Charles Dorian (1891-1942) was a vaudeville performer who acted in films between 1915 and 1920.
From 1920 onwards, Dorian worked as an assistant director, latterly at MGM, where he worked on The Rogue Song and Reckless.
Dorian won an Academy Award in the Best Assistant Director category in 1934.
Jack Dart Richards (1916-76) was a child actor who made a handful of appearances in Hollywood pictures in 1929-30.
One of these, now lost, was in The Rogue Song.
In old Hollywood, actors would sometimes show up in one or two pictures, then disappear, leaving behind no clue as to how they came to stand briefly in the spotlight. One such was Ruth Metzger (dates unknown).
IMDb states that she appeared in Honky Tonk (1929), a Sophie Tucker musical, and in The Rogue Song. No specific character is named in either case.
Presumably someone had a basis for inputting this information, but it is difficult to be certain that Ruth Metzger actually existed.
James Horatio Bradbury Jr (1894-1936) was the son of two actors and made his stage debut while still a child.
After serving in the First World War, Bradbury settled in Hollywood, where he maintained a steady career as a character actor and supporting player. In the silent era, he combined higher-quality pictures such as Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928) with many low-budget westerns.
After the introduction of sound, Bradbury played one of the bandits in The Rogue Song, but the general quality of his parts declined and he eventually took his own life, self-immolating in a failed attempt at suicide by gas.
William Burr McIntosh (1862-1942) was a man of many parts: writer, publisher, photographer, entrepreneur. And silent film actor.
McIntosh had already achieved success publishing The Burr McIntosh Monthly, an early example of the pinup magazine, when he turned to screen acting. He starred in a series of 14 two-reel shorts playing J Rufus Wallingford, a con man.
The high point of McIntosh’s acting career was his performance as Lillian Gish’s cruel father in D W Griffith’s Way Down East (1920).
McIntosh’s sole outing in an MGM musical was as Count Peter in the lost film, The Rogue Song.
Katherine Duffy (1872-1943) emigrated to America from Ireland as a child, and began a stage career in 1890.
It is claimed in some sources that she made her screen debut in 1902, but no film is named nor evidence provided. More certain is that she made shorts for the New York Kalem Company in 1910. Later, she worked in Florida, partnered with a young Oliver Hardy.
Price relocated to Hollywood in 1917 and found regular character work at a variety of studios. In 1926 she played the matriarch of the Kelly family in The Cohens and the Kellys, the first in a popular series of seven ethnic comedies.
Kate Price is thought to have made around 300 shorts and features, one of which was MGM’s The Rogue Song, in which she played the maidservant Petrovna.
George Westmore (1879-1931) was the founder of what is unquestionably Hollywood’s greatest dynasty. Five generations of Westmores, including six of George’s sons, worked as makeup artists for over a hundred years.
George Westmore was a hairdresser with a distinguished clientele before emigrating from the UK to Canada and then to the United States, where he worked in beauty parlours. In 1917 he established Hollywood’s first makeup department, for the Selig company, and can be credited with creating the profession of film makeup artist. In the 1920s, Westmore worked on some of the most notable pictures starring Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, including The Sheik (1921) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
Shortly before taking his own life in a particularly unpleasant fashion (mercury poisoning), Westmore worked on three musicals at MGM: The Rogue Song, Call of the Flesh and New Moon.
Opinion
It is impossible to give an opinion on the merits of The Rogue Song, a film no one has seen in its entirety for many years. Its status as the only ‘lost’ MGM musical, combined with its status as Laurel and Hardy’s only colour picture, has made it one of the holy grails of lost films. To date, about 22 minutes of footage has been unearthed around the world, less than a quarter of the total 103 minutes. Fortunately, the audiotrack has survived in its entirety. This, combined with the continuity script, has enabled YouTube provider Unreeled8 to produce a quasi-restoration of The Rogue Song, combining the soundtrack, surviving footage, stills, posters and AI into a simulacrum of the original film.
The loss of The Rogue Song is sad for many reasons, not the least because it was the first all-Technicolor musical made at the studio now synonymous with Technicolor musicals. It was also the first to feature a great singer, rather than crooners like Charles King and Lawrence Gray. Edwin M Bradley has described the challenge posed to Douglas Shearer’s sound department by the power of Tibbett’s voice. The engineers found they had to put the microphone fifteen feet away from Tibbett in order to capture his singing voice correctly. (As a sidenote, when Tibbett recorded the medley for the flogging sequence [see below], he was stripped to the waist and tied to posts in the recording studio.)
The available evidence suggests that The Rogue Song was a rummy sort of musical. Not many musicals, for example, have rape and suicide as significant plot elements, or a scene in which the hero sings a medley of songs while being publicly whipped (“The lash cries for blood!”). It may have been these melodramatic aspects that led Irving Thalberg to assign the direction of this important picture to the otherwise entirely unsuitable Lionel Barrymore.
The melodrama, combined with plodding direction, raised alarm bells after four weeks’ shooting, prompting the producers to inject some comic relief. This came in the form of Laurel and Hardy, the most unlikely of all Caucasian bandits. They feature in nine sequences, all directed by Hal Roach and separately from the rest of the picture (Stan and Ollie only worked for two days with the other actors).
Ostensibly based on Franz Lehár’s operetta Gypsy Love (1910), the plot has been completely changed and very little of Lehár’s music retained. The new songs are by Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey.
The Rogue Song got good reviews and grossed over $1.1 million worldwide, but turning only a small profit because of its high production costs. Lawrence Tibbett, who sings all the film’s eight songs, appears to give a good performance by the standards of the day; he was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.
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”.
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.
Charles Edgar Schoenbaum (1893-1951) was a hard-working cinematographer whose earliest credit seems to be working for Cecil B DeMille at Paramount in 1917, but who spent much of his career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He was sometimes credited as Charles E Schoenbaum, and even C Edgar Schoenbaum.
His work was not greatly celebrated–his sole Academy Award nomination was for Little Women in 1949–but he was valued for his work ethic.
Schoenbaum worked on five MGM musicals over a twenty-year period, from The Rogue Song in 1930 to Duchess of Idaho in 1950. In between came Here Comes the Band and the second version of Good News. He was also drafted in by Rouben Mamouian to replace Charles Rosher on Summer Holiday.
