The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Songwriters

  • Jacques Wolfe

    Jacques Leon Wolfe (1896-1973) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the United States and became fascinated by African-American music.

    Trained at Juillard, Wolfe did extensive research into the history of Black music in the United States, both as folk song and spiritual, and started to incorporate it into his own compositions. This led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes, in which Wolfe set to music Hughes’s poem Homesick Blues (1927) as ‘Sad Song in De Air’.

    Wolfe is credited with Herbert Stothart and Howard Johnson at the beginning of The Prodigal. Three songs are performed by Lawrence Tibbett and unidentified Black singers in the nighttime party sequence. Given that these are in Black dialect, it is likely that Wolfe made a significant contribution to the lyrics and music. Some online sources credit only Stothart and Johnson. What is certain is that Tibbett recorded Wolfe’s ‘The Glory Road’, but the number was not included in the final version of the film.

  • John Howard Payne

    John Howard Payne (1791-1852) was an American poet, actor, dramatist, lyricist and, for the last ten years of his life, diplomat.

    He also studied the history of the Cherokee people, lobbied for their better treatment and, from left field, supported the theory that they were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

    Payne’s lasting legacy is the song ‘Home! Sweet Home!’, written with Henry Bishop and sung in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Sweethearts, Let Freedom Ring and Cairo.

  • Henry Bishop

    Henry Rowley Bishop (1787-1856) was a British composer from the Romantic period who composed for ballet and opera. He was a founder member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

    Bishop’s lasting legacy was the ballad ‘Home! Sweet Home!’, written with American John Howard Payne for the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan (1823). The song was performed in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Sweethearts, Let Freedom Ring and Cairo. 

  • Billy Rose

    William Samuel Rosenberg (1899-1966) became familiar to audiences in 1975 when he was played by James Caan in Funny Lady, a film about Fanny Brice, to whom Rose was married for nine years. In the mid-20th century, however, he was one of the biggest impresarios on Broadway.

    Rose started out as a stenographer, playing an important role during the First World War as a senior clerk at the War Industries Board. After the war, he started writing song lyrics, and eventually became the co-writer of many standards, including ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’, ‘Don’t Bring Lulu’ and ‘Me and My Shadow’. It should be noted, however, that Rose was an enormously successful self-publicist, and doubt has been cast on the extent of his contribution in song-writing partnerships.

    Inevitably, given his ego, Rose moved into Broadway producing. One of his biggest hits was Jumbo (1936), which was filmed by MGM in 1962. Rose played no part in the production of the film, but a contractual requirement meant that it was titled Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    As an impresario, Rose was known for glitz and vulgarity, but also for giving an early opportunity as choreographer to Gene Kelly, and for staging Carmen Jones in 1943 with an all-Black cast.

    Numbers co-written by Billy Rose were used in The Prodigal and Hit the Deck. 

  • Edward Eliscu

    Edward Eliscu (1902-98) was multi-talented, an actor, writer, producer and lyricist.

    After graduating from university, Eliscu became an actor, securing roles on Broadway. He began writing songs, and in 1929 teamed up with Vincent Youmans and Billy Rose to write the musical Great Day. This included the number ‘Without a Song’, which was sung beautifully by Lawrence Tibbett in MGM’s The Prodigal. 

    Eliscu also began contributing songs to film scores, after being invited to Hollywood by Nacio Herb Brown. He scored a hit with the first big Astaire and Rogers number, ‘Carioca’ in Flying Down to Rio. He also co-wrote a number in Hit the Deck.

    Eliscu’s stage revue Meet the People was a big success in Hollywood in 1939, “an exhortation to Hollywood to come out of its cocoon and realize what was going on in the rest of the world”. None of his work was retained in MGM’s 1944 film of the same name.

    Eliscu’s career in Hollywood ended when he was one of the many people named to HUAC by Martin Berkeley. But he continued to work productively back in New York. He served for five years as president of the Songwriters Guild of America.

  • Vincent Youmans

    Vincent Millie Youmans (1898-1946) was a prolific Tin Pan Alley composer. Not a lot of his work is remembered today, but he did write a handful of hardy perennials.

    At the level of individual songs, Youmans wrote the music for ‘I Want to Be Happy’ and ‘Tea for Two’. Of his stage musicals, No, No, Nanette (1927) has endured.

    Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not use a lot of Youman’s work, but he did compose the beautiful ‘Without a Song’ for The Prodigal. His 1927 Broadway hit Hit the Deck was filmed by MGM in 1955, with many of Youmans’s numbers retained.

    Probably the most frequently revived screen musical with Youmans’s music is RKO’s proto-Astaire/Rogers picture Flying Down to Rio (1933).

  • Oscar Hammerstein II

    Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein (1895-1960) was one of the biggest names in 20th-century musicals, both literally and metaphorically.

    Hammerstein and two of his main collaborators, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers, were key to the development of the integrated musical, whereby songs are woven into the plot rather than being simply musical interpolations. In the world of film musicals, there were attempts to achieve this as early as 1930, but it is undeniable that Hammerstein’s work as lyricist, librettist and producer were hugely influential.

    Oscar Hammerstein’s career can be divided into distinct halves. During the first part, he partnered with a variety of composers, including Kern (Show Boat, 1927), Rudolf Friml (Rose-Marie, 1924) and Sigmund Romberg (The Desert Song, 1926). Then, in 1943, he joined with Rodgers to produce Oklahoma!. This was the first in a series of seminal musicals, including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949) and The Sound of Music (1959), most of which were filmed (with varying degrees of success). 

    MGM did not adapt any of Hammerstein’s work with Rodgers, but did film The New Moon (written in 1927 with Romberg) twice, as it did with Rose-Marie. The studio made one of the several versions of Show Boat.  Hammerstein songs were also featured in The Night is Young , The Great Waltz and the Romberg biopic Deep in My Heart.

  • Sigmund Romberg

    Zsigmund Rosenberg (1887-1951) was a Hungarian-born composer and one of the most celebrated composers of operettas for the American stage.

    Romberg arrived in New York in 1909 and eventually found work playing the piano in cafes and restaurants. He published a few songs and came to the attention of the Shubert brothers, who commissioned him to write material for their Broadway revues. He wrote for a number of shows starring Al Jolson.

    In the 1920s, Romberg wrote three classic operettas in the Viennese style–The Student Prince (1924), The Desert Song (1926) and The New Moon (1928)–working with various lyricists, including Oscar Hammerstein II. He also wrote film scores and adapted his own work for the screen.

    MGM made two versions of New Moon (dropping the definite article) and also adapted Rosalie, Maytime and The Student Prince. He also contributed music to The Night is Young and The Girl of the Golden West.

    In 1954, Romberg was the subject of an MGM musical-biopic, Deep in My Heart, which drew extensively on his back catalogue.

  • 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. 

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