Christian Franz Bruno Julius Maria Rub (1886-1956) was allegedly an admirer of his fellow Austrian, Adolf Hitler. This is according to those who worked with him on his most enduring contribution to cinema, as the voice and physical model for Gepetto in Pinocchio (1940).
Rub started out as a stage actor in Germany, working in provincial theatre. It is unclear when he relocated to the United States, but his first film there, The Belle of New York, was made in 1919. This was the first of more than 100 film roles, most of them during the sound era.
Rub was a jobbing character actor, accepting both credited and uncredited parts in pictures, including Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now (1934), Peter Ibbetson (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Captains Courageous (1937) and, perhaps fittingly, Nazi Agent (1942).
Christian Rub appeared uncredited in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle, The Night is Young and Maytime, and was credited as the coachman in The Great Waltz.
German Hermann Bing (1889-1947) is a Pagliacci-like figure, literally starting out as a circus clown, adding comic eccentricity to dozens of films, and driven by depression to take his own life.
Bing left home at 16 to join the circus, and later worked as a comedian in varietétheaters. He entered the German film industry in the early 1920s, apparently working on the production side, though he may also have acted. By the late thirties he was working with F W Murnau, and travelled with him to the United States to work as assistant director on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). He can also be seen onscreen in a brief appearance as a tram conductor. He went on to assist on Murnau’s 4 Devils (1928).
Bing stayed on in Hollywood and developed a career as a supporting player, playing German characters with exaggerated accents and a general air of frustrated dignity. In the early 1930s, he also appeared in German-language versions of pictures such as Garbo’s Anna Christie (1930) and Menschen hinter Gittern (1931), a version of The Big House (1930) directed by Paul Fejos.
Herman Bing was often uncredited, but always memorable, and his more than 100 feature films included Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Ford’s Flesh (1932), Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Barbary Coast (1935) and Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). He was also the voice of the Ringmaster in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
His career was hit hard by the war and, by the mid-1940s, Bing was struggling to find work, which contributed to his tragic end.
Herman Bing appeared in eleven MGM musicals, including six with Jeanette MacDonald: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, Maytime, Sweethearts and Bitter Sweet. The others were The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, The Great Waltz and Broadway Melody of 1940.
Charles Edward Butterworth (1896-1946) was one of those Hollywood character actors with a very defined onscreen persona which he carried with him from picture to picture: mild-mannered, courteous and hesitant/confused.
After starting out as a journalist, Butterworth dabbled in writing humorous pieces, which ended with him performing comic monologues in vaudeville. This led, in turn, to Broadway shows.
In 1929, Butterworth performed a monologue in a Paramount short called Vital Subjects, and followed this with 47 appearances in feature films, almost always credited. He was top-billed in a handful of pictures, for example Baby Face Harrington (1935), but was usually cast in a strong supporting role.
Butterworth played the Comte de Savignac in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and was Algy Longworth in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934). He provided comic relief in Magnificent Obsession (1935) and was the Duke of Ephesus in the, not wholly successful, screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (1940). Butterworth was an adept ad libber, and often improvised better dialogue than had been written for him.
Charles Butterworth featured in five MGM musicals of the 1930s: The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party, Student Tour, The Night is Young and Let Freedom Ring.
Butterworth died aged 49, when his car ran off the road in an unexplained accident.
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.
Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Siodmak, Mitchel Leisen, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian: Scottish actor Elspeth Dudgeon (1871-1955) worked with some of Hollywood’s best directors in her twenty-four-year fil career.
She was a particular favourite of James Whale, who used her in six of his films. Most memorably–and whimsically–he cast her as the centenarian Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932), keeping her real sex a secret even from the rest of the cast, and crediting her as John Dudgeon.
In Sh! The Octopus (1937), Dudgeon played the Nanny whose before-your-eyes transformation into a cackling ‘hag’ was a masterpiece of in-camera special effects.
Dudgeon spent the last twenty or so years of her life in California, but had previously had a long career on the British stage. Whale’s Waterloo Bridge (1931) was her first, uncredited, screen role.
She made four appearances in MGM musicals, all of them without credit: Stage Mother, The Night is Young, Bathing Beauty and Till the Clouds Roll By.
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:
Edgar Allan Woolf (1881-1943) was a successful screenwriter, dramatist and songwriter whose fame now rests firmly on being co-writer of the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. He and regular collaborator Florence Ryerson developed a draft produced by Noel Langley, introducing the character of Professor Marvel into the Kansas scenes.
After graduating from university, Woolf was briefly an actor before turning to writing material for vaudeville performers. He also wrote the book for the 1906 musical comedy Mam’zelle Champagne, which became infamous when a performance was interrupted by the murder of Stanford White, as depicted in The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing (1955).
After a quarter of a century writing for Broadway, Woolf, who had previously dabbled in screenwriting for silent films in New York,signed a contract to join MGM. Pictures he worked on included Freaks, Grand Hotel and John Ford’s Flesh (all 1932).
In addition to The Wizard of Oz, Woolf worked on seven other MGM musicals, beginning with Broadway to Hollywood, for which he also wrote a song. Subsequent pictures were Hollywood Party, The Night is Young, Everybody Sing and Ice Follies of 1939. After Oz came Babes in Arms and the posthumously-released Ziegfeld Follies.
Joan Bennett, Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow, Eleanor Powell, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Powell: just a few of the stars who had the delightful Una Merkel (1903-86) as a best friend during Hollywood’s Golden Age. With an unmistakeable Kentucky twang, Merkel was rarely the star of her pictures, but was also rarely unmemorable in them.
Aged 17, Merkel worked as a stand-in for Lillian Gish on Way Down East (1920), which means it is sometimes her you see in the famous ice floe sequence. After plying the acting trade in the legitimate theatre and in vaudeville, she worked for D W Griffith again when he cast her as Ann Rutledge in Abraham Lincoln (1930).
A hard-working supporting player, Merkel appeared in forty pictures released in the five-year period 1930 to 1934, perhaps most famously partnered with Ginger Rogers in the ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ number in 42nd Street (1933).
Una Merkel’s most famous scene is unquestionably her fight with Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939). Both actors eschewed stunt doubles and ended up heavily bruised, as well as soaking wet from James Stewart’s bucket of water.
In the 1950s, Merkel was a successful and Tony award-winning stage actor, and was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for Summer and Smoke (1961).
Merkel’s nine MGM musicals took her from Alice Brady in 1933 (Broadway to Hollywood) to Elvis Presley in 1966 (Spinout). In between came The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1936, Born to Dance, Rich Young and Pretty, The Merry Widow (again) and I Love Melvin.
British-born Dorothy Marian Isbell (1899-1962) was something of a Renaissance woman, successful in a variety of roles, including as an illustrator, actor and, most notably, as a costume designer.
As a teenager, Tree’s love of the theatre prompted her to start designing posters. This became a professional opportunity in 1917 when she was employed to produce posters and programmes for a well-known impresario. She also produced comic illustrations for newspapers and periodicals.
Between 1915 and 1918, Tree starred in around eight British films, including Hindle Wakes (1918), the first version of Stanley Houghton’s 1912 play.
Designing costumes for stage and screen began in the early 1920s, and she also designed for the Folies Bergère. Tree emigrated to the United States in 1926 and worked on Broadway, including designing for pre-Hollywood Mae West. By this time, her designs were having an impact on the wider fashion scene of the Jazz Age.
Tree’s Hollywood career began in 1929, first at Fox, and then eleven years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Pictures she worked on included The Thin Man (1934), David Copperfield (1935), Libeled Lady (1936) and Fury (1936) and The Good Earth (1937).
Dolly Tree designed costumes for fifteen MGM musicals: The Devil’s Brother, The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Rosalie, Listen Darling, Tce Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Let Freedom Ring, At the Circus, Strike Up the Band, Little Nellie Kelly and Go West.
Tree’s career effectively ended in 1942, when divorce led to a drink problem.Her reputation has long rested in the shadows created by Adrian and Orry-Kelly, but there is now a growing awareness of her importance as a designer.
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.
