The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Directors

  • 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.

  • Raoul Walsh

    Albert Edward Walsh (1887-1980) had a fifty-two-year career as a film director and made around 130 feature films and a dozen or so shorts. His first feature was The Life of General Villa (1914), co-directed with Christy Cabanne, which he also co-wrote and in which he played Pancho Villa as a young man. 

    Walsh started out as an actor on the stage in 1909, before commencing film work. In 1915, he played John Wilkes Booth in D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Probably his best-known acting role–and his last–was in Sadie Thompson (1928), which he again wrote and directed. He had already directed dozens of pictures by the time sound was introduced, and in 1930 he made The Big Trail, the expensive Fox western that was a commercial failure and launched John Wayne into an unsuccessful first attempt at stardom.

    Raoul Walsh played an important part in edging Humphrey Bogart into the top rank, moving him from supporting player in The Roaring Twenties (1939) and They Drive by Night (1940) to a career-defining starring role in High Sierra (1940). He also made multiple films with James Cagney (including the classic White Heat [1949]) and Errol Flynn. He also directed three Clark Gable pictures in the 1950s. 

    Walsh is rarely listed alongside the acknowledged greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as Ford, Hawks and Wyler. But he was a gifted and versatile director.

    In 1933, Walsh directed his sole MGM musical, Going Hollywood.

  • Jules White

    Julius Weiss (1900-85) liked to think of himself as the Fourth Stooge, having been producer and/or director on well over half of their output. He claimed to have heavily influenced and shaped their comedy.

    White acted in a couple of films as a teenager, including The Birth of a Nation (1915). He was then a general dogsbody around various studios, ending up as an editor at Educational Pictures, where his brother Jack was producing comedies. White co-directed his first short film in 1924.

    Jules White moved to MGM in 1930, where he wrote and directed short comedies, including the Dogville Comedies, satires starring trained dogs. He also co-directed Sidewalks of New York, starring Buster Keaton.

    In 1933, White moved on again, this time to Columbia, where he was put in charge of the studio’s short subjects. Over the next couple of decades he produced over 360 pictures, and also acted as director on around 240, as well as contributing to their screenplays. It is claimed that by the 1950s he could put out a new short comedy with a single day’s shooting, largely by cannibalizing from earlier films.

    Columbia stopped making shorts in 1957, but White went on to direct a couple of Three Stooges’ feature films.

    Shortly before moving to Columbia in 1933, White shot retakes for Broadway to Hollywood, which featured two of the Stooges, More and Curly Howard.

  • Charley Rogers

    Charles Rogers (1887-1956) is generally known as Charley and, like his namesake Charlie Chaplin and his close friend Stan Laurel, he started out working in British music halls, before emigrating to the United States in 1912.

    In the same year, Rogers played the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, one of the earliest multi-reel features, produced by a New York studio. He continued to work in the East Coast film industry for several years, before finally making his way to Hollywood. 

    In 1927, Rogers appeared uncredited in Love ‘em and Feed ‘em, and stayed at the Hal Roach Studios for many years, quickly moving into writing and directing.

    Rogers has been described as, in creative terms, second only to Stan Laurel on the Roach lot, and he worked on a number of Laurel and Hardy’s best shorts and features. These included, as a gag writer, We Faw Down, Two Tars (both 1928), Hog Wild and Laughing Gravy (both 1930). Rogers contributed the original stories and screenplays for Block-Heads (1938), A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea (both 1940). 

    Rogers directed or co-directed, and also contributed to the writing of, three of Laurel and Hardy’s operettas: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland (in which he also played Simple Simon) and The Bohemian Girl. He also wrote gags for Swiss Miss. 

    Away from Laurel and Hardy, Rogers played Josef Goebbels in the studio’s bizarre wartime semi-feature That Nazty Nuisance (1943). One of his last jobs was an uncredited appearance in Chaplin’s Limelight (1952). 

  • W S Van Dyke II

    The reputation of Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II (1889-1943) as ‘One-Shot Woody’ was what enabled him to direct over ninety films in twenty-five years, half of them during the sound era.

    Van Dyke’s mother was an actor, leading to his own early appearances on the stage as a child. Constantly on tour, he claimed to have attended schools in every state. 

    He undertook many jobs during his early years as an adult, before obtaining his first job in the film industry in 1915. He began pretty much at the top, as one of a number of assistant directors under D W Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915). Two years later, after having written a number of films, he directed his first feature, The Land of Long Shadows (1917), based on his own screenplay. 

    Van Dyke’s work in silent films was prolific, but undistinguished. It was as a director of sound pictures that he came into his own. He travelled to Tahiti in 1928 to make White Shadows in the South Seas, MGM’s first feature with recorded sound (music and sound effects). Two years later he shot Trader Horn (1931) mostly in Africa, with some dialogue scenes reshot in Hollywood. 

    Van Dyke went on to become a mainstay of MGM’s production schedule, reputedly Louis B Mayer’s favourite (because most efficient) director. He directed the first Johnny Weissmuller film as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), The Thin Man (1934) and three of its sequels, and Marie Antoinette (1938). 

    He made nine musicals for MGM and, after The Cuban Love Song, all of them starred either Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, or both of them together: Naughty Marietta,(which he also produced), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (also produced by Van Dyke), Rosalie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, I Married and Angel and Cairo.

    Van Dyke was also used regularly to direct reshoots or new scenes for other directors’ pictures, and he did this for Broadway Melody of 1936 and the 1940 New Moon, again with MacDonald and Eddy.

    Woody Van Dyke was a Christian Scientist and, when he learned in 1943 that he was terminally ill, refused medical treatment and took his own life.

  • Busby Berkeley

    The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.

    IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.

    In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.

    Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.

    Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.

    Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

  • Harry A Pollard

    Harry Adolphus Pollard (1879-1934) was a stage actor who made his film debut in 1910. A few years later, he became an early auteur, writing, directing and starring in many films with his wife, Margarita Fischer.

    Pollard gave up acting in 1916, though he still managed to clock up over eighty credits. In 1920, he directed the much-praised science fiction serial The Invisible Ray, and in 1926 co-wrote and directed the first in the successful The Cohens and the Kellys series. 

    As an actor, Pollard had blacked-up to play Uncle Tom in 1913. Fourteen years later, he directed another version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), this time with Black stage actor James B Lowe in the role. He also directed the first, part-talkie version of Show Boat (1929).

    Pollard’s sole MGM musical was The Prodigal, which was billed as a ‘Harry Pollard Production’.

    Pollard directed his final film, a William Haines comedy, the following year.

  • Edgar J MacGregor

    Edgar J MacGregor (1878-1957) was an actor who became a highly-successful theatre director, usually on Broadway, from 1910 through to the late 1940s. His successes included Good News (1927), Funny Face (1927), DuBarry Was a Lady (1939), Panama Hattie (1939) and several editions of Earl Carroll’s Vanities.

    MacGregor’s screen career was less auspicious. He travelled to Hollywood in 1930 to work on the screen version of Good News, co-directing with Nick Grinde. He never directed another film.

  • Nick Grinde

    Harry A Grinde (1893-1979) was a vaudeville performer who found work as a director at MGM in the late twenties. From then until 1945 he directed around sixty generally low budget features for a variety of studios.

    Early on, Metro occasionally used Grinde to work in partnership with tyro directors who had joined the studio directly from theatre work. For example, he co-directed The Bishop Murder Case (1930) with Broadway director David Burton.

    Another such was Good News, which Grinde co-directed with Edgar J MacGregor, director of the original broadway production.

    Grinde did not direct any additional musicals at Metro, being far more at home with westerns and thrillers, though he did, out of left field, write the screenplay for Babes in Toyland.

  • Charles Brabin

    Charles J Brabin (1882-1957) emigrated from Liverpool to New York in 1900 and found work as a stage actor. In 1908 he joined the Edison company, first as an actor, and later taking up writing and directing. 

    Brabin directed for a variety of studios throughout the silent era, generally with success. The major exception was MGM’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1924) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Brabin began shooting the film in Italy, with George Walsh playing the title character. Irving Thalberg did not like the rushes that were being sent back to Hollywood, and decided to replace both Brabin and Shaw with, respectively, Fred Niblo and Ramon Novarro.

    It would seem no long-term grudges were held on either side, as Brabin did work subsequently for the studio, including on two musicals, Call of the Flesh and Stage Mother. He also had considerable success for MGM with The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).

    Charles Brabin was married to screen star Theda Bara for 34 years, until her death, one of the most successful of Hollywood marriages.

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