Category: Main Crew

Paul Marquardt

German-born Paul Alfred Marquardt (1889-1960) was a composer who worked for many years as an arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and for other studios. Although rarely receiving an onscreen credit, Marquardt made a substantial contribution to MGM’s musical history.

He orchestrated the music for many non-musical films, including Anna Karenina (1935), Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), The Women (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), Rebecca (1940),Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), High Noon (1952) and Friendly Persuasion (1957). Marquardt also composed original scores in the 1930s, including for The Sign of the Cross and A Farewell to Arms (both 1933). He worked on well over 350 films between 1930 and 1957.

The first of Marquardt’s 39 MGM musicals was The Cuban Love Song, collaborating with Charles Maxwell. This was followed by Dancing Lady, The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, Naughty Marietta, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco. Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, Rosalie, Everybody Sing, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz, Sweethearts (in which he also appeared as a conductor), The Wizard of Oz (credited for orchestral and vocal arrangements), Babes in Arms, At the Circus, Balalaika, New Moon, Hullabaloo, Rio Rita, I Married an Angel, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Thousands Cheer, Ziegfeld Follies, Holiday in Mexico, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Royal Wedding and Show Boat.

July 20, 2026
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’.

July 20, 2026
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).

July 20, 2026
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.

July 19, 2026
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.

July 17, 2026
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.

July 16, 2026
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