The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Designers

  • Edwin B Willis

    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:

    Broadway to Hollywood

    Stage Mother (ID)

    Dancing Lady (ID)

    Going Hollywood (ID)

    The Cat and the Fiddle (ID)

    Hollywood Party (ID)

    Student Tour (AAD)

    The Merry Widow (AAD)

    The Night is Young (AAD/SD)

    Naughty Marietta (AAD)

    Reckless (AAD)

    Broadway Melody of 1936 (AAD)

    Here Comes the Band (AAD)

    A Night at the Opera (AAD)

    Rose Marie (AAD)

    The Great Ziegfeld (AAD)

    San Francisco (AAD)

    Born to Dance (AAD)

    Maytime (AAD)

    A Day at the Races (AAD)

    Broadway Melody of 1938 (AAD)

    The Firefly (AAD)

    Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (AAD)

    Rosalie (AAD)

    Everybody Sing (AAD)

    The Girl of the Golden West (AAD)

    Listen, Darling (AAD)

    The Great Waltz (AAD)

    Sweethearts

    Honolulu

    Let Freedom Ring

    Ice Follies of 1939

    The Wizard of Oz

    Babes in Arms

    At the Circus

    Balalaika

    Broadway Melody of 1940

    New Moon

    Strike Up the Band

    Hullabaloo (Associate Set Decorator, uncredited)

    Bitter Sweet

    Little Nellie Kelly

    Go West

    Free and Easy

    Ziegfeld Girl

    The Big Store

    Lady Be Good

    The Chocolate Soldier

    Smilin’ Through

    Babes on Broadway

    Born to Sing

    Ship Ahoy

    Rio Rita

    I Married an Angel

    Cairo

    Panama Hattie

    For Me and My Gal

    Seven Sweethearts

    Cabin in the Sky

    Presenting Lily Mars

    Du Barry was a Lady

    Best Foot Forward

    Thousands Cheer

    Swing Fever

    Girl Crazy

    Broadway Rhythm

    Two Girls and a Sailor

    Meet the People

    Bathing Beauty

    Meet Me in St Louis

    Music for Millions

    Thrill of a Romance

    Anchors Aweigh

    Ziegfeld Follies

    Yolanda and the Thief

    The Harvey Girls

    Two Sister from Boston

    Easy to Wed

    Holiday in Mexico

    No Leave, No Love

    Till the Clouds Roll By

    It Happened in Brooklyn

    Living in a Big Way

    Fiesta

    The Unfinished Dance

    Good News

    Summer Holiday

    On an Island With You

    The Pirate

    Easter Parade

    A Date with Judy

    Luxury Liner

    The Kissing Bandit

    Words and Music

    Take Me Out to the Ball Game

    The Barkeleys of Broadway

    Neptune’s Daughter

    In the Good Old Summertime

    That Midnight Kiss

    On the Town

    Nancy Goes to Rio

    Annie Get Your Gun

    Three Little Words

    Duchess of Idaho

    The Toast of New Orleans

    Summer Stock

    Two Weeks with Love

    Pagan Love Song

    Grounds for Marriage

    Royal Wedding

    The Great Caruso

    Excuse My Dust

    Rich, Young and Pretty

    Show Boat

    An American in Paris (winning an Oscar)

    The Strip

    Texas Carnival

    The Belle of New York

    Singin’ in the Rain

    Skirts Ahoy

    Lovely to Look At

    The Merry Widow

    Because You’re Mine

    Everything I Have is Yours

    Lili

    I Love Melvin

    Small Town Girl

    Dangerous When Wet

    The Band Wagon

    Latin Lovers

    The Affairs of Dobie Gillis

    Torch Song

    Kiss Me Kate

    Easy to  Love

    Rose Marie

    The Student Prince

    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

    Brigadoon

    Athena 

    Deep in My Heart

    Jupiter’s Darling

    Hit the Deck

    The Glass Slipper

    Interrupted Melody

    Love Me or Leave Me

    It’s Always Fair Weather

    Kismet

    Meet Me in Las Vegas

    High Society

    The Opposite Sex

    Ten Thousand Bedrooms

    Silk Stockings

    Les Girls

  • Stan Rogers

    Stanwood Rogers (1898-1963) was an art director who did most of his work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As a consequence, he rarely received full credit for the films he designed. He was cited as associate art director under Cedric Gibbons, even where he was himself responsible for the look of the film.

    There is little information available about Rogers prior to his first MGM picture, Midnight Mary (1933). He was rarely assigned to the studio’s big pictures, making it all the more likely that he was the creator of most of the art design for those he did work on. 

    Rogers worked on four of the Marx Brothers’ MGM musicals, A Day at the Races, Go West, At the Circus and The Big Store, in addition to five others: Broadway to Hollywood, Stage Mother (on both of which he did receive full credit), Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy and Free and Easy.  

  • James Basevi

    The name of James Basevi (1890-1962) is probably less familiar today than that of Cedric Gibbons, but he was, like his erstwhile colleague, one of the most influential of all art directors during the classical Hollywood era. Basevi was to 20th Century-Fox, what Gibbons was to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

    James Badevi was British, but emigrated to Canada, then the USA, after serving in the First World War. He gave up his profession as an architect to design films, joining MGM at its formation in 1924. One of his earliest successes was The Big Parade (1925), where he designed battle sequences that drew on his own wartime experiences. 

    In the 1930s, he was put in charge of MGM’s special effects work, and in this capacity contributed to two musicals: Madam Satan and, most significantly, San Francisco, for which he designed “one of the truly great cinematic illusions”, the earthquake sequence.

    After moving to Fox, Basevi soon established one of the great partnerships between a designer and a director, when he worked with John Ford on The Hurricane (1937). He was the art director on a further seven Ford pictures, including some of his greatest westerns: My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master (1950) and (his final film) The Searchers (1956).

    Basevi also made remarkable contributions to two Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1940s, Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945).

  • Mitchell Leisen

    Fans of classical Hollywood films will know James Mitchell Leisen (1898-1972) as the director of Easy Living (1937), Midnight (1939), Hold Back the Dawn (1941) and Frenchman’s Creek (1944). Some may recall that he was the director who drove Billy Wilder to direct his own scripts, so that he did not have to watch Leisen doing it.

    What is less well remembered is Mitchell Leisen’s work as an art director. He worked in this capacity several times with Cecil B DeMille, including on Madam Satan, in collaboration with Cedric Gibbons. He also acted as an assistant director on that picture. 

  • Cedric Gibbons

    Austin Cedric Gibbons (1890-1960) has been called “the most powerful arbiter of style” at MGM after Mayer and Thalberg. He was head of the studio’s art department for more than 30 years, responsible for the look of all its pictures and was credited on most of them. 

    Clearly, Gibbons did not undertake the detailed design of over a thousand films, which has led some observers to treat him as merely a credit-hogging bureaucrat.  He was that, of course, which is why he has more onscreen credits than any other individual in cinema history. But this is no reason to overlook the contribution he made to the visual style of the studio that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s.

    Gibbons started out working for the Edison Studio in 1914  and then, after military service, for Samuel Goldwyn, and thereby to MGM in 1924. In 1925 he visited the Paris Exhibition, which consolidated the influence of contemporary art movements such as Futurism, Surrealism and Art Deco on his approach to design. 

    By 1931, Gibbons had 40 staff working under him, including six art directors. He was careful to recruit personnel whose style and influences were in line with his own. His role became supervisory, though in a genuine sense: Gibbons personally signed off on all designs and, frequently, constructed sets, until health issues curtailed this level of involvement in 1945.

    It is difficult to say which musicals Gibbons had a direct involvement in, but his influence certainly dictated both the look of 1930s’ black-and-white pictures, and the Technicolor extravaganzas launched by The Wizard of Oz. Two of his eleven Oscars were for musicals: the first version of The Merry Widow (undoubtedly deserved) and An American in Paris (almost certainly not).

  • Richard Day

    Canadian Richard Day (1896-1972) was one of the great Hollywood art directors, and one of the few to work steadily as a freelancer for much of his career. He won seven Oscars and was nominated a further thirteen times. Day worked with Erich Von Stroheim on a number of his best silent films, and developed a commitment to realism in design that set him apart from many of his peers.

    For a period after 1929 Day worked in partnership with Cedric Gibbons at Metro, including designing most of the settings for The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

    By the end of his career Day had worked on well over 300 films and with most of the leading directors, including Ford, Hawks, Vidor, Lang, Wellman and Preminger, and with Jean Renoir on Swamp Water (1941). 

  • Erté

    Romain de Tirtoff (1892-1990) was a Russian-born French exponent of Art Deco in many forms, including clothing, interior decoration and jewellery. He also worked in the theatre, designing costumes and sets for, for example, the Folies Bergère in Paris and George White’s Scandals on Broadway. 

    Erté first worked for MGM in 1924-25, designing gowns and costumes for The Mystic and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (both 1925). He continued in films, mostly in costume design, throughout the 1920s, culminating in costumes and sets for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. See, for example, the art deco arch in the opening number.

    Erté was still working at the age of 95, two years before his death. 

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