The screen immortality of Clara Blanchard Dickey (1876-1962) rests on her role as Dorothy’s Auntie Em in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. Playing aunts was something of a speciality: she was Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly in three different pictures, and Esther Blodgett’s Aunt Mattie in A Star is Born (1937), amongst many others.
Blandick made her stage debut in Boston at the age of 21, and made her first Broadway appearance in 1903, in Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. She continued to work on Broadway and in touring productions.
Some sources claim she made her first film in 1908, but the earliest appearance identified by the AFI is Mrs Black is Back (19140, an adaptation of a Broadway hit made by Famous Players.
Blandick was part of the 1929 exodus to Hollywood, where she worked as a character actor until the early fifties, sometimes credited, sometimes not, and well over 100 pictures in total. She played the snooty mother in Shopworn (1932) and was uncredited in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). Blandick was credited again in Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and DeMille’s North West Mounted Police (1940), and uncredited in Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943).
As well as The Wizard of Oz, Blandick appeared without credit in three other MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, The Big Store and Du Barry was a Lady.
The King’s Men was a musical quartet formed in 1928 by Kenneth ‘Ken’ Lorin Darby (1909-92) and also comprising Jon Dodson [Blunt] (1907-63), Grafton ‘Bud’ Linn (1909-68) and Radburn ‘Rad’ Brown Robinson.
The group sang on radio in the Hollywood area before being invited by Paul Whiteman to appear with his orchestra. They were later the backing singers on Bing Crosby’s recording of ‘White Christmas’.
The King’s Men appeared on screen in a number of films during the 1930s and 40s, including five MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Honolulu, Cairo and For Me and My Gal. In addition, they provided singing voices for the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They also undertook vocal work for Disney animations.
Ken Darby had a varied and successful career in Hollywood. In addition to his appearances with the King’s Men, he was a composer and musical arranger, winning three Academy Awards. The films he worked on included The Wizard of Oz and At the Circus for MGM, Disney features such as Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (942), and The King and I (1956), Porgy and Bess (1957) and Camelot (1962). He was also musical director on non-musicals such as How the West Was Won (1962).
Darby also worked as a vocal coach, including with Marilyn Monroe in several pictures, and coached the chorus onThe Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
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.
Francis Phillip Wuppermann (1890-1949) was the Wizard of Oz. It was his most famous role, the one that has gained him immortality. But it was not his only role: he made about a hundred films altogether, including thirteen other MGM musicals.
A graduate of Cornell University (he studied business administration), Morgan made his start in acting in the theatre, in a Broadway production of Mr Wu in 1914. His screen debut came two years later, a supporting role in a Vitagraph picture. He was a journeyman player in both media until the late 1920s, when he appeared on stage in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1927). Three years later he created the title role in the comedy Topaze.
In the cinema, a highlight was co-starring as Bunny in John Barrymore’s Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917). He was always based in New York, and apparently told his friend Ralph Bellamy he was selling out by going to Hollywood. Six months later, Morgan was there himself and, after returning East for two Broadway productions, became a fixture in the film capital. He was under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the rest of his life, though he was loaned out in 1933 for Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.
Morgan had a few leading roles, for example in The Affairs of Cellini (1934), which earned him an Oscar nomination. More often, he worked as a character actor, always bringing added value to whatever picture he was in. Particular highlight was Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), as the tragi-comic Mr Matuschek, and his role in Borzage’s anti-Nazi The Mortal Storm (1940).
Morgan was a very good actor, and did also star in a number of pictures, perhaps most notably James Whale’s The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933). In an entertaining minor MGM film from 1943, A Stranger in Town , he starred as a Supreme Court Justice trying to have a duck-hunting vacation in a small town.
The musicals in which Morgan appeared, beside The Wizard of Oz, were Broadway to Hollywood (playing the lead), The Cat and the Fiddle, Naughty Marietta, The Great Ziegfeld, Rosalie, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Hullabaloo (another lead), Thousands Cheer, Yolanda and the Thief and Summer Holiday. This means he worked with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Mickey Rooney and Kathryn Grayson: most of the musical performers whose stars glittered in the MGM firmament.
Frank Morgan, despite his usually cheery persona on and off screen, had a serious problem with alcohol, believed to have been triggered by the murder of the brother with whom he was closest. He was a functioning alcoholic, but the impact on his general health was almost certainly a contributing factor to his death from heart failure at the age of 59, just after he had started shooting Annie Get Your Gun.
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.
The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.
IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.
In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.
Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.
Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.
Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
Although he appeared in around thirty films, Irving Lahrheim (1895-1967) was fundamentally a stage comedian, with a personality and technique that were too big for the screen. Nevertheless, he is an indisputably iconic figure in film history thanks to one performance, as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.
Lahr left school to start performing in vaudeville as a teenager, working his way up to become what was called ‘top banana’. He made his Broadway debut in 1927, and was a major draw there for the rest of his career. As late as 1965, Lahr won a Tony for the musical Foxy.
Much more serious off-stage than on it, Lahr was impressed by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), and played Estragon in a highly-praised 1956 Broadway production. A few years earlier he had won critical acclaim as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Lahr’s screen debut was in a 1929 short called Faint Heart. This was followed two years later by his first Metro musical, Flying High, based on Lahr’s own hit stage musical. He recreated the role of Rusty Krause.
The Wizard of Oz followed eight years later, and Lahr made a further three musicals at MGM: Ship Ahoy, Meet the People and the 1954 version of Rose Marie.
Bert Lahr died during the production of his final film, The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), but the filmmakers worked around it and his performance was retained.
The figures of 350+ film and TV appearances by Harry Wilson (1897-1978) is made more impressive by the fact that Wilson worked almost entirely in the sound era, when the turnover of pictures was not so great as in the silent days.
British-born Wilson dubbed himself ‘the ugliest man in movies’ (though there was competition), and he was many studios’ go-to actor for convicts and criminal henchmen. He features with Mike Mazurki in Some Like it Hot (1959) as one of George Raft’s goons.
Wilson appeared uncredited in no fewer than fifteen MGM musicals, across more than thirty years and four decades. In the 1930s he made A Lady’s Morals, The Bohemian Girl, A Day at the Races, Let Freedom Ring and The Wizard of Oz (as a Winkie Guard). In the 40s, Wilson was in Go West, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Luxury Liner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
His 1950s appearances were in Million Dollar Mermaid, It’s Always Fair Weather, Guys and Dolls and Merry Andrew. And finally, in 1963, Wilson played a roustabout in Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
As if Wilson was not busy enough making his own films, he worked for fifteen years as Wallace Beery’s stand-in.
Jack Mintz (1895-1983) had a varied career in the film world that took him from Monty Banks in 1926 to Troy Donahue in 1963.
Mintz worked as an assistant director, including on MGM musicals Free and Easy and The Cuban Love Song. He was also a contributing writer on The Wizard of Oz and Presenting Lily Mars. He also worked from time to time as a dialogue coach and assistant to the producer.
Mintz was, for a period in the 1940s, in charge of purchasing for Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), which must have involved handing budgets of dozens of dollars.
