The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Directors

  • Edward Sedgwick

    Edward Sedgwick Jr (1889-1953) was a colleague and friend of Buster Keaton and, like him, started working in a family vaudeville act at a young age. He acted in his first comedy short in 1914, and started directing in 1920. Sedgwick’s first directorial assignment was making episodes of a serial based on the French Fantômas character. 

    Although is today associated with Keaton and comedy, Sedgwick worked in a variety of genres during the 1920s, including many westerns. He also did uncredited work on Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

    Sedgwick joined MGM in 1926, and went on to direct most of Keaton’s films at the studio, including his first talking picture, Free and Easy.

    Some years later Sedgwick did uncredited work on Easy to Wed and Excuse My Dust.

  • Mal St Clair

    Andrew Sarris summarized the career of Malcolm St Clair (1897-1952) thus: his silent films fizzed and his sound films fizzled, it was as simple and tragic as that.

    St Clair was an important writer-director of the silent era, primarily in the field of comedy. Starting out as an actor-writer-director with Mack Sennett, he went on to co-direct a couple of shorts with Buster Keaton, from whom he learned a great deal about comedy technique. St Clair also made a series of more sophisticated comedies at Paramount in the mid-twenties, including the original adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), co-written by Anita Loos herself.

    As Sarris suggests, the quality of St Clair’s pictures declined with the advent of sound, though he continued to work until 1948. One of his early sound films was the MGM musical Montana Moon, which he produced and directed.

    One of St Clair’s more interesting later assignments was directing the silent era comedy sequences for Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), including restaging some of his earlier work.

  • William Nigh

    Emil Kreuske (1881-1955) was a silent film actor-turned-director and occasional writer, which probably makes him a kind of Poverty Row auteur. He was essentially a ‘B’ movie director, which makes it all the more surprising that he spent a period at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which officially never made ‘B’ pictures.

    Nigh generally made action and adventure stories, and it was a moment of madness when producer Harry Rapf assigned him to direct a musical, Lord Byron of Broadway. He soon regretted it. According to one of the film’s stars, Marion Shilling, Rapf had just lost heavily in the stock market crash when he watched Nigh’s footage. Appalled by what he saw, he yanked Nigh from the project and brought in Harry Beaumont to undertake substantial retakes. But Nigh was accorded a co-director credit, which was quite unusual at MGM. He made no further musicals for the studio and was back on Poverty Row for his next picture.  

  • Jack Conway

    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.

  • J Clifford Brooke

    Clifford Brooke (1873-1951) may (or may not) be the J Clifford Brooke who is credited with staging a sequence in Devil-May-Care. The AFI Catalogue says no, while IMDb says yes.

    Brooke was a British stage actor, well-known on Broadway as both performer and director, who belatedly worked in Hollywood. His first credited role was in The Sea Hawk (1940) 

  • Sidney Franklin

    Sidney Arnold Franklin (1893-1972) was a director and occasional producer for over forty years, co-directing in the early years with his brother Chester. His experience working with Mary Pickford and the Talmadge sisters led Irving Thalberg to invite him to MGM in 1928 to direct Norma Shearer. 

    Franklin’s career at Metro was not spectacular (David Thomson described him as colourless), though he did direct some prestigious projects, including The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934 and 1957) and The Good Earth (1937), and he produced Mrs Miniver (1942).

    Franklin made two attempts at directing musicals, Devil-May-Care and A Lady’s Morals, and many years later he produced Torch Song. 

  • Willard Mack

    Charles Willard McLaughlin (1873-1934) worked as an actor, director and playwright before he took up screenwriting in 1916, carrying this out alongside work on Broadway.

    Mack contributed to the scenarios of It’s a Great Life and Lord Byron of Broadway. He also co-wrote and directed Broadway to Hollywood, the film in which producer Harry Rapf recycled content from the abandoned The March of Time. 

  • Christy Cabanne

    William Christy Cabanne (1888-1950) became a stage actor, and subsequently director, in 1908. In 1912, he and Raoul Walsh took a film crew to Mexico to film the revolution taking place, producing a film released as Life of Villa. He then worked alongside D W Griffith at the Biograph Company.

    After that, Cabanne always worked as a freelancer, directing silent and talking pictures for many studios. Metro assigned him to The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but found his work unexciting and brought in Charles Reisner to finish the picture. It has been estimated that Cabanne was responsible for about half the finished film, but he received no credit.

  • Charles F Reisner

    Charles Francis Reisner (1887-1962) was an actor and director who might best be described with the word ‘competent’. Yet he managed, in both careers, to be associated with some very impressive projects. Reisner acted with Chaplin in A Dog’s Life (1918), The Kid (1921) and The Pilgrim (1923), and also worked for him as a gag writer. And he was the named director on Keaton’s masterpiece, Steamboat Bill Jr (1928). In fact, it was Reisner who came up with the original story idea, and who was literally on his knees praying while Keaton performed the stunt where the house fell down around him.

    Reisner’s career at MGM was less prestigious, though he was considered a capable pair of hands. This is why he was brought in to rescue The Hollywood Revue of 1929 when Christy Cabanne’s work was judged to be lacking by Irving Thalberg. 

    From there Reisner moved straight on to directing Chasing Rainbows, to which he also contributed dialogue. He then directed Love in the Rough and was working on The March of time when it was abandoned. His next completed musical was Flying High.

    Reisner did uncredited writing for Hollywood Party and was one of its eight directors. He directed Student Tour, then took a break from musicals after a busy couple of years. He returned in 1941 to direct The Big Store, the last and least of the Marx Brothers’ films for Metro.

    In 1943 Reisner made Swing Fever, and ended his career in MGM musicals with Meet the People.

  • Lionel Barrymore

    Although Lionel Herbert Blyth (1878-1954) apparently had no ambition to join the family business (the show business), by the time sound films were introduced he had been an actor for 36 years, with extensive stage and screen experience. Early on he had worked under D W Griffith at the Biograph Company and he was a contract player for MGM since its inception, having been signed by Louis B Mayer to work for Metro Pictures.

    Barrymore also directed pictures, though far less skillfully than he acted in them. It is ironic, therefore, that his first two appearances in MGM musicals both cast him in the role of a director. In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 he is directing Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. And in Free and Easy he is directing the bedroom scene that is disrupted by Elmer.

    Barrymore went from there to the director’s seat for real, taking charge of Metro’s new signing, Lawrence Tibbett, in The Rogue Song.

    In 1939 Barrymore had a supporting role in Let Freedom Ring and two years later was the judge in Lady Be Good.

    That was the end of Barrymore’s career in MGM musicals, though his most famous role, as Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) still lay in the future. 

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