The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Editors

  • Slavko Vorkapich

    Slavoljub Vorkapić (1894-1976) is one of the more fa

    scinating and unexpected figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

    Born in Serbia, Vorapich studied to be a painter, and was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris in the late 1910s. He travelled to the United States in 1920, and found work as an actor, predominantly for the director Rex Ingram (he played Napoleon in Scaramouche [1923]).

    In 1928, Vorkapich directed, with the collaboration of Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, a short and influential experimental film called The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, allegedly with a budget of $98. The prowess in editing demonstrated in the film led to employment in Hollywood, initially by Paramount, and then RKO and MGM. He came to specialize in montage sequences, in which action over a lengthy period of narrative time is compressed into a few minutes of screen time in what he called “symphonies of visual movement”. Vorkapich would be brought in specifically to shoot and edit these, often expressionistic, sequences. He developed and utilized techniques in pacing action for maximum psychological impact on the viewer. 

    Vorkapic was also adept at in-camera special effects, such as the collapse of Wall Street at the end of The Conquerors (1932) and the locust attack in The Good Earth (1937).

    He made propaganda shorts during the Second World War, and then took up academic posts in California, and later in Yugoslavia. This was also where he directed his only feature film, Hanka (1955). He lectured on what he saw as the autonomous visual language of cinema, and never hesitated to criticize directors of high reputation, including Eisenstein and Ford, for what he considered incompetence.

    Vorkapich’s work at MGM can be seen in the musicals Dancing Lady, San Francisco, Maytime, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts.

    Quite why he was seen as simpatico with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is unclear.

  • Frank E Hull

    Frank Edgar Hull (1882-1968) was a film editor who spent most of his career working for MGM and, to a lesser extent, Fox. He worked on around eighty pictures in the period 1920-50.

    Hull is famous to film historians for working closely with Erich von Stroheim on the editing of Greed (1924). He received no credit on the final version of the film after it had been drastically cut and re-edited by MGM. Hull also worked with von Stroheim on The Wedding March (1928), which was also subject to studio interference, this time by Paramount.

    Hull’s projects were never as prestigious again, though he did work with John Ford on one of his masterpieces, They Were Expendable (1945).

    Frank Hull edited six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Here Comes the Band, A Day at the Races and Panama Hattie.

  • Ben Lewis

    Benjamin Lewis (1894-1970) was a film editor who spent the whole of his career, forty-three years, working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

    He started out working as an assistant editor on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), and obtained his first full credit a year later on The Devil’s Circus (1926), directed by Benjamin Christiansen during his sojourn in Hollywood.

    Lewis edited some of MGM’s most prestigious pictures, as well as being a frequent editor on the money-making Andy Hardy series. He worked on Trader Horn (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and The Good Earth (1937, uncredited).

    In 1951, Lewis was given the unpleasant task of editing John Huston’s cut of The Red Badge of Courage down to 69 minutes. 

    Lewis worked on seven MGM musicals, across a thirty-four-year period: Broadway to Hollywood, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Strike Up the Band, Rio Rita, For Me and My Gal, Three Little Words  and The Fastest Guitar Alive.

    Ben Lewis’s brother was the venerated ‘B’ picture director, Joseph H Lewis.

  • William H Terhune

    William Hilton Terhune (1899-1940) directed half a dozen shorts for Hal Roach in the 1930s, but was predominantly an editor, starting at the studio as a cutter in 1926.

    Terhune was the editor on Topper (1937) and its first sequel, Topper Takes a Trip (1938). He also worked on the Joan Crawford picture Susan and God (1940) for MGM.

    William Terhune edited the four Laurel and Hardy musicals, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss, as well as the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus.

  • Bert Jordan

    Albert Adrian Jordan (1887-1983) worked in the British film industry in the 1910s before emigrating to America, where he found work as a cutter at Vitagraph.

    Jordan moved to the Hal Roach Studios in 1921, where he stayed for the bulk of his career. Stan Laurel, who was the creative force behind the Laurel and Hardy films, admired Jordan’s work to the extent of insisting that he edit all of their pictures, if he was available.

    This meant that Jordan worked on virtually all of the Laurel and Hardy features, including their four musicals, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.

    Jordan also edited one of the Roach studio’s most prestigious productions, Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men (1939).

    After leaving Hal Roach, Jordan worked mostly in television until he retired, aged 75.

  • Margaret Booth

    In 1977, Margaret Booth (1898-2002) received an honorary Oscar in tribute to her 62-year Hollywood career, during most of which she was arguably the industry’s greatest editor. Remarkably, she carried on working for another eight years.

    Like many major Hollywood figures, Booth started out with D W Griffith, working as a negative cutter. She subsequently worked for Louis B Mayer, transferring with him to the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. She was appointed as Supervising Editor in 1939, and stayed there until her shameful dismissal in 1986. During that time, as Booth described it, she worked only in the projection room, never the cutting room (though it is believed she did uncredited cutting on Ben Hur (1959).  She has been described as “the final arbiter on every picture the studio made”, and was responsible, amongst other things, for the butchering of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951).

    The first MGM musical edited by Margaret Booth was The Rogue Song. This was followed by New Moon, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady, Reckless. After that, she technically supervised the editing of every musical, but made a particularly significant contribution to The Wizard of Oz and Gigi.

    As late as 1982, aged 84, Booth worked as supervising editor on the Columbia-released musical Annie. 

  • Blanche Sewell

    Blanche Irene Sewell (1898-1949) died far too young, but had become one of the most talented of all Hollywood editors and a seminal influence on the MGM musical style . After training under pioneer Viola Lawrence, Sewell became a full-fledged editor at MGM in 1925 and spent the rest of her career there.

    She was the sister-in-law of Walt Disney, and it is generally accepted that she tutored him on the principles of editing and was very influential, in particular, on the form of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

    Sewell cut some of Metro’s most memorable pictures of the 1930s, including Grand Hotel, Red Dust and Queen Christina. In the 1940s, she edited twenty films, fourteen of which were musicals. 

    Sewell’s involvement with musicals began in 1930 with Children of Pleasure, after which she cut Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie and Listen Darling.

    In 1939, Sewell was chosen to edit The Wizard of Oz, and it was claimed that this was in the hope she could bring to it some of the magic that Disney had produced in Snow White.

    After this cameBroadway Melody of 1940, Go West, Ziegfeld Girl, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Du Barry Was a Lady, Best Foot Forward, Bathing Beauty, Easy to Wed, It Happened in Brooklyn, Fiesta andThe Pirate. Sewell’s last work, shortly before her death, was on Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

  • Karl Zint

    Karl E Zindt (1909-78) was a sound engineer who started out in Douglas Shearer’s new sound department at MGM. While there, he worked on the highly successful Grand Hotel (1932) and, with slightly less prestige, Free and Easy. Thereafter, Zint spent most of his career on Poverty Row aand in television.

  • George Todd

    George Todd (1???-1???) is a mysterious figure. Both IMDb and the American Film Institute are certain that he was a cutter on Free and Easy and Children of Pleasure…and that’s it. 

  • William LeVanway

    William LeVanway (1896-1957) was an editor who spent his entire career at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, latterly as head of the editing department. Unlike Douglas Shearer and Cedric Gibbons, he was not credited on every film.

    While still undertaking editing assignments, LeVanway worked on the silent version of The Broadway Melody (1929), and was the cutter on Free and Easy, Good News and A Night at the Opera. He was the supervising editor for An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.

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