German-born Paul Levy (1889-1932) was an unsuccessful actor who worked as a stage manager on Broadway before relocating to Hollywood. After some writing and directing, he settled at MGM and became assistant to Irving Thalberg, and then a production supervisor.
Bern’s sole involvement in musicals was as the uncredited producer of The Rogue Song.
Bern is best remembered today for all the wrong reasons. A few months after marrying star Jean Harlow in 1932, he was found dead from gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances.
Franz Lehár (1870-1948), born in what is now Hungary, was one of the most popular composers of operettas in the first half of the twentieth century.
Lehár’s best-known work, The Merry Widow (1905), was filmed three times by MGM, once as a silent film in 1925, and twice in musical form, in 1934 and 1952.
Some of the music from Lehár’s Gypsy Love (1910) is used in The Rogue Song. The musical is sometimes described as an adaptation of the operetta, but their two stories have no similarities.
With a career that lasted more than thirty years, Marion Benson Owens (1888-1973) was undoubtedly one of the most important writers in American cinema, even though her name is not well known today. She worked with Anita Loos on a film for D W Griffith, then became a writer for pioneer filmmaker Lois Weber, developing into one of the most prolific and skilled screenwriters in Hollywood.
Some of the major pictures worked on by Marion include: The Big House (1930), for which she won an Academy Award; Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1931); The Champ (1931), bringing a second Academy Award; Dinner at Eight (1933); Camille (1936); and The Good Earth (1937), uncredited.
Marion’s extensive work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer included eight musicals. She co-wrote The Rogue Song, and immediately followed this with an uncredited contribution to In Gay Madrid. She wrote the screenplay for the 1930 version of Good News, and then worked without credit on Going Hollywood, Maytime, Rosalie, Presenting Lily Mars and, her swan song, The Pirate.
John Colton (1887-1946) was a successful playwright who was enticed to Hollywood by MGM in 1927, to write titles for some of their last silent films. This was not taxing work, with Colton’s name in the credits being more valuable than anything he wrote.
The Broadway hit Rain, co-written by Colton with Clemence Randolph, was filmed by MGM in 1928 as Sadie Thompson, but the author was not invited to work on it. Other films based on Colton’s plays were The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949).
Colton contributed to conventional screenplays after the introduction of sound, including for three MGM musicals: The Rogue Song, Call of the Flesh and The Cuban Love Song. All three lent themselves to the interest in exotic settings that Colton demonstrated in his plays.
Most of the names synonymous with silent film comedy are performers: Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. But they are joined by two producer-directors: Mack Sennett and Harold Eugene Roach (1892-1992).
Roach began working as an extra in Hollywood in 1912, and produced his first comedy shorts in 1915, in partnership with his friend Harold Lloyd. He worked with Lloyd until 1923, and went on to establish the Laurel and Hardy team. Roach wrote, produced and sometimes directed hundreds of comedy shorts and features.
In 1928, the Hal Roach studio began releasing its films through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is how he became connected with its early musical pictures. In 1930, MGM wanted to add comic relief to The Rogue Song, so Roach directed additional sequences featuring Stan and Ollie as members of Lawrence Tibbetts band of outlaws.
In 1933, the Hal Roach Studio and MGM co-produced The Devil’s Brother, a Laurel and Hardy musical that Roach directed. He also worked as an uncredited director on Swiss Miss and The Bohemian Girl (which he co-wrote), and produced Babes in Toyland and Nobody’s Baby.
Blanche Irene Sewell (1898-1949) died far too young, but had become one of the most talented of all Hollywood editors and a seminal influence on the MGM musical style . After training under pioneer Viola Lawrence, Sewell became a full-fledged editor at MGM in 1925 and spent the rest of her career there.
She was the sister-in-law of Walt Disney, and it is generally accepted that she tutored him on the principles of editing and was very influential, in particular, on the form of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Sewell cut some of Metro’s most memorable pictures of the 1930s, including Grand Hotel, Red Dust and Queen Christina. In the 1940s, she edited twenty films, fourteen of which were musicals.
Sewell’s involvement with musicals began in 1930 with Children of Pleasure, after which she cut Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie and Listen Darling.
In 1939, Sewell was chosen to edit The Wizard of Oz, and it was claimed that this was in the hope she could bring to it some of the magic that Disney had produced in Snow White.
After this cameBroadway Melody of 1940, Go West, Ziegfeld Girl, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Du Barry Was a Lady, Best Foot Forward, Bathing Beauty, Easy to Wed, It Happened in Brooklyn, Fiesta andThe Pirate. Sewell’s last work, shortly before her death, was on Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Percy Hilburn (1889-1946) had a career as a cinematographer lasting only from 1915 to 1931, but still managed to shoot over 70 pictures. Most notable amongst these was MGM’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), on which he was one of several DoPs.
During the remainder of his career at the studio Hilburn shot two musicals, Children of Pleasure and Good News.
It is difficult to find any information about George Ward (????-????), the co-writer of songs featured in Children of Pleasure, Good News and the uncompleted The March of Time. Most online sources seem to confuse him with George Warde, a child actor during the 1920s.
Lyricist Howard Johnson (1887-1941) both served in the First World War and wrote popular songs about it, including the immortal ‘I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in his Hand’:
I’d like to see all mothers free from sorrow,
I’d like to see poor Belgium free from pain;
I’d like to see this cruel conflict ended,
I’d like to see my daddy once again.
I’d like to see the Yankees win this battle,
I’d like to see France get back her promised land;
I’d like to see this whole big world United,
And I’d like to see the Kaiser with a lily in his hand!
Johnson was capable of better than this, and his best-known song is probably ‘What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?,’ written in 1916 and made a UK chart hit by Shakin’ Stevens 70 years later.
Johnson co-wrote numbers for Children of Pleasure and the abandoned March of Time. His songs are also featured in Madam Satan, A Night at the Opera, For Me and My Gal and Hit the Deck.
