The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Main Crew

  • Marvin Hatley

    Composer Thomas Marvin Hatley (1905-86) achieved a form of immortality when he wrote a piece called ‘Dance of the Cuckoos’ (sometimes known as ‘Ku-Ku’). In 1930, this became the theme music for Laurel and Hardy’s sound shorts after it was heard on the radio. According to Laurel, Hal Roach gave the composer “about fifty bucks’ for the rights to the music.

    But Hatley did also find a job at the Roach studio as musical director, in which capacity he wrote and arranged probably hundreds of scores. Two Laurel and Hardy features, Way Out West (1937) and Block-Heads (1938) earned him nominations for the Best Original Score Oscar.

    Hatley also enjoyed appearing in front of the camera whenever a musician or conductor was required. And he provided the piano sounds for The Music Box (1932).

    He was musical director of The Devil’s Brother, which also utilized ‘Dance of the Cuckoos’, and he composed for The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.

    Hatley was deemed surplus to requirements when Roach restructured his studio in 1939, though Laurel insisted he be brought back to work on Saps at Sea (1940). Hatley became a lounge pianist, often remarking that he was earning more than Hal Roach ever paid him. 

  • Thomas Reynoldson

    Thomas Herbert Reynoldson (1807-83) may or may not have the right to an entry on this website.

    Reynoldson was a British actor and singer of the late Regency period who began, probably in late 1939, to translate and adapt European light operas. One of the works he adapted was Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo, written in 1830 with a libretto by Eugène Scribe.

    Fra Diavolo was loosely adapted by Hal Roach and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as The Devil’s Brother, with a number of the original songs retained. Most sources cite Scribe as the author of the lyrics, but this is to ignore the necessary artistry required for the translation of song lyrics. The aria ‘On yonder rock reclining’ may have the same sense as Scribe’s ‘Voyez sur cette roche’, but the former is not a literal translation of the latter.

    It is not certain that Reynoldson’s translations are the ones used by the filmmakers, but it is likely.

  • Daniel Auber

    Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was a French Romantic composer and, for many years, the director of the Paris Conservatoire.

    Auber established a long professional partnership with the librettist Eugène Scribe, and together they wrote France’s first Grand Opera. They are more often associated, however, with the opera-comique. 

    Auber’s chief association with the cinema is the 1830 operetta Fra Diavolo, which has been filmed many times for the large and small screens. In 1933, it formed the basis of MGM’s Laurel and Hardy picture The Devil’s Brother.

  • Charley Rogers

    Charles Rogers (1887-1956) is generally known as Charley and, like his namesake Charlie Chaplin and his close friend Stan Laurel, he started out working in British music halls, before emigrating to the United States in 1912.

    In the same year, Rogers played the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, one of the earliest multi-reel features, produced by a New York studio. He continued to work in the East Coast film industry for several years, before finally making his way to Hollywood. 

    In 1927, Rogers appeared uncredited in Love ‘em and Feed ‘em, and stayed at the Hal Roach Studios for many years, quickly moving into writing and directing.

    Rogers has been described as, in creative terms, second only to Stan Laurel on the Roach lot, and he worked on a number of Laurel and Hardy’s best shorts and features. These included, as a gag writer, We Faw Down, Two Tars (both 1928), Hog Wild and Laughing Gravy (both 1930). Rogers contributed the original stories and screenplays for Block-Heads (1938), A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea (both 1940). 

    Rogers directed or co-directed, and also contributed to the writing of, three of Laurel and Hardy’s operettas: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland (in which he also played Simple Simon) and The Bohemian Girl. He also wrote gags for Swiss Miss. 

    Away from Laurel and Hardy, Rogers played Josef Goebbels in the studio’s bizarre wartime semi-feature That Nazty Nuisance (1943). One of his last jobs was an uncredited appearance in Chaplin’s Limelight (1952). 

  • The Devil’s Brother

    The Crew

    Hal RoachDirector
    Charley RogersDirector
    Jeanie MacPhersonAdaptation
    Stan LaurelGag Writer (uncredited)
    Hal RoachGag Writer (uncredited)
    Charley RogersGag Writer (uncredited)
    Daniel AuberComposer
    ? Thomas ReynoldsonLyricist (uncredited)
    Marvin HatleyComposer (uncredited)
    Hal RoachProducer
    Hap DepewCinematographer
    Art LloydCinematographer
    Bert JordanEditor
    William H TerhuneEditor
    Dolly TreeCostume Designer (uncredited)
    James GreeneSound Recording Engineer
    Leroy ShieldMusical Director

  • Rafael Hernández

    Rafael Hernández Marín (1892-1965) was a Puerto Rican songwriter who spent much of his career in Mexico and Cuba.

    Hernández was a multi-instrumentalist who performed with bands in Puerto Rico and the USA. He relocated to Mexico in 1932 and, at the age of 40, enrolled in the National Music Conservatory, presumably on the basis that there is always more to learn.

    Songs by Hernández are featured in two Metro musicals. In The Cuban Love Song, Lupe Velez sings ‘Buchipluma na’ ma’, and Xaviet Cugat and his Orchestra perform ‘Cachita’.

  • Paul Hervey Fox

    Paul Hervey Fox (1894-1956) was a dramatist, novelist and screenwriter of modest abilities and moderate success.

    One of Fox’s Broadway productions was successful enough to secure him an invitation to work in Hollywood. In 1930, he wrote Prince of Diamonds for Columbia, and the following year he contributed dialogue to MGM’s The Cuban Love Song, perhaps seen as qualified by his marriage to Cuban writer Elsie de Sola. (In a bizarre incident in 1923, they had handed over their new-born daughter to a founding hospital. She grew up to be the celebrated writer Paula Fox.)

    Alcohol impeded Fox’s career. Though he contributed some interesting stories, most notably for the Kay Francis pre-code vehicle Mandalay (1934).

  • Moisés Simons

    Moisés Simón Rodríguez (1889-1945) was a Cuban composer and band leader who is best remembered today for writing the song ‘El Manisero’, known in English as ‘The Peanut Vendor’.

    Simons began his professional career as a pianist and musical director, before establishing his own jazz band in 1924. As a composer, he was part of the Afrocubanismo movement which foregrounded Black identity within Cuban culture. 

    Simons composed ‘El Manisero’ in 1930, and it went on to sell millions of copies as sheet music and in recordings by a variety of artists. In 1931, the song was used prominently in MGM’s The Cuban Love Song.

  • C Gardner Sullivan

    Charles Gardner Sullivan (1884-1965) was a prolific screenwriter with around 200 credits, the great majority of which were from the silent era. He was noted for the unusual amount of directorial detail included in his screenplays. Producer Jesse Lasky, speaking of Sullivan’s collaboration with Cecil B DeMille on films like The Buccaneer (1938) and Union Pacific (1939), described him as “the methodical giant who composed sequences of short shots and elaborately prepared camera angles that were calculated to give DeMille pictures a tremendous sense of visual place”.

    It was while working as a journalist that Sullivan began contributing story ideas to film studios. The first accepted would seem to have been Her Polished Family (1912), though this is not included by IMDb.

    When Lee Surrenders (1912) was filmed by Thomas Ince, beginning a long collaboration between Sullivan and the producer/director. In 1914, the writer relocated to Hollywood and joined Ince’s permanent staff. He worked on some of Ince’s most successful pictures, and co-wrote Civilization (1916), the big-budget anti-war film. It was a subject he would return to fourteen years later, when he supervised the screenplay for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

    By 1920, Sullivan was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood and, for a time, ran his own production company. 

    Sullivan made one contribution to MGM’s musicals, co-writing, with Bess Meredyth, the screenplay for The Cuban Love Song. 

  • John Lynch

    John G Lynch (1870-1936) was a successful business person operating a chain of theatres on the East coast who, in his mid-forties, contributed a story to a New York picture company and began a new career.

    Within a few years he was working for the Thomas Ince Corporation in Hollywood, churning out stories and occasional screenplays. When he died in 1936, he was working as an editorial supervisor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

    Lynch is credited with Adaptation on The Cuban Love Song, but it is unclear what he adapted, since the picture appears to be an original story.

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