Humourist Robert Charles Bentley (1889-1945) made his name writing for Vanity Fair and TheNew Yorker, and carousing with the other intellectuals (and Harpo Marx) at the Algonquin Round Table. He was also well known as a drama critic and reluctant stage performer.
Benchley appeared in films from 1928 (having earlier written titles, in two distinctly different ways. His first appearances were in very early Movietone sound shorts, in which he recreated revue monologues such as The Treasurer’s Report and The Sex Life of the Polyp (both 1928). Later on, he wrote and starred in a series of ‘instructional’ comedy shorts for MGM, starting with How to Sleep (1935), which won the Best Short Film Oscar. Other titles, in many of which he took the name Joe Doakes, included How to Be a Detective (1936), How to Figure Income Tax (1938) and Seeing Your Doctor (1939). After leaving MGM, who did not treat him well, Benchley made further shorts at Paramount. Many of these lecture films were based on his own earlier written material.
Alongside this, Benchley had a peculiar career as a character actor in around 50 feature films. Frequently cast as a drunk (reflecting his personal proclivity), Benchley was often permitted to write his own dialogue. Notable appearances included Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), The Major and the Minor (very much restricted to speaking Wilder-Brackett lines and I Married a Witch (both 1942).
Benchley’s two forays into MGM musicals were supporting roles in Dancing Lady and Broadway Melody of 1938.
Benchley’s early death was the result of cirrhosis of the liver.
Of all Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s great musical stars, Frederick Austerlitz (1899-1987) was technically the first. He did not star for the studio until 1940, but he made his first appearance seven years earlier, in Dancing Lady, playing himself. He stands alongside Gene Kelly as the two greatest dancer-choreographers in cinema.
After a very successful stage career, dancing with his sister Adele, Fred Astaire sought a Hollywood career after Adele got married and retired. He was 34 when he signed with RKO, who immediately loaned him to MGM, for Dancing Lady.
In the years that followed, Astaire and a new partner, Ginger Rogers, made nine pictures at RKO, a number of which are considered the high points of the 1930s musical. Astaire innovated in a number of areas, not least his insistence that dances be photographed with full-length shots, without cutaways to the face or feet.
When the Rogers partnership ended in 1939 with The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Astaire starred for the first time at MGM, dancing with Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940.
Then came perhaps Astaire’s most successful post-Rogers collaboration, when he danced in two pictures with the much-underrated Rita Hayworth at Columbia. He was back at MGM in 1945, dancing with Gene Kelly for the only time in Ziegfeld Follies, then starring in Vincente Minnelli’s strange Yolanda and the Thief.
After an attempted retirement, Astaire was lured back to MGM to replace the injured Gene Kelly in Easter Parade, after which he was reunited with Rogers in The Barkeleys of Broadway. He made five more musicals at Metro during the next ten years: Three Little Words, Royal Wedding (in which he danced on the ceiling), The Belle of New York (in which he danced on clouds), The Band Wagon (in which he and Cyd Charisse performed ‘Dancing in the Dark’ for the ages) and Silk Stockings (the final film in which he danced like Fred Astaire).
Astaire turned to straight acting from 1959, with the exception of Finian’s Rainbow (1968), where he anguished over Francis Ford Coppola’s inept style of shooting dance numbers. He made his final film in 1981.
Joseph Max Newman (1909-2006) was a highly-respected assistant director who worked his way up to become a mediocre director.
Newman started out in the film industry as an office boy, then a clerk. His first assignments as assistant director were in 1933, when worked on eight MGM productions, including Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor. He worked for Cukor again on David Copperfield (1934), for which he was nominated for the Assistant Director Academy Award.
MGM allowed him to start directing shorts in 1938, alongside his work as AD on features. His first full-length picture was Northwest Rangers (1942), Metro’s version of a ‘B’ movie.
Newman directed around 45 low-budget features before moving to television. His most high-profile picture This Island Earth (1955), though its more interesting aspects are attributable to Jack Arnold, who reshot some of Newman’s footage.
Seven MGM musicals had Newman as AD: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, San Francisco (another Oscar nomination), Maytime and The Firefly. Some sources claim that he directed the famous ‘Donkey Serenade’ sequence in The Firefly.
Frank Edgar Hull (1882-1968) was a film editor who spent most of his career working for MGM and, to a lesser extent, Fox. He worked on around eighty pictures in the period 1920-50.
Hull is famous to film historians for working closely with Erich von Stroheim on the editing of Greed (1924). He received no credit on the final version of the film after it had been drastically cut and re-edited by MGM. Hull also worked with von Stroheim on The Wedding March (1928), which was also subject to studio interference, this time by Paramount.
Hull’s projects were never as prestigious again, though he did work with John Ford on one of his masterpieces, They Were Expendable (1945).
Frank Hull edited six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Here Comes the Band, A Day at the Races and Panama Hattie.
No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.
Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.
He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.
At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films.
Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.
Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie,Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.
The status of Louis Silberstein (1889-1954) as the pioneer of film music is unassailable, given that he worked as musical director and composer on The Jazz Singer (1927), the ur-musical/talking picture.
Silvers had already claimed his place in musical history when, aged 24, he composed the music for ‘April Showers’, with lyrics by Buddy De Sylva. He also wrote the music for the experimental sound sequences in the D W Griffith turkey Dream Street (1921). He also composed for three other Griffith pictures.
Silvers had started out as a vaudeville pianist and was working as a musical director on Broadway when he went to Hollywood. His work on The Jazz Singer is far more nuanced and inventive than the film in general, or Al Jolson’s overblown performance in particular, though it rarely figures in discussion of the picture’s importance.
Silvers went on to compose music for over thirty films and act as musical director on around seventy. He also conducted the music for dozens of Warner’s early Vitaphone recordings. In 1935, he won the Oscar for Best Original Score for One Night of Love (1934).
For MGM, Silvers composed and conducted incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady, and co-wrote ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.
Composer Maurice De Packh (1896-1960) was already working as an orchestrator on Broadway by the time he was 22, and its was in that capacity that he excelled. He continued to work on Broadway for decades, while maintaining a parallel career in films.
De Packh, usually without credit, arranged the scores for some of Hollywood’s greatest Golden Age pictures. The total exceeded 240, but some of the highlights were: Queen Christina (1933), The Informer (1935), Top Hat (1935), Ninotchka (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939, one of several), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Nightmare Alley (1947), Unfaithfully Yours (1948), All About Eve (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Rio Bravo (1959) and Spartacus (1960, his final film).
De Packh started out in MGM musicals composing incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady. He was also the arranger on the latter, and later orchestrated Annie Get Your Gun, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Merry Widow, The Student Prince, I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Gigi.He also co-wrote the song ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.
Benjamin Hunt Stromberg (1894-1968) was, for eighteen years, one of the most powerful men at Hollywood’s most powerful studio.
After a brief career as a reporter, Stromberg became Samuel Goldwyn’s publicity director in New York, before being sent to Hollywood in 1918. He then joined Thomas Ince, and in 1920 directed a promotional short, A Trip Through the World’s Greatest Motion Picture Studios.
In 1921, Stromberg set up his own production company, and produced his first film, The Foolish Age. From 1921-25, he directed and/or produced a dozen or so, predominantly short, pictures.
Stromberg joined the newly-formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925, joining Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf as one of its senior executives. In 1928, he produced two of its early successes, the award-winning White Shadows in the South Seas and Our Dancing Daughters.
During the 1930s, Stromberg produced all of Jean Harlow’s pictures and, running into the 40s, the Thin Man series. He also supervised Marie Antoinette (1938), The Women (1949) and Pride and Prejudice (1940).
After falling out with Mayer, Stromberg produced a number of independent pictures, with varying degrees of success, the best being Lady of Burlesque (1943) and The Strange Woman (1946), which he co-wrote with director Edgar G Ulmer.
Stromberg was an important producer of MGM musicals in the 1930s. Cutting his teeth on Stage Mother, he then worked on six Jeanette MacDonald vehicles: Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Maytime, The Firefly, Sweethearts and I Married an Angel. He also found time to produce the hugely successful The Great Ziegfeld.
Donald Matthew Redman (1900-64) was a bandleader, singer, songwriter and musical arranger for performers including Count Basie and Pearl Bailey.
Redman has been described as “one of the first great jazz arrangers and…a pivotal figure in the development of Swing and the Big Band style Jazz”. Which makes his one link with the MGM musical even funnier.
One of Redman’s most successful songs was ‘How’m I Doin’?’, written in 1926 and recorded by a number of artists, including Redman himself. But in MGM Stage Mother it is given a twelve-second rendition by ten-year-old Mary Ann Jackson that is arguably (certainly) the most memorable sequence in the film. She shakes her head, slaps her thigh, rotates her hips and bawls out the inappropriate lyrics in a way that only a true stage mother could love. It’s probably not what Don Redman had in mind.
