The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: The Merry Widow (1934)

  • Hector V Sarno

    Ettore Vittorio Sarno (1880-1953) was an Italian-born actor known to have worked for New York-based film companies from around 1912. His first feature film is thought to have been Under the Gaslight (1914). 

    Sarno appeared in at least 200 features and shorts, mostly credited roles during the sound era, but more often uncredited after 1929, when he was largely restricted to ‘ethnic’ parts. He can be seen in King of Kings (1927), Lucky Star (1929), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Cloak and Dagger (1946) and The Egg and I (1947).

    Sarno was a Mexican waiter in MGM’s Going Hollywood and the Gypsy leader at the beginning of Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. IMDb also suggests he appeared in Balalaika, which seems likely given its setting.

  • Fifi D’Orsay

    The first two screen appearances of Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier (1904-83) were in They Had to See Paris and Hot for Paris (both 1929). Her characters also epitomized Parisian gaiety and ‘ooh-la-la’. But she was actually a French-Canadian who never went to France, or anywhere else outside North America, in her life.

    D’Orsay moved to New York as a young woman and found work in a revue by claiming to have experience at the Folies Bergère.She later took her surname from a brand of perfume. She worked in vaudeville until moving to Hollywood and achieving short-lived stardom until she foolishly walked out on a contract with Fox in 1936 and found it difficult to obtain work.

    She then returned to vaudeville, taking film roles when she could get them, and worked right through to the early seventies. In 1971, D’Orsay played Solange, an aging French chorus girl in the original Broadway production of Follies.

    One of D’Orsay’s best roles was as the awful Lili in MGM’s Going Hollywood. She made one other musical for the studio, playing Marcelle in the French-language version of The Merry Widow.

  • Lorenz Hart

    The lyrics of Lorenz Milton Hart (1895-1943) were sophisticated, erudite, witty, conversational and amongst the finest contributions to the Great American Songbook. He stands with Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin as one of the foremost lyricists of the mid-twentieth century.

    In 1919, Hart met Richard Rodgers, and they formed a partnership that produced 26 of the most inventive Broadway shows of the late-1920s and 1930s These included A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Babes in Arms (1937), (The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and Pal Joey (1940).

    Hart and Rodgers worked in Hollywood for a period in the early 30s, with notable work for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933).

    Hart’s erratic behaviour eventually led to a rift with Rodgers, culminating in the latter working with Oscar Hammerstein II on Oklahoma! (1943). Hart died not long after the show’s premier.

    Lorenz Hart’s lyrics can be heard in eleven MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady  in 1933. The others were Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Words and Music (a less-than-accurate dramatization of the Rodgers and Hart partnership), Torch Song, Love me or Leave Me and Billy Rose’s Jumbo. 

  • Florine McKinney

    Florine McKinney (1909-75) was an actor and singer who worked in Hollywood for about ten years, making around 35 pictures.

    McKinney played with the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers (1932) and was Little Em’ly in David Copperfield (1935). She was uncredited in Waterloo Bridge and The Philadelphia Story (both 1940).

    Four MGM musicals featured uncredited appearances by Florine McKinney: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Student Tour and The Merry Widow.

    McKinney continued to work on the stage after leaving Hollywood.

  • Shirley Chambers

    Shirley Chambers (1913-2011) was nineteen when she played an assistant in a dress shop in the Warner’s comedy Gentleman for a Day (1932). In the same year she had credited roles in a Clark and McCullough comedy short, The Iceman’s Ball (1932), and in the Lupe Velez vehicle, The Half-Naked Truth (1932), which was directed by Gregory La Cava.

    Chambers’s film career fluctuated between uncredited bit parts and down-the-bill credits in films such as Calm Yourself (1935), a comedy-mystery starring Robert Young. Her best role was probably Vera in Melody Cruise (1933), a Charles Ruggles comedy.

    Some of her uncredited appearances were in quality pictures such as Nothing Sacred (1937, as Lady Godiva) and The Women (1939).

    Chambers sustained film career ended after she played one of Belle’s girls in Gone with the Wind (1939), though she continued to act on the stage and was in 1947’s Home Stretch and one episode of the television series My Mother the Car in 1966.

    Shirley Chambers’s connections with the MGM musical are Dancing Lady, as one of the scores of chorus girls, and the 1934 The Merry Widow, as a Maxim’s girl.

  • Florine Bale

    Florine Crawford Bale (1910-90) trained in tap and ballet as a child, equipping her for her film debut under the command of Busby Berkeley in Footlight Parade (1933).

    Bale only appeared uncredited, in ten pictures, but apparently became well known in Hollywood as a commander in the women’s section Victor McLaglen’s California Light Horse Regiment, established by the actor to fight communism and play polo.

    Florine Bale appeared in four Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow and The Night is Young.

    After leaving show business, Bale worked in the real estate business.

  • Sterling Holloway

    For those who grew up in the 60s and 70s, Sterling Price Holloway Jr (1905-92) is the voice of Winnie the Pooh; there can be no other. He was also the voice of the snake Kaa in The Jungle Book (1967) and, before that, of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (1951), amongst other Disney performances.

    After training at the American School of Dramatic Arts, Holloway toured widely with stock companies, both acting and singing. He was only 21 when he moved to Hollywood, making his debut in a Fox short called The Battling Kangaroo (1928).

    Holloway appeared in over 170 pictures, mostly credited, and almost always bringing something eccentric to the role, with his very distinctive voice and physical appearance. Typical examples would be the frenzied delivery boy in Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), or ‘Chilly’ Willie Simms in Mitchell Leisen’s comedy Remember the Night (1940). 

    He was cast against type, and to great effect, in Lewis Milestone’s war film A Walk in the Sun (1945). He plays the medic McWilliams, whose brief lack of concentration brings about his own death.

    Sterling Holloway made appearances in four Metro musicals. In Dancing Girl he plays Pinky, the scene-stealing author of the show being staged. He was uncredited in Going Hollywood and The Cat and the Fiddle, and then featured as Mishka, Danilo’s orderly, in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, where he was finally allowed to demonstrate his singing voice. 

    Holloway carried on working into his eighties, bowing out by narrating the highly-respected ‘Atomic Shakespeare’ episode of Moonlighting in 1986.

  • Joseph M Newman

    Joseph Max Newman (1909-2006) was a highly-respected assistant director who worked his way up to become a mediocre director.

    Newman started out in the film industry as an office boy, then a clerk. His first assignments as assistant director were in 1933, when worked on eight MGM productions, including Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor. He worked for Cukor again on David Copperfield (1934), for which he was nominated for the Assistant Director Academy Award.

    MGM allowed him to start directing shorts in 1938, alongside his work as AD on features. His first full-length picture was Northwest Rangers (1942), Metro’s version of a ‘B’ movie.

    Newman directed around 45 low-budget features before moving to television. His most high-profile picture This Island Earth (1955), though its more interesting aspects are attributable to Jack Arnold, who reshot some of Newman’s footage.

    Seven MGM musicals had Newman as AD: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, San Francisco (another Oscar nomination), Maytime and The Firefly. Some sources claim that he directed the famous  ‘Donkey Serenade’ sequence in The Firefly.

  • Frank O’ Connor

    It was quite an achievement for character actor Frank O’Connor (1881-1959) to cram well over 650 film appearances into even a forty-year career. Add in a couple of dozen pictures he directed and seven contributions to screenplays, and you have a very busy man.

    O’Connot starred in his earliest pictures, starting in 1915, but by 1921 he was pursuing a career as a director. Apparently it was an attempt to set up as a producer that ruined him financially, leading to over twenty years playing bits in hundreds of films. 

    But, amidst much dross, O’Connor showed up in some of Hollywood’s greatest pictures: King Kong (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Force of Evil (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Blue Gardenia (1953). Hawks, Capra, Welles, Curtiz, Wilder, Stevens, Ford, Lang: O’Connor kept good company.

    Frank O’Connor made appearances in six MGM musicals: Stage Mother, The Merry Widow, Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West and Little Nellie Kelly.

  • Nora Cecil

    British actor Nora Cecil (1878-1951) began her acting career on the London stage before moving to the United States and Broadway in her early twenties. 

    She made her screen debut in Maurice Tourneur’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), and went on to appear in over 200 pictures. She worked for Tourneur again as one of Mary Pickford’s teachers in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).

    Cecil came into her own when she grew old enough to play prim or sour-faced ‘spinster types’, like the missionary in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Aunt Emily in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933) and the teacher in Nothing Sacred (1937). She was memorable in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as the landlady who throws out Doc Boone.

    In I Married a Witch (1942) she played Harriet Wooley, one of the nagging women who make miserable the lives of the cursed Wooley men.

    In Cecil’s final film, Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), she played Louisa Ames, the malicious town gossip.

    Nora Cecil was uncredited in six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Two Sisters from Boston and No Leave, No Love.

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