Category: Main Crew

W S Van Dyke II

The reputation of Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II (1889-1943) as ‘One-Shot Woody’ was what enabled him to direct over ninety films in twenty-five years, half of them during the sound era.

Van Dyke’s mother was an actor, leading to his own early appearances on the stage as a child. Constantly on tour, he claimed to have attended schools in every state.

He undertook many jobs during his early years as an adult, before obtaining his first job in the film industry in 1915. He began pretty much at the top, as one of a number of assistant directors under D W Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915). Two years later, after having written a number of films, he directed his first feature, The Land of Long Shadows (1917), based on his own screenplay.

Van Dyke’s work in silent films was prolific, but undistinguished. It was as a director of sound pictures that he came into his own. He travelled to Tahiti in 1928 to make White Shadows in the South Seas, MGM’s first feature with recorded sound (music and sound effects). Two years later he shot Trader Horn (1931) mostly in Africa, with some dialogue scenes reshot in Hollywood.

Van Dyke went on to become a mainstay of MGM’s production schedule, reputedly Louis B Mayer’s favourite (because most efficient) director. He directed the first Johnny Weissmuller film as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), The Thin Man (1934) and three of its sequels, and Marie Antoinette (1938).

He made nine musicals for MGM and, after The Cuban Love Song, all of them starred either Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, or both of them together: Naughty Marietta,(which he also produced), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (also produced by Van Dyke), Rosalie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, I Married and Angel and Cairo.

Van Dyke was also used regularly to direct reshoots or new scenes for other directors’ pictures, and he did this for Broadway Melody of 1936 and the 1940 New Moon, again with MacDonald and Eddy.

Woody Van Dyke was a Christian Scientist and, when he learned in 1943 that he was terminally ill, refused medical treatment and took his own life.

July 16, 2026

The Cuban Love Song

The Crew

W S Van Dyke	Director
John Lynch	Adaptation
C Gardner Sullivan	Screenplay
Bess Meredyth	Screenplay
John Colton	Additional Dialogue
Gilbert Emery	Additional Dialogue
Robert E Hopkins	Additional Dialogue
Paul Hervey Fox	Additional Dialogue
Albert Lewin	Producer
Herbert Stothart	Composer
Dorothy Fields	Lyricist
Jimmy McHugh	Composer
Moïses Simons	Songwriter (uncredited)
Rafael Hernández	Songwriter (uncredited)
Harold Rosson	Cinematographer
Margaret Booth	Editor
Cedric Gibbons	Art Director
Adrian	Costume Designer
Douglas Shearer	Sound Recording Director
Paul Neal	Sound Recording Engineer (uncredited)
Jack Mintz	Assistant Director (uncredited)
Paul Marquardt	Arranger (uncredited)
Charles Maxwell	Arranger (uncredited)

July 15, 2026

Sandy Roth

Sanford Lewton Rothenberg (1887-1943) started out as an actor in some of Harold Lloyd’s Lonesome Luke pictures, and had a very minor career in occasional roles until 1933.

Roth arguably made a much greater mark as an assistant director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, working on a number of the studio’s musicals. He first carried out that role in 1922, and went on to support Buster Keaton and Charles Reisner on Steamboat Bill Jr (1928). He was also AD on Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940).

Roth’s Metro musicals were The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Flying High, Student Tour, Everybody Sing, Go West, The Big Store, This Time for Keeps, Thousands Cheer and Bathing Beauty.

July 10, 2026
Busby Berkeley

The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.

IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.

In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.

Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.

Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.

Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

July 10, 2026
George White

These entries usually start with the subject’s birth name and dates, but that is problematic with George White. Some sources claim he was Eassy White (1892-1968), born in New York. Others say he was George Weitz (1892-1968), born in Toronto. All we know for sure is that the dates are pretty certain.

White started out as a dancer in burlesque theatres, and worked his way up to the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. This inspired him to become a producer at the age of 27, launching his own Follies knock-off, George White’s Scandals in 1919. He continued with the format until 1939.

White also produced book-based Broadway shows, including Flying High (1931). It was typical of the early days of sound that MGM invited him, someone with no background in or knowledge of films, to go to Hollywood and produce a screen version of the hit musical comedy.

He continued working in Hollywood from time to time, even directing an eponymous musical based around his Broadway show.

White’s career took a downturn in the late thirties, culminating in a prison sentence in 1947 for being the driver in a fatal hit-and-run incident.

July 10, 2026

Flying High

The Crew

Charles F Reisner	Director
Charles F Reisner	Adaptation
Andrew Percival Younger	Screenplay
Robert E Hopkins	Aditional Dialogue
Buddy G DeSylva	Lyricist
Lew Brown	Lyricist
Ray Henderson	Composer
Dorothy Fields	Lyricist
Jimmy McHugh	Composer
William Axt	Composer
Charles Maxwell	Orchestrator
George White	Producer
Merritt B Gerstad	Cinematographer
William S Gray	Editor
Cedric Gibbons	Art Director
Adrian	Costume Designer
Douglas Shearer	Sound Recording Director
Ralph Shugart	Sound Recording Engineer
Busby Berkeley	Choreographer
Sandy Roth	Assistant Director (uncredited)

July 10, 2026

Gus Arnheim

Gustavus Arnheim (1897-1955) was a band leader and songwriter, whose most lasting composition was ‘I Cried for You’, written in 1923, with Abe Lyman and Arthur Freed.

Arnheim started out as a pianist, working for a time as accompanist to Sophie Tucker. He set up his own orchestra in 1927.

Arnheim and his band appeared in Vitaphone shorts in 1928-29 before making their feature debut in Universal’s Broadway in 1929. The orchestra was in about a dozen pictures, one of which was Metro’s Flying High. They also showed up in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932).

‘I Cried for You’ was sung by Judy Garland in Babes in Arms, by Helen Forrest in Bathing Beauty and, briefly, by Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me. Arnheim’s song ‘Sweet and Lovely’ was ‘performed’ by June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven in Two Girls and a Sailor, with the voices of Virginia Rees and Dorothy Jackson.

July 7, 2026
René Hubert

During a forty-year career, Rene Hubert (1895-1976) designed costumes for films made in France, the UK and Hollywood.

Born in Switzerland, Hubert is less well-remembered than contemporaries such as Orry-Kelly and Edith Head. But he worked on dozens of prestige pictures and dressed many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. His pictures included The Wind (1928), Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), Shanghai Express (1931), À Nous la Liberté (1931), Liliom (1934), Rembrandt (1936), Things to Come (1936), Lady Hamilton (1941), The Song of Bernadette (1943), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Anastasia (1956).

In 1931, Hubert designed costumes for tramps and gowns for Esther Ralston in The Prodigal.

July 2, 2026
Jacques Wolfe

Jacques Leon Wolfe (1896-1973) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the United States and became fascinated by African-American music.

Trained at Juillard, Wolfe did extensive research into the history of Black music in the United States, both as folk song and spiritual, and started to incorporate it into his own compositions. This led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes, in which Wolfe set to music Hughes’s poem Homesick Blues (1927) as ‘Sad Song in De Air’.

Wolfe is credited with Herbert Stothart and Howard Johnson at the beginning of The Prodigal. Three songs are performed by Lawrence Tibbett and unidentified Black singers in the nighttime party sequence. Given that these are in Black dialect, it is likely that Wolfe made a significant contribution to the lyrics and music. Some online sources credit only Stothart and Johnson. What is certain is that Tibbett recorded Wolfe’s ‘The Glory Road’, but the number was not included in the final version of the film.

July 2, 2026
John Howard Payne

John Howard Payne (1791-1852) was an American poet, actor, dramatist, lyricist and, for the last ten years of his life, diplomat.

He also studied the history of the Cherokee people, lobbied for their better treatment and, from left field, supported the theory that they were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

Payne’s lasting legacy is the song ‘Home! Sweet Home!’, written with Henry Bishop and sung in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Sweethearts, Let Freedom Ring and Cairo.

July 2, 2026