Category: Main Crew

Oscar Straus

Oscar Nathan Strauss [sic] (1870-1954) was a highly-productive Viennese composer of operettas, orchestral music, film scores and songs. His most famous work, The Chocolate Soldier (1908), was ostensibly filmed by MGM, but little of Straus’s music was used.

Straus spent a few years working in America from 1930, during which time he contributed music to A Lady’s Morals and, perhaps more memorably, to two Lubitsch musicals, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) and One Hour with You (1932).

Late in life, Straus provided the scores for two masterpieces by Max Ophuls, La ronde (1950) and Madame de… (1953).

June 17, 2026
Arthur Richman

Arthur Reichman (1886-1944) was a successful playwright who dabbled in screenwriting during the 1930s.

Richman wrote a string of successful plays performed on Broadway in the 1920, including The Awful Truth (1922), which was filmed several times, most successfully with Cary Grant and Irene Dunn in 1937. In 1924, he was elected President of the Dramatists Guild of America.

Richman’s screen work was generally uninspiring, though he did work without credit on Imitation of Life (1934). For MGM, he contributed dialogue to A Lady’s Morals.

June 17, 2026
John Meehan

John Meehan (1890-1954) was a Canadian actor and dramatist with some limited success on Broadway who made his greatest mark as a screenwriter for MGM. His play Bless You, Sister (1927) was the source for Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931).

Meehan signed a contract with the studio in 1929, along with many other Broadway alumni. Over the next twenty years, he worked on many pictures, including A Free Soul (1931), Dinner at Eight (1933, uncredited) and Boy’s Town (1938).

Meehan worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals, Stage Mother, Babes in Arms and Three Daring Daughters.

June 15, 2026
Claudine West

Ivy Claudine Godber (1890-1943) was a British novelist and playwright (to little lasting effect, it would seem), who journeyed to Hollywood in 1929 to write for the talking pictures, where she found considerable success.

Signed up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West contributed to the scripts of some of the studio’s most successful films of the 30s and early 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933, uncredited), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Good Earth (1937), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest (both 1942). She shared Oscars for the last three pictures.

West worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals and, without credit, Maytime, The Firefly and The Chocolate Soldier.

Claudine West worked as a codebreaker during the First World War, and it is noticeable that Mrs Miniver and her screenplay for Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940) were as fervently anti-Nazi as might be expected from somone with brothers serving in the RAF at the time.

June 15, 2026

A Lady’s Morals

The Crew

Sidney Franklin	Director
Dorothy Farnum	Story
Hanns Kräly	Scenario (as Hans Kraly)
Claudine West	Scenario
John Meehan	Dialogue
Arthur Richman	Dialogue
Oscar Straus	Composer
Clifford Grey	Lyricist
Herbert Stothart	Composer
Harry M Woods	Composer
Arthur Freed	Lyricist
Howard Johnson	Lyricist
Carrie Jacobs-Bond	Songwriter
Irving Thalberg	Producer (uncredited)
George Barnes	Cinematographer
Margaret Booth	Editor
Cedric Gibbons	Art Director
Adrian	Costume Designer
George Westmore	Makeup Artist (uncredited)
Douglas Shearer	Sound Recording Director
James Brock	Sound Recording Engineer (uncredited)
Sammy Lee	Choreographer

June 15, 2026

Gilbert Emery

Gilbert Emery Bensley Pottle (1875-1945) was a successful author and playwright (sometimes under the name Emery Pottle) both before and during his career as a screen character actor. At least one of his plays, The Hero (1921), has been revived in the 21st century.

Following some stage acting, Emery made his first film, for Vitagraph, in 1921, but only appeared in one other silent film. From 1929 onwards, however, he accumulated around 80 credits.

Emery only appeared in one MGM musical, A Lady’s Morals, but he also contributed to the screenplays of a number of pictures, one of which was The Cuban Love Song.

June 12, 2026
Charles Dorian

Charles Dorian (1891-1942) was a vaudeville performer who acted in films between 1915 and 1920.

From 1920 onwards, Dorian worked as an assistant director, latterly at MGM, where he worked on The Rogue Song and Reckless.

Dorian won an Academy Award in the Best Assistant Director category in 1934.

June 10, 2026
Jack Mintz

Jack Mintz (1895-1983) had a varied career in the film world that took him from Monty Banks in 1926 to Troy Donahue in 1963.

Mintz worked as an assistant director, including on MGM musicals Free and Easy and The Cuban Love Song. He was also a contributing writer on The Wizard of Oz and Presenting Lily Mars. He also worked from time to time as a dialogue coach and assistant to the producer.

Mintz was, for a period in the 1940s, in charge of purchasing for Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), which must have involved handing budgets of dozens of dollars.

June 10, 2026
Robert A Golden

Robert Joseph Anthony Golden (1897-1942) started out as an assistant director on Harold Lloyd pictures, including Dr Jack (1922) and Safety Last! (1923). He is also known to have worked as Lloyd’s double.

Golden’s subsequent work as AD, often uncredited, included seven MGM musicals, beginning with Hallelujah in 1929. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz and Ziegfeld Girl.

Golden directed one picture, a Polly Moran comedy called Honeymoon, in 1928.

June 10, 2026
LeRoy Prinz

The father of LeRoy Jerome Prinz (1895-1983) owned a dance academy, which might be assumed to have contributed to his son’s career as a dance director. But Jack Cole, who might be considered to know, apparently asserted that Prinz “didn’t know a bloody thing about dancing”. Most of the dances Prinz directed for Madam Satan would seem to support that view, the exception being ‘Low Down’, which is performed by Lillian Roth and LeRoy’s brother Eddie, which it is possible to surmise was choreographed by Eddie himself.

Knowledge of terpsichore notwithstanding, LeRoy Prinz directed the dances for scores of pictures at Paramount and, later, Warner Bros. His approach was conservative and generally showed little interest in dance skills.

Prinz was known as a shameless self publicist, claiming that early in life he was a cabin boy, a test pilot (he did serve with distinction as a pilot in the First World War), a dancer in a bordello, an adviser to the Mexican government, and had a working relationship with gangsters including Al Capone.

June 8, 2026