The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Pat O’Brien

    William Joseph Patrick O’Brien (1899-1983) will be remembered as a key member of the Warner Bros company of the 1930s, alongside his friend James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Edward G Robinson and Bette Davis.

    O’Brien trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and pursued a successful stage career, including on Broadway. New York-based, he made his first short films for Vitaphone, before travelling to Hollywood to star in The Front Page (1931), in which he had appeared on Broadway. 

    He went on to star in around 100 pictures, playing more than his share of wiseguys, reporters and cops. In 1932 he was loud-mouthed flyer Duke Talbot in John Ford’s Air Mail, and, in1939, as a change of pace, he was the priest who persuades Cagney to turn yellow for the sake of the Dead End Kids.

    Musicals were not really Pat O’Brien’s things, but he did co-star (in a non-singing role)with Bert Lahr in Flying High. He played, of course, a fast-talking con man.  

  • Bert Lahr

    Although he appeared in around thirty films, Irving Lahrheim (1895-1967) was fundamentally a stage comedian, with a personality and technique that were too big for the screen. Nevertheless, he is an indisputably iconic figure in film history thanks to one performance, as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

    Lahr left school to start performing in vaudeville as a teenager, working his way up to become what was called ‘top banana’. He made his Broadway debut in 1927, and was a major draw there for the rest of his career. As late as 1965, Lahr won a Tony for the musical Foxy. 

    Much more serious off-stage than on it, Lahr was impressed by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), and played Estragon in a highly-praised 1956 Broadway production. A few years earlier he had won critical acclaim as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

    Lahr’s screen debut was in a 1929 short called Faint Heart. This was followed two years later by his first Metro musical, Flying High, based on Lahr’s own hit stage musical. He recreated the role of Rusty Krause.

    The Wizard of Oz followed eight years later, and Lahr made a further three musicals at MGM: Ship Ahoy, Meet the People and the 1954 version of Rose Marie. 

    Bert Lahr died during the production of his final film, The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), but the filmmakers worked around it and his performance was retained.

  • Flying High

    The Cast

    Bert LahrRusty Krause
    Charlotte GreenwoodPansy Potts
    Pat O’BrienSport Wardell
    Kathryn CrawfordEileen Smith
    Charles WinningerDoctor Brown
    Hedda HopperMrs. Smith
    Guy KibbeeMr. Smith
    Herbert BraggiottiGordon
    Gus Arnheim and his OrchestraThemselves
    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)
    Janet CurrieChorus Girl (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)
    Beatrice HagenChorus Girl (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)
    Betty RecklawChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Buddy RooseveltAviator (uncredited)
    Bee StephensChorus 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.

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