The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Producers

  • Walter Wanger

    Walter Feuchtwanger (1894-1968) studied at Dartmouth College and then went into theatrical production in New York. It was during his military service during the First World War that he had his introduction to filmmaking, when he was assigned to work on producing propaganda films.

    After the war, Wanger met Jesse Lasky, who hired him to work at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) in New York. He eventually became General Manager of Production, and produced the Marx Brothers’ first pictures, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). 

    Wanger left Paramount in 1931 and, after an abortive attempt at independent production, joined Columbia, where he was responsible for The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). He then had a short spell at MGM, producing Queen Christina (1933) and one musical, Going Hollywood. It was after this that he finally achieved independence, releasing productions through Paramount, and then United Artists.

    Pictures produced by Wanger over the next quarter of a century included John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and The Long Voyage Home (1940), Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). His career ended when he joined Twentieth Century-Fox for the debacle of Cleopatra (1963).

  • John W Considine Jr

    Producer John William Considine Jr (1898–1961) had a more erudite background than most of his colleagues in the upper echelons of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, having studied at Stanford, Yale, Oxford and the University of Heidelberg. He was the son of a successful theatrical impresario.

    Considine started out writing and producing at Fox, and directing one picture, Disorderly Conduct (1932). He also wrote the original story for Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930). He joined MGM in 1932, and stayed at the studio for the rest of his career. He retired when he was 45, owing to health problems.

    Considine’s first picture at MGM was Flesh (1932), directed by John Ford. Subsequent successes included Mad Love (1935, one of MGM’s rare stabs at the horror film), Boy’s Town (1938) and A Yank at Eton (1942).

    Considine only produced two MGM musicals: Dancing Lady (in tandem with David O Selznick) and Broadway Melody of 1936.

  • David O Selznick

    David Selznick (1902-65, the ‘O’ was just an initial he adopted), was one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most successful independent producers, though his time at the top was not lengthy. His name will always be linked with Gone with the Wind (1939), the epic Civil War saga, and with Rebecca (1940), Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film. The two productions made him the only producer to win Best Picture Oscars in successive years.

    Selznick was born into a film family (his father was also a producer). Early on, he worked for MGM, Paramount and RKO before striking out on his own. Highlights of this studio period were What Price Hollywood? (1932), King Kong (1933), Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1935) and Anna Karenina (1935).

    For Selznick International he produced Nothing Sacred (1937), Intermezzo (1939), Spellbound (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946). Later on, he produced and then suppressed the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece Gone to Earth (1950), reshooting sections, re-editing it and releasing it under another title. The film was not seen as intended until a restoration in 1985.

    Selznick’s last major production was A Farewell to Arms (1957).

    During his time with MGM, Selznick produced two musicals: Dancing Lady and Reckless (for which he also wrote the original story under the name Oliver Jeffries).

  • Hunt Stromberg

    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.

  • 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.

  • George White

    These entries usually start with the subject’s birth name and dates, but that is problematic with George White.  Some sources claim he was Eassy White (1892-1968), born in New York. Others say he was George Weitz (1892-1968), born in Toronto. All we know for sure is that the dates are pretty certain.

    White started out as a dancer in burlesque theatres, and worked his way up to the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. This inspired him to become a producer at the age of 27, launching his own Follies knock-off, George White’s Scandals in 1919. He continued with the format until 1939.

    White also produced book-based Broadway shows, including Flying High (1931). It was typical of the early days of sound that MGM invited him, someone with no background in or knowledge of films, to go to Hollywood and produce a screen version of the hit musical comedy.

    He continued working in Hollywood from time to time, even directing an eponymous musical based around his Broadway show.

    White’s career took a downturn in the late thirties, culminating in a prison sentence in 1947 for being the driver in a fatal hit-and-run incident.

  • Paul Bern

    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.

  • Hal Roach

    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.

  • Cecil B DeMille

    Cecil Blount DeMille (1881-1959) was one of the founders of Hollywood cinema. After a fairly successful career as a stage actor, and less success as a playwright, he helped to found the Jesse L Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount) in 1913. DeMille and a team of actors and technicians relocated from New York to Los Angeles and established the first studio in the Hollywood area. His first production was The Squawman (1914), a story he remade twice, in 1918 and 1931.

    DeMille produced and directed films in Hollywood for  the next forty-three years, ending with The Ten Commandments in 1956. Veering wildly between the prurient and the pious, his work was usually commercially successful, and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) won one of the all-time most baffling Best Picture Oscars, beating The Quiet Man and High Noon; Singin’ in the Rain was not even nominated.

    DeMille directed one of MGM’s strangest musicals, Madam Satan, in which he provided the voice coming from a radio. He also appeared, as himself, in Free and Easy.

  • Albert Lewin

    Albert Parsons Lewin (1894-1968) was one of the more exotic figures working behind the scenes in Hollywood’s golden age. He joined MGM in 1924 as a writer. Trusted by Irving Thalberg, he was made head of the story department, and subsequently a production supervisor and trusted adviser to Thalberg. He became a full-fledged producer after Thalberg’s responsibilities were reduced.

    An intellectual in a doggedly non-intellectual world, Lewis later became a somewhat eccentric auteur, writing, producing and directing a series of oddities, most notably Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951).

    Producer responsibilities were often vague at Metro during the years of Thalberg’s pomp, but Lewin was certainly responsible for The Cuban Love Song. He is also believed to have worked as producer on Devil-May-Care. 

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!