Principal Crew
| Sam Wood | Director |
| Al Boasberg | Screenplay & Dialogue |
| Delmer Daves | Screenplay |
| Joseph Farnham | Dialogue |
| Sam Wood | Producer |
| Leonard Smith | Cinematographer |
| Frank Sullivan | Editor |
| Leslie F Wilder | Editor (uncredited) |
| Cedric Gibbons | Art Director |
| Douglas Shearer | Sound |
| Henrietta Frazer | Costumes |
| Martin Broones | Composer |
| Al Boasberg | Lyricist |
| Fred Fisher | Lyricist |
| Charlotte Greenwood | Lyricist |
| Ray Klages | Composer |
| Jesse Greer | Lyricist |
| Arthur Lange | Arranger |
Sammy Lee (1890-1968), born Samuel Levy, was the first in a line of important choreographers at MGM, though he arguably achieved greater success on Broadway and at Twentieth Century-Fox.
Lee is uncredited on The Broadway Melody, which he might have been quite happy about, given the rudimentary nature of the dance numbers. He had worked on Ziegfeld’s Follies in 1927, but this is not reflected in the style of the fictional Zanfield’s show. Lee and director Harry Beaumont could not, in this first-ever film musical, determine how to make a stage performance cinematic. Nor were the chorines of the quality Lee would have been used to on Broadway.
Lee’s first onscreen credit was for ‘Dances and Ensemble’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where he did his best with non-professional dancers Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. He also essayed a pre-Berkeley overhead shot of the chorus.
Lee went on to stage dances for It’s a Great Life, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, They Learned About Women, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure, Good News, Love in the Rough (which includes an al fresco number performed at a real golf club), A Lady’s Morals, Broadway to Hollywood and Dancing Lady.
A move to Twentieth Century-Fox earned Lee Academy Award nominations for King of Burlesque (1936) and Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). He was back at Metro for Honolulu, Hullabaloo, Cairo, Born to Sing, Meet the People and Two Girls and a Sailor.
Lee had a parallel career as the director of a series of undistinguished shorts.
Jesse Greer (1896-1970) published over 100 songs, but perhaps only ‘Just You, Just Me,’ written with Ray Klages for Marianne, and reprised years later in This Could Be the Night, has become a standard.
Greer and Klages also wrote a number featured in So This is College.
Raymond Klages (1888-1947) and his composer-partner Jesse Greer are perhaps the least-known of the three songwriting partnerships that contributed to Marianne, but it is their song ‘Just You, Just Me’ that went on to become a jazz standard that has been recorded by dozens of artists. It was used again by Metro almost thirty years later in This Could Be the Night.
Klages and Greer’s only other work for the studio was a song in So This is College.
Lyricist Roy Kenneth Turk (1892-1934) had his biggest hit posthumously when Elvis Presley recorded his 1927 ‘Are You Lonely Tonight,’ written with composer Lou Handsman. His most frequent collaborator was composer Fred E Ahlert, with whom he and Bing Crosby wrote ‘Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’
Turk and Ahlert wrote numbers for Marianne, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure and In Gay Madrid. In addition, they contributed to the abandoned The March of Time and ‘Mean to Me’ was included in Love Me Or Leave Me.
Frederick Emil Ahlert (1892-1953) was a composer of popular music who most frequently worked with lyricist Roy Turk. The pair collaborated with Bing Crosby on the singer’s ‘theme song’ ‘Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’. Ahlert also wrote ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ with Joe Young.
Ahlert and Turk contributed songs to Marianne, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure and In Gay Madrid. In addition, ‘Mean to Me’ was included in Love Me Or Leave Me.
Ahlert’s music for ‘Poor Little G-String,’ written with Turk for the abandoned The March of Time, was used for a dance number in Broadway to Hollywood.
Dale Van Every (1896-1976) was a highly-paid screenwriter, Oscar-nominated for Captains Courageous (1937). His sole MGM musical credit was for contributing the story of Marianne. Van Every had been stationed in France during the war.
Gladys Buchanan Unger (1884/5-1940) was an Anglo-American playwright and occasional scenarist. She contributed dialogue to Marianne and, the following year, helped to flesh out Jeanie MacPherson’s screenplay for Madam Satan.
Laurence Stallings (1894-1968) is best known for co-authoring, with Maxwell Anderson, the First World War play What Price Glory?, which was filmed twice, and for writing the novel that formed the basis of The Big Parade (1925). Informed by his own wartime experiences, these helped qualify Stallings to contribute dialogue to the doughboy story Marianne.
Later in his career Stallings contributed to three of John Ford’s more personal pictures: Three Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953). But, after Marianne, his only involvement in MGM musicals was uncredited work on Let Freedom Ring and At the Circus.
Oliver Taylor Marsh (1892-1941) was an MGM company man for most of his career, and arguably achieved his greatest successes with some of the nineteen musicals he photographed, most of which were directed by Robert Z Leonard and W S Van Dyke.
Marsh’s earliest efforts were Marianne, In Gay Madrid and The Florodora Girl. He protographed the 1930 New Moon and also worked uncredited on the 1940 remake. He returned to the genre after the 1932 hiatus and shot Dancing Lady. The following year he worked with Lubitsch on The Merry Widow and moved immediately from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland.
Marsh photographed the Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld and the destruction of San Francisco in the film of the same name. Maytime was the first of his five MacDonald-Eddy operettas, and he also worked with MacDonald on The Firefly and with Eddy on Rosalie. The Girl of the Golden West was followed by an Academy Award, with Allen Davey, for their Technicolor work on Sweethearts.
Following the ridiculous Ice Follies of 1939, Marsh was with Jeanette MacDonald again for Broadway Serenade. He rounded off his career with Broadway Melody of 1940, Bitter Sweet (again Oscar-nominated for Technicolor) and Lady Be Good, made shortly before his untimely death.
