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.
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 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.
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.
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 Francis Reisner (1887-1962) was an actor and director who might best be described as ‘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.
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.
During his years at MGM, Samuel Grosvenor Wood (1883-1949) was a thoroughgoing studio man, one of Louis B Mayer’s favourite directors because, if Mayer told him to change something, he changed it.
Wood was a reliable journeyman director who was eventually assigned to pictures that were beyond his creative abilities. Sam Wood and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was not a match made in heaven, given the director’s extreme conservatism, but Paramount gave him the job anyway.
Earlier on, Wood provided unfussy, if uninspired, direction on So This Is College, It’s a Great Life (which he also produced) and They Learned About Women. He also did uncredited work on The Cat and the Fiddle and Hollywood Party.
There were few directors at Metro less suited to work with the Marx Brothers, yet Wood was assigned both A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
Robert Zigler Leonard (1889-1968), commonly known as Pop, turned to directing in 1914 after a short career as a leading man, and was a workhorse producer-director at MGM from 1926 until 1957. He worked in pretty much every genre tackled by the studio, and was one of its most prolific directors of musicals, working on fifteen between 1929 and 1952.
Leonard directed and co-produced Marianne in 1929, one of his many collaborations with Metro’s female stars. A few years later he made In Old Madrid, then became the first person to direct Fred Astaire on film in Dancing Lady.
The Great Ziegfeld was the second musical to win the Best Picture Oscar, and Leonard was also nominated for his direction.
Leonard worked on five Jeanette Macdonald-Nelson Eddy vehicles–Naughty Marietta (uncredited), Maytime, Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts (uncredited) and New Moon–as well as two MacDonald solo pictures, The Firefly and Broadway Serenade.
Ziegfeld Girl returned him to the world of the Broadway impresario, and, after a gap of eight years, he was reunited with that film’s star, Judy Garland, for In the Good Old Summertime. Leonard then directed a new generation of musical performers in Nancy Goes to Rio (Jane Powell), Duchess of Idaho (Esther Williams) and Grounds for Marriage (Kathryn Grayson.
Leonard’s final musical outing was Everything I Have is Yours in 1951.
King Vidor (1894-1982) was celebrated throughout his career at MGM and later as a maker of ‘prestige’ pictures. This applies to Hallelujah, his only musical and a film celebrated (and criticized) for many things other than its musical performances. Hallelujah stands alongside The Crowd (1928), The Champ (1931), The Citadel (1938) and War and Peace (1956) as a film for which Vidor was nominated for the Best Director Oscar (he never won).
