The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Main Crew

  • 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.

  • Claudine West

    Ivy Claudine Godber (1890-1943) was a British novelist and playwright (to little lasting effect, it would seem), who journeyed to Hollywood in 1929 to write for the talking pictures, where she found considerable success.

    Signed up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West contributed to the scripts of some of the studio’s most successful films of the 30s and early 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933, uncredited), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Good Earth (1937), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest (both 1942). She shared Oscars for the last three pictures.

    West worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals and, without credit, Maytime, The Firefly and The Chocolate Soldier.

    Claudine West worked as a codebreaker during the First World War, and it is noticeable that Mrs Miniver and her screenplay for Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940) were as fervently anti-Nazi as might be expected from somone with brothers serving in the RAF at the time.

  • A Lady’s Morals

    The Crew

    Sidney FranklinDirector
    Dorothy FarnumStory
    Hanns KrälyScenario (as Hans Kraly)
    Claudine WestScenario
    John MeehanDialogue
    Arthur RichmanDialogue
    Oscar StrausComposer
    Clifford GreyLyricist
    Herbert StothartComposer
    Harry M WoodsComposer
    Arthur FreedLyricist
    Howard JohnsonLyricist
    Carrie Jacobs-BondSongwriter
    Irving ThalbergProducer (uncredited)
    George BarnesCinematographer
    Margaret BoothEditor
    Cedric GibbonsArt Director
    AdrianCostume Designer
    George WestmoreMakeup Artist (uncredited)
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    James BrockSound Recording Engineer (uncredited)
    Sammy LeeChoreographer

  • Gilbert Emery

    Gilbert Emery Bensley Pottle (1875-1945) was a successful author and playwright (sometimes under the name Emery Pottle) both before and during his career as a screen character actor. At least one of his plays, The Hero (1921), has been revived in the 21st century.

    Following some stage acting, Emery made his first film, for Vitagraph, in 1921, but only appeared in one other silent film. From 1929 onwards, however, he accumulated around 80 credits.

    Emery only appeared in one MGM musical, A Lady’s Morals, but he also contributed to the screenplays of a number of pictures, one of which was The Cuban Love Song. 

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