Carl Roup (1915-2002) had a long career with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, briefly as a child actor, and then in various production capacities.
Roup was discovered and cast in his first film, The Red Mill (1925), by Marion Davies, who saw him selling newspapers on the studio lot. She paid for his education at a military school, leading Lon Chaney to nickname him ‘Major’.
Roup made a number of other appearances in silent pictures, and played a young baseball fan in They Learned About Women.
Roupe later became a script clerk, including on A Day at the Races and At the Circus. In 1946, he started working as a second assistant director on Till the Clouds Roll By, and also carried out that role on On an Island With You, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Pagan Love Song, Show Boat, Lili, Dangerous When Wet, Rose Marie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jupiter’s Darling, Silk Stockings and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
The Los Angeles Times obituary described Roup as “as much a part of MGM as Leo the Lion”.
Michael Joseph Donlin (1878-1933) was a Major League baseball player, nicknamed Turkey Mike, who is generally held to have frittered away his enormous talent. A chaotic lifestyle was exacerbated by an ill-conceived ambition to become an actor. He abandoned baseball in 1906 to perform in a Broadway play with a baseball theme.
After an ill-fated attempt to return to the game, Donlin sought a Hollywood career. He made around 70 films, often uncredited and generally without interest, though he did become an early member of John Ford’s stock company, making half a dozen pictures with him.
Donlin’s bit as a baseball player in They Learned About Women would not have stretched his talents.
Edward T Gribbon (1890-1965) started making comedy shorts in around 1917, doing a lot of work for Mack Sennett. He progressed to supporting roles in many features. Later in his career he did a lot of uncredited work, but was a regular in the Joe Palooka series, and showed up as a storm trooper in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940).
Gribbon played Coach Brennan in They Learned About Women.
They Learned About Women is a contender for the worst title ever given to a film musical. ‘Playing the Field’ and ‘Take It Big’ were other suggested titles, but undoubtedly lend themselves to innuendo. The other contender, ‘The Pennant-Winning Battery’ would arguably have been worse.
Van and Schickel were very popular entertainers, and their musical performances give an inkling of why they were so liked. But they were no great shakes as actors and it seems likely they would have gone the same way as the Duncan Sisters after It’s a Great Life, if Schickel’s untimely death had no rendered the matter moot.
Sam (Benny Rubin), Jack (Joe Schickel) and Tim (Tom Dugan) at the start of a new season. Jerry (Gus Van) is AWOL.
They Learned About Women was the second Metro musical outing for the songwriting team of Milton Ager and Jack Yellen, and is notable for being the first of the studio’s musicals with a score entirely written by one team. These remained a rarity for the next forty years. It’s a fairly average set of numbers, though ‘Ten Sweet Mamas’ is notable for several reasons. It is a very early integrated number, in two senses: it is sung by Gus Van not on a stage, but in a shower room, with the chorus engaged in their ablutions while singing; Van washes himself then lies face down on a massage table.
The song is also integrated in the way it comments on the themes and plot
Jerry tells the other players all about his Ten Sweet Mamas
of the film. ‘Ten Sweet Mamas’ is a variation on ‘Ten Green Bottles,’ with the number of mamas reducing throughout the song; in fact, Van starts singing at the seven point. The song’s subject is unfaithfulness, ostensibly female (“Can’t trust a woman/I have found”), though in fact the blame swings both ways (he loses his last mama because she catches him with his wife). The lyrics foreshadow Jack’s fickleness and Daisy’s duplicity. The shower room setting, coyly shot though it is, positions the film as pre-code, as does the lyric “Had two sweet mamas for my jelly roll,” which was a euphemism for sexual intercourse.
The film’s other highpoint is its one production number, ‘Harlem Madness,’ which gave Nina Mae McKinney, the breakout star of Hallelujah, her second and final opportunity to shine. Her singing and dancing is joyously eccentric enough to merit the song’s title.
Nina Mae McKinney gives it her all in ‘Harlem Madness’
The direction in They Learned About Women is fairly lacklustre, even though it took two directors to achieve it. It was far from unusual at MGM, at that time, for one director to complete another’s film, but it seems unclear why, on this occasion, Conway and Wood were given a shared credit.
Bessie Love works hard, as always, but there are diminishing returns for her third dose of heartbreak in a year. Frankly, Jerry is as big a chump as Terry in Chasing Rainbows; she would probably have been better off with Jerry.
Robert Shirley (1904-81), like most of the engineers in Douglas Shearer’s sound department, never received onscreen credit for his work, despite working on some of Metro’s prestige projects. These included Strange Interlude (1932), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
Shirley’s musicals were They Learned About Women, Reckless, The Wizard of Oz (though everyone seems to have worked on that), Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Thrill of a Romance, Anchors Aweigh, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Two Sisters from Boston,Easy to Wed, Holiday in Mexico and, to round things off nicely, Singin’ in the Rain.
Thomas Held (1889-1962) was an Austrian-born editor. After starting out as an assistant director, his first, uncredited editing assignment was on They Learned About Women, where he worked alongside Jack McKay.
Held’s other musicals were San Francisco and The Great Waltz (for which he was Oscar-nominated). He also worked uncredited on The Wizard of Oz.
Hugh Ryan Conway (1886-1952) was an actor and director in silent films from around 1910. From 1925 he was under contract as a director at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer.
Conway was a solid journeyman director, though few of his pictures are likely to end up on any Greatest Ever lists. He worked with most of MGM’s major stars of the 1930s, with particular success on Jean Harlow and Clark Gable assignments such as Libelled Lady and Too Hot to Handle. His largest-scale achievement was A Tale of Two Cities (1935).
Conway only worked on three musicals: They Learned About Women (with Sam Wood), the 1930 New Moon and Let Freedom Ring.
Arthur Baer (1886-1969) was a journalist, cartoonist and humourist, part of the Algonquin Round Table group and named as the greatest living humourist by Damon Runyon.
‘Bugs’ Baer had baseball connections (it was he who dubbed Babe Ruth ‘the Sultan of Swat’), which is probably why he was brought in to provide additional dialogue for They Learned About Women.
Andrew Percival Younger (1890-1931) was a screenwriter with almost sixty credits in a career that spanned only 1919-31. His early death was the result of accidental suicide in a shooting accident.
Younger wrote the original story for They Learned About Women, then produced the screenplay and dialogue for Flying High.
