The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Directors

  • 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.

  • Directors N to Z

    Nigh, William
    Ober, Robert
    Pollard, Harry A
    Reisner, Charles F
    Roach, Hal
    Sedgwick, Edward
    St Clair, Mal
    Vidor, King
    Wood, Sam

  • Directors A to M

    Barrymore, Lionel
    Beaumont, Harry
    Brabin, Charles
    Cabanne, Christy
    Conway, Jack
    DeMille, Cecil B
    Franklin, Sidney
    Grinde, Nick
    Houston, Norman
    Leonard, Robert Z
    MacGregor, Edgar J
    Mack, Willard

  • Robert Ober

    Robert Howard Ober (1881-1950) was an actor with considerable stage experience when he started taking screen roles in the early 1920s. His most notable appearance was as John Gilbert’s brother in King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925).

    Although he never directed a film, Ober does appear to have been assigned some directorial tasks by MGM, one of which was to shoot retakes for In Gay Madrid after Robert Z Leonard had moved on to his next film.

  • Hal Roach

    Most of the names synonymous with silent film comedy are performers: Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. But they are joined by two producer-directors: Mack Sennett and Harold Eugene Roach (1892-1992).

    Roach began working as an extra in Hollywood in 1912, and produced his first comedy shorts in 1915, in partnership with his friend Harold Lloyd. He worked with Lloyd until 1923, and went on to establish the Laurel and Hardy team. Roach wrote, produced and sometimes directed hundreds of comedy shorts and features.

    In 1928, the Hal Roach studio began releasing its films through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is how he became connected with its early musical pictures. In 1930, MGM wanted to add comic relief to The Rogue Song, so Roach directed additional sequences featuring Stan and Ollie as members of Lawrence Tibbetts band of outlaws.

    In 1933, the Hal Roach Studio and MGM co-produced The Devil’s Brother, a Laurel and Hardy musical that Roach directed. He also worked as an uncredited director on Swiss Miss and The Bohemian Girl (which he co-wrote), and produced Babes in Toyland and Nobody’s Baby.

  • 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.

  • Cecil B DeMille

    Cecil Blount DeMille (1881-1959) was one of the founders of Hollywood cinema. After a fairly successful career as a stage actor, and less success as a playwright, he helped to found the Jesse L Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount) in 1913. DeMille and a team of actors and technicians relocated from New York to Los Angeles and established the first studio in the Hollywood area. His first production was The Squawman (1914), a story he remade twice, in 1918 and 1931.

    DeMille produced and directed films in Hollywood for  the next forty-three years, ending with The Ten Commandments in 1956. Veering wildly between the prurient and the pious, his work was usually commercially successful, and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) won one of the all-time most baffling Best Picture Oscars, beating The Quiet Man and High Noon; Singin’ in the Rain was not even nominated.

    DeMille directed one of MGM’s strangest musicals, Madam Satan, in which he provided the voice coming from a radio. He also appeared, as himself, in Free and Easy.

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