The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Main Crew

  • Lionel Barrymore

    Although Lionel Herbert Blyth (1878-1954) apparently had no ambition to join the family business (the show business), by the time sound films were introduced he had been an actor for 36 years, with extensive stage and screen experience. Early on he had worked under D W Griffith at the Biograph Company and he was a contract player for MGM since its inception, having been signed by Louis B Mayer to work for Metro Pictures.

    Barrymore also directed pictures, though far less skillfully than he acted in them. It is ironic, therefore, that his first two appearances in MGM musicals both cast him in the role of a director. In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 he is directing Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. And in Free and Easy he is directing the bedroom scene that is disrupted by Elmer.

    Barrymore went from there to the director’s seat for real, taking charge of Metro’s new signing, Lawrence Tibbett, in The Rogue Song.

    In 1939 Barrymore had a supporting role in Let Freedom Ring and two years later was the judge in Lady Be Good.

    That was the end of Barrymore’s career in MGM musicals, though his most famous role, as Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) still lay in the future. 

  • Albertina Rasch

    Albertina Rasch (1891-1967) was an important component of early MGM musicals. She provided dance direction for seven pictures, which normally featured her eponymous ballet troupe, as well as acting in two others.

    Rasch trained at the State Opera House in Vienna, and pursued a career there before relocating to the United States when she was around 18. She was involved in spectacular productions at the 5,000-seat New York Hippodrome and performed as prima ballerina with a number of companies. Rasch also acquired vaudeville experience.

    In the early twenties she established the Albertina Rasch Dancers and played a part in the development of syncopated American Ballet such as ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (1925).

    At MGM, Rasch developed the insertion of ‘ballet spectacles’ into the studio’s musicals, something she had begun on Broadway. She and her dancers first appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, which was followed by Devil-May-Care, Broadway Melody of 1936 (the ‘Lucky Star’ ballet involving Eleanor Powell), Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, The Great Waltz and Sweethearts. She also worked on the abandoned The March of Time.

    Rasch acted in The Rogue Song and appeared without credit in The Firefly. 

    Rasch was married to composer Dimitri Tiomkin.

  • Eva Jessye

    Eva Jessye (1895-1992) was an internationally-renowned choral conductor and composer and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Later in life, she was part of the civil rights movement.

    Cinema played a very small part in Jessye’s prestigious life and career. She made only three films, but one was an MGM musical, she was the choral director and sang in Hallelujah.

    In the 1960s Jessye acted in Black Like Me (1964) and Slaves (1969), two well-intentioned anti-racist films. 

  • Douglas Shearer

    Douglas Graham Shearer (1899-1971) was working in MGM’s camera department when talking pictures were the latest thing and it has been suggested that he became one of the pioneers of the practical use of sound largely because no one else expressed an interest. He said “Overnight I became the one-man sound department”.

    Shearer started out adding music and sound effects to White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) and went on to win five Academy Awards, four of them for musicals. While supervising the still rudimentary sound recording on The Broadway Melody, it was Shearer who suggested playing back the pre-recorded music when Thalberg ordered the big production number be redone. He was also the impetus behind the establishment of MGM’s famed music department.

    As a department head, Shearer received a credit on almost a thousand pictures during his forty-year tenure, running Cedric Gibbons a close second. But he does appear to have been very hands-on in his approach, personally developing many innovations and technical improvements in screen sound.

    Shearer received Academy Awards for Naughty Marietta, San Francisco, Strike Up the Band and The Great Caruso, and nominations for Maytime, Sweethearts, Balalaika and The Chocolate Soldier. He also won an Oscar nomination for his contribution to the special effects in The Wizard of Oz.

    In addition, Shearer won seven awards for scientific and technical innovations.  

  • Fred Fisher

    Originally Alfred Breitenbach, German-born Fred Fisher (1875-1942) wrote the popular ‘Peg O’My Heart’ and many other Irish-themed ballads. He also co-wrote ‘Whispering Grass’ with his equally-successful daughter, Doris Fisher.

    Songs by Fisher, usually written in collaboration with others, are featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, So This Is College, Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure, For Me and My Gal and In the Good Old Summertime. He also contributed a number to The March of Time.

  • Martin Broones

    Martin Broones (1892-1971) was a prolific, if little-remembered, composer who worked in theatre, radio, television and moving pictures. He was also the creator and first director of MGM’s music department. 

    Broones only composed songs for two of Metro’s earliest musicals: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and So This is College. For the latter, he collaborated on the number ‘Campus Capers’ with his wife, the actor and eccentric dancer Charlotte Greenwood.

  • Leonard Smith

    Leonard Smith (1894-1947) photographed his first film in 1915 and spent most of his career at Metro. He was nominated four times for an Academy Award, finally winning for The Yearling shortly before his death. Smith was best known for his Technicolor work, but most of the thirteen musicals he worked on were in black and white. 

    In the 1929-30 period Smith shot So This Is College, They Learned About Women and Free and Easy. 

    After a seven-year break he worked uncredited on A Day at the Races and Rosalie, photographed Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, then shot the Marx Brothers next two pictures, At the Circus and Go West.

    There followed Ship Ahoy and uncredited work on I Married an Angel and Seven Sweethearts. Finally, Smith photographed Best Foot Forward and Broadway Rhythm in colour.

  • Joseph Farnham

    Joseph White Farnham (1884-1931) is the permanent holder of two cinematic records. He was the only person to receive an Academy Award for writing title cards, for The Fair Co-Ed (1927), Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Telling the World (both 1928). And he was the first winner of an Academy Award to die.

    Farnham’s brief career in talking pictures was less prestigious, but did include work on six Metro musicals. He wrote a skit for The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and titles for Marianne (both without credit). He then contributed dialogue to So This Is College, Montana Moon, Good News and Love in the Rough. Farnham also appeared as himself in Free and Easy.

  • Delmer Daves

    Delmer Lawrence Daves (1904-77) started out as a prop boy, dabbled in acting and screenwriting, and became a director singled out by Martin Scorsese as neglected and as a forerunner of his own approach to depicting indigenous Americans in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

    In his mid-twenties Daves co-wrote So This Is College, and also appeared onscreen as one of the USC footballers. Sticking with the college background, he then played Beef in Good News. 

  • Al Boasberg

    Albert Isaac Boasberg (1891-1937) played a number of roles in his short career but was essentially a gag writer. In that capacity he worked with many of the major vaudeville and radio stars of the day, including Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Burns and Allen. In Hollywood, he also wrote for and, on occasion, directed dozens of shorts and features, most notably Battling Butler (1926) and The General (1927) with Buster Keaton.

    Boasberg contributed to seven MGM musicals. He co-wrote So This Is College, (and also composed song lyrics, then worked on It’s a Great Life and Chasing Rainbows. Free and Easy reunited him, in less auspicious circumstances, with Keaton, and he provided additional dialogue for The Florodora Girl.

    Back in his comfort zone, Boasberg script-doctored for the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, and then wrote most of the scripted jokes for A Day at the Races. Joe Adamson, in his book about the Marx Brothers, wrote of Boasberg that his “monumental ingenuity at packing sentences with insanities was matched only by his monumental indifference to the logical progression of a plotline”.

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