The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Charlotte Greenwood

    Frances Charlotte Greenwood (1890-1977) had aspirations to be a serious actor, but found that her destiny was to make people laugh. This was, in part, owing to her very long legs and the things she could do with them while dancing; as she said herself, “I’m the only woman alive who can kick a giraffe in the eye”.

    Greenwood appeared in many film musicals, though only three at MGM. In 1931 she was Pansy Potts, Bert Lahr’s love interest, in Flying High. There followed a gap of 22 years until Dangerous When Wet, and then, just three years later, The Opposite Sex.

    Charlotte Greenwood also notched up one entry as a Metro songwriter when she and her husband Martin Broones contributed ‘Campus Capers’ to So This Is College.

  • Ernie Alexander

    Ernie Alexander (1890-1961) was typical of Hollywood’s hardworking bit players. Out of over 200 mostly uncredited performances, sixteen were in Metro musicals.

    Beginning as a doughboy in Marianne, Alexander was a student in So This Is College, a servant in Hollywood Party, and a townsman in Babes in Toyland.

    Alexander’s contribution to Here Comes the Band was lost in the edit, but he came back with an elevator operator in Rose-Marie and a racetrack usher in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

    He was a revolutionary in The Great Waltz, a photographer in Broadway Serenade and an expectant father in Little Nellie Kelly. He played a pageboy in Lady Be Good and stagehands in Ship Ahoy and For Me and My Gal. 

    He delivered flowers in Du Barry Was a Lady and finally acquired a name as Charlie the bellboy in I Dood It. 

    Finally, Alexander was back in uniform as a commissionaire in Swing Fever.

  • Max Davidson

    Max Davidson (1875-1950) was a German-born actor who found regular work in Hollywood as comedic Jews, including a rare lead role in Pleasure Before Business (1927).

    Davidson has a bit in So This Is College as Moe Levine, the bemused tailor at the other end of Eddie’s fake call to a girl. He also made uncredited appearances in The Cat and the Fiddle and Rosalie.

  • Polly Moran

    Pauline Theresa Moran (1893-1952) was a seasoned vaudeville performer when she became a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty in 1914. After years of slapstick with Sennett she signed with MGM and was teamed with Marie Dressler for the first time in 1927, a partnership that lasted nine pictures in total.

    Moran appeared alongside Dressler in two numbers in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. She was the fraternity cook in So This Is College, then sparring again with Dressler in Chasing Rainbows. Her final musical for Metro was Hollywood Party, as Henrietta Clemp, wife of the multi-est millionaire in Oklahoma.

  • Ann Dvorak

    Anna McKim (1911-79) made her name as an actor of great talent in Scarface (1932) and flourished for a time at Warner Bros. But only a couple of years earlier she had been a regular member of the chorus line in no fewer than eleven of Metro’s early musicals. She is prominent in all her appearances, largely owing to her unique beauty and a screen presence that would be fully revealed by Howard Hawks.

    Dvorak is cited by some sources as assistant choreographer to Sammy Lee, who certainly was the dance director on most of her MGM appearances. This would certainly explain her prominence.

    Dvorak starts off big in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in a two-shot with Jack Benny. She gets to speak two words (“Pardon me”) and slap Benny in the face. After playing a student in So This Is College, she was back in the chorus line in It’s a Great Life, supporting the Duncan Sisters.

    After that, Dvorak was in Devil-May-Care, Chasing Rainbows, Lord Byron of Broadway, Free and Easy and Children of Pleasure. She was another student in Good News, another chorus girl in Love in the Rough and, finally, a party-goer in the zeppelin in Madam Satan. In later films she was also working on choreography with Sammy Lee.

    Dvorak also worked on The March of Time before it was abandoned.

  • Sally Starr

    Sarah Kathryn Sturm (1909-1996) was only a teenager when she appeared on Broadway in George White’s Scandals of 1924. After signing with MGM she became Sally Starr, which has led some sources to attribute her with films of the 1910s made by an actor with the same name. 

    So This Is College was Starr’s only musical for the studio and, obscure though it is, is her best-known film. She retired from acting in 1938.

  • Robert Montgomery

    The mature roles undertaken by Robert Montgomery (real name Henry) (1904-1981) include the killer Danny in Night Must Fall (1937), a naval commander in They Were Expendable (1945) and Philip Marlowe in The Lady in the Lake (1947). It is easy to forget that he started out playing a jock named Biff in So This is College and predominantly worked in light comedies.

    By no means a gifted singer, Montgomery still performed in three early MGM musicals. As well as So This Is College, he made Free and Easy and Love in the Rough  in quick succession, then called it a day with musicals, apart from archive footage of him at a premiere in Going Hollywood.

    Later in life Montgomery asserted that So This Is College had shown him that making a picture is a “great co-operative project”. This is arguably more true of musicals than any other type of film.

  • Elliott Nugent

    Elliott Nugent (1896-1980) was a playwright and stage actor who performed for a few years in Hollywood before taking on a new role as director. In this capacity, his best known films are probably the Bob Hope vehicles The Cat and the Canary (1940) and My Favorite Brunette (1947). In the fifties he directed the original Broadway production of The Seven Year Itch. So This Is College was Nugent’s only musical. 

  • Benny Rubin

    Benny Rubin (1899-1986), like Cliff Edwards, was a recurring presence in Metro’s earliest musicals. A talented dialect comedian, he was limited in most of his musical appearances to a Jewish characterization; it has been suggested that his career was hampered by the idea that he looked “too Jewish”.

    Rubin’s first appearance was alongside Edwards in Marianne, and he followed this up as vaudeville booker Benny Friedman in It’s a Great Life. He is the Jewish half of a double act with Irish Tom Dugan in They Learned About Women, and an agent in Lord Byron of Broadway.

    Rubin plays a doctor from the Bronx who finds himself amongst the cowboys in Montana Moon, while he is back in New York’s show biz as a pianist in Children of Pleasure. In Love in the Rough he is a fish-out-of-water Russian immigrant masquerading as Robert Montgomery’s valet. 

    The 1932 moratorium followed and Rubin was absent from MGM’s musicals until 1953’s Torch Song. He then had, mostly uncredited, roles in Easy to Love, Meet Me in Las Vegas, Ten Thousand Bedrooms and Looking for Love. 

    Benny Rubin’s final appearance was as another Jewish agent in Orson Welles’s film maudit The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the 70s, released 2018).

  • George Baxter

    George Baxter (1905-76) made a steady living for over thirty years, often uncredited, in films, television and radio. Marianne was his first film role, as the noble André. He appeared without credit in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, and reappeared in the Golden Age with a part in Lili.

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