The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Main Crew

  • Anita Loos

    Corinne Anita Loos (1888-1981) habitually lied about her age, but 1888 is the most likely year. Her name is now inextricably linked with her most famous novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and its adaptations, but she was connected with the cinema for most of her career.

    Loos started in public life as a child performer on the stage, and only later tried her hand at writing. In 1911, she submitted a story idea to the Biograph studio. It is often claimed that her first filmed script was D W Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), but it was actually Griffith’s The New York Hat (1912), with Mary Pickford. It was only when she visited the studio some time later that Griffith discovered that ‘A Loos’ was female. She would eventually write an estimated 100 scenarios for Biograph and/or Griffith, and for the Lubin studio. Most famously, she provided the intertitles for Intolerance (1916).

    Loos moved to New York in 1918 to write for Famous Players-Lasky. She also published two books on screenwriting, and wrote her first stage play in 1923. Only in 1931 did Loos settle in Hollywood, signing a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Prominent amongst her screenplays were Red-Headed Woman (1932), the musical San Francisco, for which she was Oscar nominated, and The Women (1939).

    Loos’s final Hollywood film was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945, dialogue only), after which she returned to New York and worked in other mediums.

    In addition to San Francisco, Loos worked uncredited on The Cat and the Fiddle and Babes in Arms, and wrote the screenplay for I Married an Angel.

  • Sam Spewack

    Samuel Spewack (1899-1971) travelled from what is now Ukraine to the USA as a child and was educated at Columbia University. He became a journalist, wrote a few novels and, after marrying Bella Cohen, worked with her in Moscow for four years.

    In the late 1920s, he and Bella began writing plays together, a number of which were performed on Broadway. Their work was also adapted for the cinema. In 1948, they collaborated with Cole Porter, writing the book for the musical Kiss Me, Kate. Broadly speaking, Sam took responsibility for the plot and structure of their work, while Bella was noted for her crackling dialogue.

    The Spewacks’ first work directly for the screen was providing additional dialogue for Paramount’s Caught (1931). They contributed to fourteen other features, including adapting their own play, Clear All Wires! (1933).

    In 1940, they wrote the screenplay for the Cary Grant-Irene Dunn comedy My Favourite Wife, which earned them an Oscar nomination.

    Bella and Sam Spewack wrote one MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle. In addition, Kiss Me, Kate was filmed by the studio in 1953.

  • Bella Spewack

    Bella Cohen (1899-1990) travelled from Romania to the USA as a child and grew up poor in New York. She became a journalist and, with her husband Sam Spewack, worked in Moscow for four years.

    In the late 1920s, she and Sam began writing plays together, a number of which were performed on Broadway. Their work was also adapted for the cinema. In 1948, they collaborated with Cole Porter, writing the book for the musical Kiss Me, Kate. Broadly speaking, Sam took responsibility for the plot and structure of their work, while Bella was noted for her crackling dialogue.

    The Spewacks’ first work directly for the screen was providing additional dialogue for Paramount’s Caught (1931). They contributed to fourteen other features, including adapting their own play, Clear All Wires! (1933).

    In 1940, they wrote the screenplay for the Cary Grant-Irene Dunn comedy My Favourite Wife, which earned them an Oscar nomination.

    Bella and Sam Spewack wrote one MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle, and some sources state that Bella worked uncredited on Naughty Marietta. In addition, Kiss Me, Kate was filmed by the studio in 1953.

  • William K Howard

    Andrew Sarris designated director William K Howard ‘Subject for Further Research’, indicating something more than the ordinary in his output.

    Howard is best-remembered today for The Power and the Glory (1933), the story of a wealthy businessman told in a non-linear narrative, which is held to have influenced Citizen Kane (1941). Though screenwriter Preston Sturges was responsible for the innovative structure, his literary conceit was brought to life by Howard’s staging and the mise en scène he crafter with cinematographer James Wong Howe.

    William K Howard started out in Hollywood as an assistant director in 1920, and very quickly earned an assignment as co-director on Get Your Man (1921) at Fox. He worked as director on around fifty pictures across his career, as well as occasionally working as either writer or producer.

    In the late 1930s, Howard worked for a period in the United Kingdom, with his most notable production being Fire Over England (1937).

    Few of Howard’s films were major ‘A’  productions, but he was a stylist who frequently elevated routine material like biopics and crime dramas into something more.  

    Immediately after making The Power and the Glory, Howard directed his only MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle.

  • The Cat and the Fiddle

    The Crew

    William K HowardDirector
    Sam WoodDirector (uncredited)
    Bella SpewackScreenwriter
    Sam SpewackScreenwriter
    Anita LoosScreenwriter (uncredited)
    Eve GreeneScreenwriter (uncredited)
    Zelda SearsScreenwriter (uncredited)
    James Kevin McGuinessScreenwriter (uncredited)
    Jerome KernSongwriter
    Otto HarbachSongwriter
    Herbert StothartComposer (uncredited)
    Charles MaxwellOrchestrator (uncredited)
    Bernard H HymanProducer (uncredited)
    Harold RossonCinematographer
    Charles ClarkeCinematographer
    Ray RennahanCinematographer (Technicolor)
    Frank E HullEditor
    Alexander ToluboffArt Director
    Natalie KalmusArt Director (Technicolor)
    Edwin B WillisInterior Decorator
    AdrianCostume Designer
    Lesley SelanderAssistant Director (uncredited)
    Douglas ShearerRecording Director
    Paul NealRecording Engineer (uncredited)

  • Walter Wanger

    Walter Feuchtwanger (1894-1968) studied at Dartmouth College and then went into theatrical production in New York. It was during his military service during the First World War that he had his introduction to filmmaking, when he was assigned to work on producing propaganda films.

    After the war, Wanger met Jesse Lasky, who hired him to work at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) in New York. He eventually became General Manager of Production, and produced the Marx Brothers’ first pictures, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). 

    Wanger left Paramount in 1931 and, after an abortive attempt at independent production, joined Columbia, where he was responsible for The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). He then had a short spell at MGM, producing Queen Christina (1933) and one musical, Going Hollywood. It was after this that he finally achieved independence, releasing productions through Paramount, and then United Artists.

    Pictures produced by Wanger over the next quarter of a century included John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and The Long Voyage Home (1940), Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). His career ended when he joined Twentieth Century-Fox for the debacle of Cleopatra (1963).

  • Standish J Lambert

    While sound department head Douglas Shearer always ensured he received a credit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were hit-and-miss in their approach to crediting his staff.

    Standish John Lambert (1905-59) worked for the studio for at least twenty years, and does not appear to have ever received an onscreen credit. He and his brother Kenneth Lambert joined the studio in the mid-30s as electrical engineers, but Standish appears to have transitioned to the sound department at some point.

    Some sources (IMDb) have him listed as working on Going Hollywood in 1933, but that seems unlikely. The earliest pictures cited by the AFI catalogue are from 1944. Clearly Lambert must have been doing something during the previous nine or ten years, but it is impossible to say what.

    Most of Lambert’s known contributions are for sound and effects mixing, on pictures like Mrs Parkington (1944), Cry ‘Havoc’ (1944), The Clock (1945) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1945). Later, he worked as sound director on half a dozen pictures, including Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949). 

    The MGM musicals with Lambert as sound mixer were Broadway Rhythm, Meet Me in St Louis, Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh and The Harvey Girls. He was sound director on Luxury Liner. 

  • Lennie Hayton

    Leonard George Hayton (1908-71) was an important figure in the music department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the Golden Age of the studio’s production of musicals.

    Hayton started out as a pianist and arranger with Paul Whiteman in the late 1920s, which led to a friendship with Bing Crosby when he was one of the Rhythm Boys. It was Crosby who had arranged for Hayton to conduct the orchestra when he made Going Hollywood at MGM in 1933. He then returned to working with Crosby on radio and recording for several years.

    In 1940, MGM signed Hayton as a musical director, and he remained with the studio until 1953. He composed for or acted as MD on a range of non-musical pictures, including H M Pulham Esq (1941), Maisie Gets Her Man (1942) and Battleground (1950). But it was in musicals that he made his greatest mark.

    Hayton’s MGM musicals were: Born to Sing, This Time for Keeps (composer), Best Foot Forward, Meet the People, Yolanda and the Thief, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Good News, Living in a Big Way, The Pirate, Summer Holiday, Words and Music, The Barkleys of Broadway, On the Town (winning an Oscar), Singin’ in the Rain and Easy to Love. After leaving MGM, Hayton returned to arrange and conduct numbers for his wife, Lena Horne, in Meet Me in Las Vegas.

    Lennie Hayton won another Oscar towards the end of his life, for Hello, Dolly (1968).

  • Eric Little

    Eric Little (dates unknown) was a lyricist who contributed to West End musicals in the 1920s, which suggests that he was British. Later, he wrote the lyrics for the Rudy Vallee hit ‘My Time is Your Time’.

    MGM used the song as part of the Radio Rogues’ medley in Going Hollywood,

  • Leo Dance

    Public knowledge about Leo Dance (dates unknown) seems to rest entirely on the fact that he composed the song ‘My Time is Your Time’, which became a hit for Rudy Vallee in 1929.

    A few years later, the song was included in the medley performed by the Radio Rogues in MGM’s Going Hollywood.

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