The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Ted Healy

    Ernest Lea Nash (1896-1937) is best-known today as the co-founder of the act ‘Ted Healy and his Three Stooges’, but he also had a successful acting career in both comic and dramatic roles.

    After working for some years in vaudeville, Healy teamed with schoolfriend Moe Howard, Moe’s brother Shemp (subsequently replaced by Curly) and comic Larry Fine. There were tensions in the act, largely owing to Healy’s heavy drinking, and the three stooges eventually signed with Columbia to make a series of shorts. 

    Healy signed a contract with MGM, who occasionally loaned him to other studios. He played Jean Harlow’s freeloading brother in Blonde Bombshell (1933) and Reagan the reporter in Mad Love (1935). 

    Ted Healy acted in six MGM musicals. Probably his best role was as the vaudeville performer Ralph Martin in Stage Mother. He appeared with the Stooges in Dancing Lady and did an uncredited bit in the all-star Hollywood Party. He was also in Reckless, Here Comes the Band and San Francisco.

    Healy died from symptoms related to his drinking that were triggered by a serious and mysterious beating sustained outside a nightclub.

  • Phillips Holmes

    Phillips Raymond Holmes (1907-42) never achieved the Hollywood career to which he aspired, and his potential was ended by his early death as a flyer in the Second World War.

    Holmes was talent spotted while still a student and offered a screen test. (IMDb suggests he was an extra in Her Market Value in 1925, but this seems unlikely, given it was shot in California while he was at Princeton on the East Coast.)

    His first verifiable appearance was in Varsity (1928). After a variety of supporting roles at Paramount, he starred alongside Walter Huston in The Criminal Code (1931). Other notable lead roles were in Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy (1931) and Ernst Lubtisch’s Broken Lullaby (1932).

    Holmes made the mistake of moving to MGM, where he was never given the same quality of roles. After making a couple of pictures in the UK in 1938, he worked on the stage until joining the Royal Canadian Air Force at the start of the war.

    Holmes’s sole MGM musical was as Lord Aylesworth in Stage Mother.

  • Franchot Tone

    Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone (1905-68) became an actor after graduating from Cornell in 1927. After gaining extensive experience on the New York stage, he joined the influential Group Theatre, where he became a proponent of Stanislavsyan techniques. Tone made his first film, The Wiser Sex (1932) at New York’s Astoria Studios.

    In 1933, Tone signed with MGM and moved to Hollywood. He gained early prominence playing the romantic lead in Gabriel Over the Whitehouse (1933). Metro often loaned him to other studios, where he made some of his most interesting films, including John Ford’s The World Moves On (1934) at Fox and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) at Paramount. In 1937, he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in RKO’s Quality Street.

    When his contract ended in 1939, Tone went back to work on Broadway for a year or so. During the war, he appeared in two outstanding pictures, Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and the seminal film noir Phantom Lady (1944).

    In 1949, Tone produced, co-directed and starred in RKO’s The Man on the Eiffel Tower. He performed the same functions in an independent film of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1957. One of Tone’s last major films was Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965).

    Franchot Tone acted in three MGM musicals during his 1930s contract: Stage Mother, Dancing Lady (with future wife Joan Crawford) and Reckless.

  • Maureen O’Sullivan

    Maureen Paula O’Sullivan (1911-98) is immortal, to those in the know, as Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan in the earliest and best of MGM’s series. She is also known, less excitingly, as Mia Farrow’s mother.

    Like the wild colonial boy, O’Sullivan was born and raised in Ireland. Shortly after leaving school, she was spotted in Dublin by Frank Borzage, who was there shooting footage for Song O’ My Heart (1930). He cast her in a substantial role.

    She moved to Hollywood to complete the picture, and made further films for Fox, including the bizarre sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine (1930), before signing with MGM in 1932. By the time she retired in 1994, she had notched up about seventy film credits, plus considerable work on television. 

    In addition to six Tarzan films, O’Sullivan had featured roles in The Thin Man (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), David Copperfield (1935, as Dora), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Big Clock (1943, directed by her husband, John Farrow) and The Tall T (1957). Late in life she acted in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, playing the mother of her daughter Mia).

    O’Sullivan appeared in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and A Day at the Races.

  • Stage Mother

    The Cast

    Alice BradyKitty Lorraine
    Maureen O’SullivanShirley Lorraine
    Franchot ToneWarren Foster
    Phillips HolmesLord Aylesworth
    Ted HealyRalph Martin
    Russell HardieFred Lorraine
    C. Henry GordonRicco
    Alan EdwardsAl Dexter
    Ben AlexanderFrancis Nolan
    Sam AshMr. Mark Thorne (uncredited)
    Ruth GilletteBlonde friend (uncredited)
    Jay EatonMr. Sterling (uncredited)
    Phillips SmalleyMusic Store Manager (uncredited)
    Nora CecilMiss Gilford (uncredited)
    Elspeth DudgeonMusic Store Customer (uncredited)
    Larry FineMusic Store Customer (uncredited)
    Lowden AdamsDexter’s butler (uncredited)
    Aggie HerringLandlady (uncredited)
    Harry HolmanMr. Rumley (uncredited)
    Lillian HarmerMrs Lorraine (uncredited)
    Tom RickettsMr Lorraine (uncredited)
    Carl ‘Alfalfa’ SwitzerIrish Eyes’ singer (uncredited)
    Mary Ann JacksonAuditioning Child Dancer (uncredited)
    Hank BellMustached Man With Badge (uncredited)
    Margaret BertNurse (uncredited)
    Harrison GreeneStage Manager (uncredited)
    Shirley Jean RickertShirley Lorraine as a child (uncredited)
    Margaret JonesStudent (uncredited)
    John ElliottPolitician (uncredited)
    Luis AlberniHors D’Oeuvres Waiter (uncredited)
    Bud GearyOrderly (uncredited)
    Lew KellyJake, a stagehand (uncredited)
    June GittelsonLaughing Fat Woman (uncredited)
    Gladden JamesAudience Member (uncredited)
    Tiny JonesDancing Girls’s Mother (uncredited)
    Alice LakeAudience Member (uncredited)
    John LarkinPorter (uncredited)
    Buddy MessingerFellow in Third Row (uncredited)
    Greta MeyerDancing Girl’s Mother (uncredited)
    Bert MoorhouseNavy Officer (uncredited)
    Billy O’BrienStudent (uncredited)
    Frank O’ConnorMan at gangplank (uncredited)
    Garry OwenJerry, a stagehand (uncredited)
    Bradley PageTom Banton (uncredited)
    Leo WhitePercy, the audition manager (uncredited)
    Henry RoquemoreMessenger (uncredited)
    Larry SteersDexter’s party guest (uncredited)
    Carl StockdaleStagehand (uncredited)
    Guy UsherTheater Owner (uncredited)
    Monte VandergriftStage Lighting Man (uncredited)
    Glen WaltersDancing Girl’s Tall Mother (uncredited)
    Beal WongStage Extra (uncredited)
    Tammany YoungTaxi Driver (uncredited)
    Edmund MortimerShipboard Extra (uncredited)
    Bill ElliottDexter’s Party Guest (uncredited)

  • Weber & Fields

    Joseph Morris Weber (1867-1942) and Moses Schoenfeld (1867-1941) were a highly influential comedy duo at the turn of the twentieth century, in both vaudeville and musical theatre. They were best known for a ‘Dutch’ dialect act, in which they played German immigrants torturing the English language. Both performers were themselves the children of Polish immigrants.

    Weber and Fields also became impresarios, staging shows that centred on their own act, while also putting together road shows that toured the country.

    Joe Weber and Lew Fields were amongst the old vaudeville acts that filmed material for the abandoned MGM musical The March of Time. Part of their sequence can be seen at the beginning of Broadway to Hollywood, although, given they are in a horse costume, there is no way of actually verifying it is them. Both men would have been in their seventies at the time. Joe Weber also appears briefly as a character in Broadway to Hollywood, played by Leo White.

  • Eddie Foster

    Edward Eleck Foster (1906-89) had a fairly anonymous thirty-six-year career, but worked with some of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers.

    Sullivan started at the top in 1926, performing in Buster Keaton’s The General. Later, he appeared in Howard Hawks’s The Road to Glory (1936), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941, and Frank Borzage’s Strange Cargo (1940). 

    He was in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943) and Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). He played a slave in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and one of his last films was Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961).

    Along the way, Sullivan appeared without credit (as was normally the case) in Metro’s Broadway to Hollywood.

  • Billy Sullivan

    William Arthur Sullivan (1891-1946) was a hard-working character who made around ninety films, none of which have attracted a great deal of attention from film historians. His best-known film may well be MGM’s musical Broadway to Hollywood, even though it is unclear what role he actually played.

    Sullivan would have been 23 when he made his debut in the serial Million Dollar Mystery (1914). He bowed out with the Raoul Walsh picture Big Brown Eyes (1936), in the auspicious company of Cary Grant and Joan Bennett. 

  • Forrest Taylor

    Edwin Forrest Taylor (1883-1965) had already acted on the stage and made over two dozen films when America’s belated involvement in the First World War interrupted his career. 

    He returned to the stage after military service, for a time leading his own company. Screen work began again in 1926, and by the time he retired, shortly before his death, he had appeared in well over 400 films and television episodes. 

    Taylor was a character actor, mainly in uncredited parts, including in a couple of hundred ‘B’ westerns. He occasionally showed up in more prestigious pictures, including Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Wilson (1944), The Sea of Grass (1947) and Rancho Notorious (1952).

    Despite all those appearances, Taylor was only ine one Metro musical, as a film director in Broadway to Hollywood.

  • Bobby Somers

    Robert David Somers (1932-1982) made his screen debut aged seven months, playing Eddie Quillan as a baby in the MGM musical Broadway to Hollywood.  

    Some sources suggest that Somers also appeared with the Little Rascals, though it is unclear whether or not this is accurate. His adult career in the cinema began in 1953 when he worked as both actor and stunt performer on The War of the Worlds. Stunt work in film and television constituted the major part of his work over the next twenty years. Most of his work would appear to be uncredited and, in many cases, unrecorded.  

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