The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Tex Driscoll

    The Hollywood career of John W Morris (1889-1970) ran parallel to the development of Hollywood itself. He made his debut in Cecil B DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914), generally considered to be the first feature film to be made in Los Angeles, shot in a converted barn on the corner of Selma and Vine.

    Driscoll acted in around 200 films, and was in scores of westerns, including Stagecoach (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939), The Return of Frank James (1940), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Canyon Passage (1946), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wichita (1955). He worked under many of the great directors of classical Hollywood: Ford and Hawks (in the same year), Lang, Wellman, Daves, Mann, Tourneur and Fuller. He also made a number of other pictures with DeMille, including the 1931 remake of The Squaw Man..

    Tex Driscoll was in five MGM musicals: New Moon, Naughty Marietta, The Girl of the Golden West, Swiss Miss and Bitter Sweet.

  • Harry Cording

    Hector William Cording (1891-1954) was British and educated at a top public school. After serving in the First World War, he worked on a transatlantic steamship and eventually decided to stay in America. He made the first of his 280-plus films in 1925.

    Cording was a big man and so was frequently cast as henchmen and thugs, most stylishly when he played Dickon Malbete, would-be slayer of Richard the Lionheart, in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

    Cording made two uncredited appearances in 30s’ Metro musicals: New Moon and, playing a pirate, Naughty Marietta.

  • Max Barwyn

    Max Barwyn (1884-1955) made his first screen appearance in 1926 and went on to over 70 more. He was one of those supporting players who looked like he belonged in the service industries, and played waiters more than two dozen times. From left-fields, just for a change, he was cast as Napoleon Bonaparte in Brigadier Gerard (1927), which may have equipped him for his multiple roles as a maitre d’. 

    Barwyn acted in nine MGM musicals, starting with the 1930 New Moon.  He was then in Dancing Lady, The Night is Young, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, The Chocolate Soldier (a rare credited role) and Rhapsody.

  • Emily Fitzroy

    Emily Fitzroy (1860-1954) was acting on the British stage years before cinema was invented. But this did not prevent her notching up over a hundred film appearances.

    Fitzroy relocated to the United States and performed regularly on Broadway. She made her first screen appearance in 1913, for the Philadelphia-based Lubin company, later working for Fox when the company was located in the east.

    From the ages of 60 to 83, Fitzroy worked steadily as a character actor, latterly based in Hollywood, with a notable appearance as Mrs Hawks in the first screen version of Show Boat (1929). Her final film took her back to (a make-believe) England in Clarence Brown’s The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).

    Fitzroy played Countess Anastasia in the 1930 version of New Moon.

  • Adolphe Menjou

    Adolphe Jean Menjou (1890-1963) was born in Pittsburgh, but for almost fifty years he epitomized a type of continental sophistication on the screen.

    Menjou made his debut in 1914 for the Vitagraph Company and within a few years had become a supporting player of note, appearing in films as prestigious as The Three Musketeers (playing the King) and The Sheik (both 1921).

    Menjou’s role as the seducer in Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923) was the template for the kind of philandering, morally-questionable characters he made his speciality. He was never the leading man, but always brought considerable added value to the films he was in. His sole Oscar nomination was for playing Walter Burns in The Front Page (1931).

    Menjou was a leading Hollywood conservative, though arguably more nuanced in his views than some of his colleagues.

    Adolphe Menjou’s greatest performance may have been one of his last, as the corrupt general in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). Much earlier, he had appeared, with typical suavity, in the 1930 version of New Moon.

  • Harry Wilson

    The figures of 350+ film and TV appearances by Harry Wilson (1897-1978) is made more impressive by the fact that Wilson worked almost entirely in the sound era, when the turnover of pictures was not so great as in the silent days.

    British-born Wilson dubbed himself ‘the ugliest man in movies’ (though there was competition), and he was many studios’ go-to actor for convicts and criminal henchmen. He features with Mike Mazurki in Some Like it Hot (1959) as one of George Raft’s goons.

    Wilson appeared uncredited in no fewer than fifteen MGM musicals, across more than thirty years and four decades. In the 1930s he made A Lady’s Morals, The Bohemian Girl, A Day at the Races, Let Freedom Ring and The Wizard of Oz (as a Winkie Guard). In the 40s, Wilson was in Go West, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Luxury Liner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

    His 1950s appearances were in Million Dollar Mermaid, It’s Always Fair Weather, Guys and Dolls and Merry Andrew. And finally, in 1963, Wilson played a roustabout in Billy Rose’s Jumbo. 

    As if Wilson was not busy enough making his own films, he worked for fifteen years as Wallace Beery’s stand-in.

  • Carl Stockdale

    William Carlton Stockdale (1874-1953) accumulated over 300 screen appearances in a thirty-year career that began in 1913 with Broncho Billy’s Last Deed. The title was misleading, because Stockdale went on to appear in more than thirty of Broncho Billy Anderson’s popular shorts, always playing a different character.

    Prior to his film career, Stockdale was a stage actor and vaudeville performer. In pictures, he came to specialize in villains and heavies, though his first appearance in an MGM musical was on the right side of the law, playing the New York Chief of Police in A Lady’s Morals.

    Stockdale made four additional contributions, in Stage Mother, Student Tour, San Francisco and Babes in Arms (though it would appear his scenes were not used).

    Stockdale became a footnote in Hollywood history when he provided actor Charlotte Selby with an alibi when she was under suspicion for the 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor. Persistant rumours maintain that the alibi was bought and paid for. 

  • Frank Reicher

    Franz Reichert (1875-1965) was a German actor and director who found his greatest success in the United States. 

    Reicher first appeared on Broadway in 1899, and made his screen debut in 1915, the same year in which he directed his first picture .He then concentrated on directing until 1921, after which he mostly acted in character parts. His most notable role was as Captain Englehorn in King Kong, a role he repeated in Son of Kong (both 1933).

    Reicher acted in three MGM musicals: A Lady’s Morals, I Married an Angel and Song of Love. He was also one of the directors of Wir schalten um auf Hollywood (1931), an alternative, German-language version of The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

  • Linda Parker

    Linda Parker (1915-69) was the younger sister of Cecilia Parker, the actor best-remembered for playing Marian Hardy in the Andy Hardy series.

    In 1930, Linda ‘joined’ her sister to play Siamese twins in Lon Chaney’s sound remake of The Unholy Three. They were immediately asked to repeat the trick in A Lady’s Morals. 

    Linda Parker had uncredited  parts in four other Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Student Tour and Naughty Marietta (which also featured Cecilia).

  • Cecilia Parker

    Cecilia Parker (1914-93) and her family emigrated from Canada to Los Angeles when she was a child, which was the gateway to her obtaining extra work and a place on a training course at Fox Studios.

    Aged 16, she appeared (literally) alongside her younger sister Linda, playing Siamese twins in A Lady’s Morals. She went on to play in three other MGM musicals: Naughty Marietta, Love Finds Andy Hardy and Seven Sweethearts.

    Cecilia Parker was in all but two of the Andy Hardy pictures, playing Andy’s sister, having previously appeared, as the love interest, in the series’s progenitor, Ah, Wilderness! (1935). 

    Parker more or less retired from acting in 1942, but returned for the failed Andy Hardy revival, Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958).

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