The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • 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). 

  • Hedda Hopper

    ZaSu Pitts called her a ferret. Katharine Hepburn kicked her in the backside, while Joseph Cotton pulled away a chair as she was sitting down. Joan Bennett sent her a skunk on Valentine’s Day. Elda Furry (1885-1966) was not the most popular person in Hollywood.

    And understandably so. As one of the town’s two demon gossip columnists (with Louella Parsons), Hopper became far too influential than might be hoped for a right-wing racist, and she helped to destroy many people’s lives and careers, not least as a cheerleader for the blacklist during the HUAC years. 

    Prior to her career in yellow journalism, Hopper had been an actor, initially on the stage and in Hollywood from 1923. She made around 120 appearances, none of them memorable, and amongst which were parts in two MGM musicals: The Prodigal and Flying High. A few years later, her career in the doldrums, Hopper took up the poison pen. Subsequent acting roles were generally offered to keep her on side, and most of later appearances were playing herself (something she did less effectively than Helen Mirren in Trumbo [2015]).

  • Purnell Pratt

    Purnell Busch Pratt (1885-1951) had a strong bass singing voice and ambitions to perform in opera. This didn’t work out for him, which must have given him mixed feelings when he appeared alongside Lawrence Tibbett in The Prodigal. 

    Pratt did, however, appear on the Broadway stage, including as a regular member of George M Cohan’s troupe. He made a couple of films for New York companies before his career was interrupted by the First World War, but began his run of well over a hundred appearances in 1925. He was always a supporting player, normally in a credited role. He was the focus of the interpolated scene in Scarface (1932), in which, as a newspaper publisher, he makes a censor-required speech condemning gangsterism. He also played Captain Wood in DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936).

    In addition to his featured role as the loathsome Rodman in The Prodigal, Pratt was uncredited in two other Metro musicals: A Night at the Opera, as the mayor welcoming the ‘aviators’, and Rosalie.

  • Esther Ralston

    Esther Louise Worth (1902-94) was the youngest child in a family vaudeville act before starting her film career while a teenager. She was only 22 when she played Mrs Darling in the Betty Bronson version of Peter Pan (1924).

    Ralston starred in dozens of films during the 1920s and made a successful transition to sound. But her career faltered, and in her autobiography, published in 1985, she asserted this was the work of Louis B Mayer, whose advances she had resisted. In a familiar story, he ensured she was greylisted at the major studios. 

    Ralston’s final leading role was in Henry Hathaway’s To the Last Man (1933), though she continued acting, mostly on the stage and in television, until the 1960s.

    Ralston was very good as the female lead, opposite Lawrence Tibbett, in MGM’s The Prodigal.

  • The Prodigal

    The Cast

    Lawrence TibbettJeffrey Farraday
    Esther RalstonAntonia Farraday
    Roland YoungSomerset ‘Doc’ Greenman
    Cliff EdwardsSnipe
    Purnell PrattRodman Farraday
    Hedda HopperChristine
    Emma DunnMrs. Cynthia Farraday
    Stepin FetchitHokey
    Louis John BartelsGeorge
    Theodore von EltzCarter Jerome
    Wally AlbrightPeter
    Susanne RansomElsbeth
    Gertrude HowardNaomi
    John LarkinAndrew Jackson Jones
    Jules CowlesHobo (uncredited)
    Charles R. MooreRailroad Porter (uncredited)

  • Hedwiga Reicher

    Hedwig [sic] Reicher (1884-1971) was a German actor who made her Broadway debut in 1909. Two years later she played Ellida in the American premiere of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888).

    Reicher did not make her first screen appearance until 1925, and only ever had small roles in about twenty films. Her most prominent part was playing Janet Gaynor’s mother in Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929).

    The following year, she had a bit part in New Moon.

    In 1913, Reicher played Columbia, the personification of the United States, in the allegorical tableau featured in the Woman Suffrage Procession held in Washington DC.

  • Actors Q

    Quartero, Nina
    Quillan, Eddie

  • Nina Quartero

    Gladys Quartaro (1908-85) was a New York-born Italian whose Mediterranean looks led to a career playing characters named Consuelo, Maria, Lola, Anita, Chiquita and Rosita.

    Quartero made her debut aged 18 with a bit part in D W Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan (1926). One of her more prominent roles was with John Wayne in Arizona (1931), playing Conchita. She acted for about seventeen years, making her final appearance (again with Wayne, but this time as Carmencita) in The Lady Takes a Chance (1943). She retired after marrying her third husband.

    Nina Quartero made a brief appearance in the first New Moon. 

  • David Mir

    A 1931 newspaper article described Vladimir Lasareff (1886-1962) as a “former prince of royal Russian Blood [who] today earns a livelihood in slapstick comedy roles”.

    Mir, who was cousin to the prince who murdered Rasputin, had fled Russia during the October Revolution. Finding himself in Hollywood, he renewed a pre-Revolution acquaintance with the writer Elinor Glyn and was given a part in His Hour (1924), which she wrote and directed with King Vidor. This meant John Gilbert had to play a Russian nobleman alongside the real thing. 

    Mir worked on a number of other Glyn pictures, even designing costumes for The Only Thing (1925).

    Mir worked steadily as a supporting player during the last years of silent cinema, but the parts began to dry up after the introduction of sound. His last appearance was a bit in Artists and Models Abroad (1938).

    In 1930, Mir was probably the only genuine Russian aboard the New Moon.

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