The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Flying High

    The Cast

    Bert LahrRusty Krause
    Charlotte GreenwoodPansy Botts
    Pat O’BrienSport Wardell
    Kathryn CrawfordEileen Smith
    Charles WinningerDoctor Brown
    Hedda HopperMrs. Smith
    Guy KibbeeMr. Smith
    Herbert BraggiottiGordon
    Gus ArnheimOrchestra Leader
    Gus Arnheim and His OrchestraGus Arnheim and his Orchestra
    Loretta AndrewsChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Mary AshcraftChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Edna CallahanChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Richard CarleHotel Manager (uncredited)
    Tommy ConlonUndetermined Secondary Role (uncredited)
    Nick CopelandAviator with the Jokester (uncredited)
    Mary DeesChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Mildred DixonMiss Dixon / Dancer (uncredited)
    James DurkinMr. Rankin – Detective (uncredited)
    Ruth EddingsChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Gloria FaytheChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Bud GearyClub Patron (uncredited)
    Mary HalseyChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Amo IngrahamChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Clarence WilsonLunch Counter Manager (uncredited)
    Tom McGuireAngry Investor (uncredited)
    Donald NovisOrchestra Singer (uncredited)
    Dave O’BrienDancer (uncredited)
    Broderick O’FarrellAngry Investor (uncredited)
    Lee PhelpsReporter from the News (uncredited)
    Nita PikeChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Herbert PriorAngry Investor with Spectacles (uncredited)
    Buddy RooseveltAviator (uncredited)
    Bee StevensChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Harry WatsonLittle Boy (uncredited)
    Tom KennedyJokester with Firecrackers (uncredited)

  • Charles R Moore

    Hattie McDaniel famously said “I’d rather play a maid than be one”. The actor Charles Randolph Moore could have said much the same about being a railway porter. He played the role at least 38 times, in well over one-third of his total appearances. He also played more than his fair share of lift operators. 

    Moore worked for some of Hollywood’s top directors, including William A Wellman, Josef von Sternberg, Victor Fleming, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and William Wyler. He was a member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, and acted in six of his pictures. In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), he was the cook who was shaken to pieces in the speeding land yacht.

    In all three of Moore’s MGM musicals–The Prodigal, Reckless and Two Girls on Broadway–Moore played a porter.

  • Jules Cowles

    Julius D Cowles (1877-1943) was aYale-educated, experienced Shakespearean actor who made his film debut in 1914. He was also an accomplished writer.

    Cowles played supporting roles throughout the 1920s, including Zambo (in blackface) in The Lost World and Yankee Joe in Lord Jim (both 1925). He was predominantly associated with ‘heavy’ roles; one newspaper headline ran “A Mean Looker But Really He’s A Perfect Gent”.

    In the 1930s, the importance of Cowles’s parts diminished and he was more frequently uncredited. He turned up, without credit, in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Hullabaloo and I Dood It.

  • John Larkin

    John Larkin Smith [?] (1877-1936) had a long career in minstrel shows and vaudeville, and was billed as ‘Jolly John Larkins–the Rajah of Mirth’. He toured the world as leader of the Dandy Dixie Minstrels.

    It was only in the final six years of his life that he devoted himself to films, in the usual menial role reserved for Black actors, and almost never playing to his comedic strengths. In this mode, he was the loyal family retainer to the Southern family in The Prodigal.

    Larkin acted in two further Metro musicals: Stage Mother (as a porter) and The Great Ziegfeld (uncredited, but at least as a named character, Sam).

    His last film, made in the year of his death, was Warner’s all-Black The Green Pastures (1936).

  • Gertrude Howard

    Gertrude Howard (1892-1934) was, like so many Black women, restricted to a limited range of acting opportunities, and most frequently cast as maids. This did, however, bring her screen immortality of a kind, as she played the maid to whom Mae West uttered the line “Beulah, peel me a grape” in I’m No Angel (1933).

    After some stage work, Howard made her first film in 1925. In 1931, she played a servant in MGM’s The Prodigal.

    Howard, who was described in 1927 as the highest-paid “colored actress” in Hollywood, died at only 41, and Mae West helped fund her funeral.

  • Susanne Ransom

    Susanne Ransom

    Susanne Ransom (1925-2010) lived to a good age and spent a few years of it as a child actor in Hollywood.

    Ransom made her debut in Madonna of Avenue A (1929), directed by Michael Curtiz, and her last appearance just eight films later, in All This, And Heaven Too (1940).

    In 1930 she made a rare credited appearance in The Prodigal.

  • Wally Albright

    Walton Algernon Albright Jr (1925-99) appears to have been a Hollywood child actor who came out of the experience unscathed and went on to have a productive life outside show business.

    Albright made his screen debut aged 3 and had notched up over sixty appearances by the age of 15. He had a handful of roles as an adult, but also pursued other interests. In 1957, he won a title at the National Water Ski Championships in the Trick category. He also ran a successful trucking business.

    In 1931, Albright appeared in MGM’s The Prodigal. A few years later he was part of Our Gang for half a dozen pictures. He also featured,as a teenager, in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), playing the boy at the migrant camp who pretends his family eats chicken.

  • Theodore von Eltz

    Julius Theodore von Eltz (1893-1964) was a typical Hollywood workhorse. In more than 200 pictures spread over 40+ years, he evolved from silent leading man to character actor to bit-part player, always giving of his best in whatever he did.

    Eltz made his stage debut aged 19, appearing on Broadway a number of occasions, and made his first film in 1915. Probably his best-known and most frequently revived role was as Arthur Geiger, the bookseller, pornographer and corpse in The Big Sleep (1946).

    Eltz was in two MGM musicals in the 1930s. He played the caddish Carter Jerome in The Prodigal and, six years later, was uncredited in The Firefly.

  • Stepin Fetchit

    It seems indisputable that Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry (1902-85) was and remains the most problematic performer in Hollywood history. As Stepin Fetchit, he played the ultimate caricature of the lazy, incoherent Black man, earning and losing a million dollars in the process. He was American cinema’s first Black star, before Sidney Poitier, before even Hattie McDaniel.

    To many observers, both now and at the time, Fetchit was an embarrassment, an enabler of the worst kind of stereotyping by white filmmakers. To others, he can be seen as a talented and intelligent performer who was knowingly satirizing white attitudes. This was certainly Fetchit’s own understanding of what he was doing.

    Fetchit’s achievements are undeniable. By the time he appeared in The Prodigal, he was the most popular Black actor in Hollywood and the first to receive featured billing. He was the first to obtain a long-term contract with a major studio. In six years, from 1929, he appeared in 26 pictures. His studio, Fox, publicized his extravagant lifestyle, his expensive suits and bevy of Chinese servants.

    Donald Bogle represents Stepin Fetchit as a highly-gifted performer who consciously developed a character that would both delight and not threaten white audiences. Fully aware of the injustices his characters experienced, he creates them as beings so far removed from reality that they cannot be demeaned by their treatment: his characters were “inhabitants of detached, ironic, artistically controlled worlds”.

    Ironist or not, Fetchit could not outrun the Civil Rights Movement and his work opportunities declined, though John Ford, a friend, gave him one last opportunity to shine in, fittingly, The Sun Shines Bright (1953). As the servant Jeff, Fetchit is the character who holds Judge Priest to his course and is the moral centre of the film. 

  • Emma Dunn

    Emma Dunn (1875-1966) was a British stage actor who travelled to the USA and worked extensively on Broadway. Her 1906 appearance in the first American production of Peer Gynt (1867), playing the protagonist’s mother despite being twenty years younger than the other actor, was typical of the way Dunn was frequently cast older than her actual age. 

    Dunn’s first screen appearance was in Muraice Tourneur’s Mother (1914), in which she recreated, silently, a role she had originated on Broadway. She made only a couple more silent pictures, but found plenty of work after the introduction of sound. 

    Dunn continued to play many mothers, including Jean Arthur’s in The Talk of the Town (1942) and Dr Kildare’s multiple times in the MGM series. She also played Mrs Jaeckel in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1941).

    Emma Dunn was mother to the uxorious Lawrence Tibbett in The Prodigal, and ten years later played Mickey Rooney’s mom in Babes on Broadway.

    Her final role was as Alexis Smith’s old nurse in The Woman in White (1948). 

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