been used to on Broadway.
Lee’s first onscreen credit was for ‘Dances and Ensemble’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he did his best with non-professional dancers Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. He also essayed a pre-Berkeley overhead shot of the chorus.
Lee went on to stage dances for It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, They Learned About Women, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure, Good News, Love in the Rough (which includes an al fresco number performed at a real golf club), A Lady’s Morals, Broadway to Hollywood and Dancing Lady.
A move to Twentieth Century-Fox earned Lee Academy Award nominations for King of Burlesque (1936) and Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). He was back at Metro for Honolulu, Hullabaloo, Cairo, Born to Sing, Meet the People and Two Girls and a Sailor.
Lee had a parallel career as the director of a series of undistinguished shorts.
