The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Main Crew

  • 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.

  • Cedric Gibbons

    Austin Cedric Gibbons (1890-1960) has been called “the most powerful arbiter of style” at MGM after Mayer and Thalberg. He was head of the studio’s art department for more than 30 years, responsible for the look of all its pictures and was credited on most of them. 

    Clearly, Gibbons did not undertake the detailed design of over a thousand films, which has led some observers to treat him as merely a credit-hogging bureaucrat.  He was that, of course, which is why he has more onscreen credits than any other individual in cinema history. But this is no reason to overlook the contribution he made to the visual style of the studio that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s.

    Gibbons started out working for the Edison Studio in 1914  and then, after military service, for Samuel Goldwyn, and thereby to MGM in 1924. In 1925 he visited the Paris Exhibition, which consolidated the influence of contemporary art movements such as Futurism, Surrealism and Art Deco on his approach to design. 

    By 1931, Gibbons had 40 staff working under him, including six art directors. He was careful to recruit personnel whose style and influences were in line with his own. His role became supervisory, though in a genuine sense: Gibbons personally signed off on all designs and, frequently, constructed sets, until health issues curtailed this level of involvement in 1945.

    It is difficult to say which musicals Gibbons had a direct involvement in, but his influence certainly dictated both the look of 1930s’ black-and-white pictures, and the Technicolor extravaganzas launched by The Wizard of Oz. Two of his eleven Oscars were for musicals: the first version of The Merry Widow (undoubtedly deserved) and An American in Paris (almost certainly not).

  • Carl Pierson

    Carl Leo Pierson (1891-1977) edited several hundred films during his long career, almost all of which would be categorized as ‘B’ pictures. Indicative of this is the fact that his best-known work is Reefer Madness (1936), the ‘notorious exploitation shocker’.

    Only six years earlier, Pierson had been in the refined setting of Metro’s Culver City studio, editing Montana Moon.

  • William Daniels

    William H Daniels (1901-70) was one of the most eminent cinematographers working during Hollywood’s Golden Age. The American Cinematographer website refers to his “inconspicuously perfect execution”. Daniels’s career lasted fifty years, from silent cinema to the self-conscious kookiness of Move (1970).

    Daniels started out as a camera operator at Universal, but followed Erich Von Stroheim to MGM, where he shot Foolish Wives (1922), Greed and The Merry Widow (both 1925). He then, famously, became Greta Garbo’s cinematographer of choice, shooting sixteen of her pictures. 

    Daniels worked with many major directors, including Clarence Brown, Frank Borzage, Raoul Walsh, George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Ida Lupino and Jules Dassin  In 1950 he won an Oscar for Dassin’s The Naked City.

    Daniels was photographing musicals for MGM for over thirty years, starting with Montana Moon in 1930 and ending with Billy Rose’s Jumbo in 1962.  In between came Broadway to Hollywood, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Broadway Melody of 1938, New Moon, For Me and My Gal and Girl Crazy.

  • Frank Butler

    Frank Russell Butler (1889-1967) was a prominent screenwriter, though his most successful days were at Paramount rather than MGM. 

    Born in  England, Butler started out as an actor at Famous Players-Lasky in 1920, writing his first scenario the following year. His acting career ended with silent cinema, and he directed only one film for Hal Roach: Flying Elephants, with Laurel and Hardy before they had established their comedy duo characters.

    Butler signed on as a writer at Metro in 1929, and worked on four musicals during his time there. He worked with regular collaborator Sylvia Thalberg on Montana Moon and New Moon. He subsequently worked on two scripts for films involving Laurel and Hardy, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl.

    Returning to Paramount, Butler wrote frequently for Bob Hope, including four of the Road pictures. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1942 for two very different screenplays, Road to Morocco and war drama Wake Island. He won two year later for Going My Way (1944).

  • Sylvia Thalberg

    It is hard to avoid describing Sylvia Thalberg (1907-88) as the younger sister of Irving Thalberg and the wife of MGM producer Lawrence Weingarten, though she would, quite understandably, not have welcomed it. Becoming the youngest writer at Hollywood’s biggest studio in 1927 inevitably attracted accusations of nepotism. This, along with writing a novel, led to her leaving Metro in 1933.

    Having published the novel, Thalberg signed a contract with Paramount in 1935. Her last, uncredited, work on a screenplay was in 1937.

    While at MGM, Thalberg worked on two musicals, Montana Moon and New Moon, both times with regular collaborator Frank Butler. Her brother’s opinion of his sister was, according to Douglas Shearer, “talented but lazy”. But that’s brothers for you.

  • Mal St Clair

    Andrew Sarris summarized the career of Malcolm St Clair (1897-1952) thus: his silent films fizzed and his sound films fizzled, it was as simple and tragic as that.

    St Clair was an important writer-director of the silent era, primarily in the field of comedy. Starting out as an actor-writer-director with Mack Sennett, he went on to co-direct a couple of shorts with Buster Keaton, from whom he learned a great deal about comedy technique. St Clair also made a series of more sophisticated comedies at Paramount in the mid-twenties, including the original adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), co-written by Anita Loos herself.

    As Sarris suggests, the quality of St Clair’s pictures declined with the advent of sound, though he continued to work until 1948. One of his early sound films was the MGM musical Montana Moon, which he produced and directed.

    One of St Clair’s more interesting later assignments was directing the silent era comedy sequences for Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), including restaging some of his earlier work.

  • Paul Neal

    Paul Neal (1896-1969) began working in Douglas Shearer’s sound department at MGM in 1929, and went on to record and mix sound for a variety of studios. He worked with a range of important filmmakers, including John Ford (The Whole Town’s Talking, 1935), Frank Borzage (History is Made at Night, 1937), William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939) and Henry Hathaway (The Dark Corner, 1946).

    Neal recorded sound on five Metro musicals: Montana Moon, The Rogue Song, The Cuban Love Song, Dancing Lady and The Cat and the Fiddle.

  • Montana Moon

    Crew

    Malcolm St ClairDirector
    Sylvia ThalbergStory and Continuity
    Frank ButlerStory and Continuity
    Joseph FarnhamDialogue
    Arthur FreedLyricist
    Nacio Herb BrownComposer
    Herbert StothartComposer
    Clifford GreyLyricist
    Malcolm St ClairProducer (uncredited)
    William DanielsCinematographer
    Carl PiersonEditor
    Leslie F WilderEditor (uncredited)
    Cedric GibbonsArt Director
    AdrianCostume Designer
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    Paul NealSound Recording Engineer (uncredited)

  • Anne Bauchens

    Roseanne Bauchens (1882-1967) spent forty years as the editor-of-choice for Cecil B DeMille’s pictures, from Carmen (1915) to The Ten Commandments (1956). She even appeared alongside DeMille when he did his cameo in Sunset Boulevard (1950). So highly did DeMille value Bauchens that it was stipulated in his contracts that she was to be his editor. She won an Oscar for North West Mounted Police (1940).

    This meant that Bauchens was the cutter on DeMille’s Metro musical, Madam Satan. Earlier that year, she edited Lord Byron of Broadway. 

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