The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Main Crew

  • Sigmund Romberg

    Zsigmund Rosenberg (1887-1951) was a Hungarian-born composer and one of the most celebrated composers of operettas for the American stage.

    Romberg arrived in New York in 1909 and eventually found work playing the piano in cafes and restaurants. He published a few songs and came to the attention of the Shubert brothers, who commissioned him to write material for their Broadway revues. He wrote for a number of shows starring Al Jolson.

    In the 1920s, Romberg wrote three classic operettas in the Viennese style–The Student Prince (1924), The Desert Song (1926) and The New Moon (1928)–working with various lyricists, including Oscar Hammerstein II. He also wrote film scores and adapted his own work for the screen.

    MGM made two versions of New Moon (dropping the definite article) and also adapted Rosalie, Maytime and The Student Prince. He also contributed music to The Night is Young and The Girl of the Golden West.

    In 1954, Romberg was the subject of an MGM musical-biopic, Deep in My Heart, which drew extensively on his back catalogue.

  • Cyril Hume

    Former journalist and occasional novelist Cyril Joseph Hume (1900-1966) had a fairly workaday career as a Hollywood screenwriter. The high point of the 1930s was adapting Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and contributing to several of its sequels, and co-writing Flying Down to Rio (1933).

    Then, in 1956, came Hume’s annus mirabilis. He wrote the screenplay for the science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet, and followed it up by co-writing the estimable Nicholas Ray picture Bigger Than Life.

    Early in his career, Hume contributed dialogue to New Moon.

  • New Moon (1930)

    The Crew

    Jack ConwayDirector
    Sam WoodDirector (uncredited)
    Sylvia ThalbergAdaptation
    Frank ButlerAdaptation
    Cyril HumeDialogue
    Sigmund RombergComposer
    Oscar Hammerstein IILyricist
    Herbert StothartComposer
    Clifford GreyLyricist
    William AxtComposer
    Paul BernProducer
    Oliver T MarshCinematographer
    Margaret BoothEditor
    Cedric GibbonsArt Director
    George WestmoreMakeup Artist
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director

  • James Brock

    James Kendall Brock (1901-63) was a sound recording engineer who spent most of his career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and worked on sixteen musicals during that time.

    Brock began, under the supervision of Douglas Shearer, on A Lady’s Morals. Here, as for most pictures, he was uncredited.

    Barnes was the sound mixer on The Merry Widow and A Night at the Opera, then sound engineer on The Great Ziegfeld, Maytime, The Girl of the Golden West, Du Barry Was a Lady, On an Island With You, Easter Parade, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Band Wagon, Easy to Love, The Student Prince, Interrupted Melody, Merry Andrew and Gigi.

  • George Barnes

    Lush is a word often applied (though not in the South Wales sense) to the work of cinematographer George Scott Barnes (1892-1953). His lighting of black-and-white film, combined with effortless tracking shots, made him an exemplar of the classical Hollywood style. He also served as a mentor to Glenn Toland, who further developed Barnes’s interest in dep focus.

    Barnes made his first film as cinematographer for the Thomas Ince Company, but was for many years a mainstay of Samuel Goldwyn Productions. He worked for a variety of studios during his career, and for many of the foremost directors, including Hitchcock (winning the Oscar for Rebecca [1940]), Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Henry King, Billy Wilder, Cecil B DeMille and John Ford (for whom he shot the infamous Sex Hygiene [1942]).

    Barnes, shot one MGM musical, A Lady’s Morals.

  • Carrie Jacobs-Bond

    Carrie Minetta Jacobs-Bond (1862-1946) was a prolific songwriter and by far the most successful female composer of her day. But she is remembered today, if she is remembered at all, for one piece: the parlour song ‘I Love You Truly’, of which about eight million sheet music copies were sold.

    A late song by Jacobs-Bond, ‘Lovely Hour’, was performed by Grace Moore in A Lady’s Morals. 

  • Harry M Woods

    Harry MacGregor Woods (1896-1970) was a Tin Pan Alley composer whose name is rarely heard, but who produced many standards from the Great American Songbook. These included ‘When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along)’, ‘I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover’, ‘Side by Side’ and ‘Try a Little Tenderness’.

    Woods rarely wrote directly for the screen, though his songs have been heard in hundreds of films. One exception was Metro’s A Lady’s Morals. 

    ‘When the Red, Red Robin’ is sung by Susan Hayward in I’ll Cry Tomorrow. 

  • 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). 

  • 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.

  • 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.

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