The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Buster Keaton

    Signing a contract with MGM was probably the worst decision ever made by Joseph Frank Keaton (1895-1966). It brought an end to the period in which he vied with Chaplin to be the greatest, most gifted comic star of the silent screen, and led to dark years of alcoholism and frustration before his rediscovery by later generations.

    Keaton was at least permitted to remain silent in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, performing the ‘Dance of the Sea’ in bizarre drag. The following year he starred in Free and Easy, his first talking feature, and filmed a caveman sequence for the abandoned The March of Time. He was also required to shoot French, Spanish and German versions of Free and Easy.

    Ten years later Keaton appeared uncredited in the MacDonald-Eddy New Moon, and in 1949 he had a supporting role in In the Good Old Summertime. 

    Keaton also contributed as a gag writer to A Night at the Opera, At the Circus, Go West, Easy to Wed, In the Good Old Summertime and Excuse My Dust.

  • William Haines

    Charles William Haines (1900-73) was a popular actor of the 1920s and one of MGM’s biggest stars. His career was cut short by his refusal to hide the fact that he was in a gay relationship by entering into a lavender marriage. This led Louis B Mayer to tear up his contract. Haines went on to become one of Hollywood’s top interior designers, aided in no small part by the willingness of his former colleagues to give him work.

    In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 it is Haines who, bizarrely, cuts Jack Benny’s tuxedo to shreds. And in Free and Easy he is glimpsed as a guest at the premiere.

  • Laurel & Hardy

    Arthur Stanley Jefferson (1890-1965) and Norvell Hardy (1892-1957), the most acclaimed of all comedy duos, were not MGM contract players; they worked for producer Hal Roach. But, from 1927, Roach released his pictures through Metro, which is how the pair came to be included in two of the studio’s all-star pictures: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Hollywood Party.

    Laurel and Hardy were also roped in to provide comic relief to The Rogue Song. Their sequences were filmed separately under Roach’s supervision and intercut with the main story.

    The pair also starred in versions of four operettas, with plots adapted to suit their style: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland , The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.

  • Joan Crawford

    Lucille Faye LeSueur (1904?-77) is often remembered today for the hard-faced, wide-shouldered roles she played in the 1940s and 50s, especially her Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce (1945). But in her early years at MGM she was best-known for playing wild young women, a model established in her breakthrough silent hit, Our Dancing Daughters (1928).

    Always driven by the ambition to succeed, Crawford worked hard on developing her speaking voice when sound was introduced, practising elocution and pronunciation. Her success can be gauged from appearance alongside Conrad Nagel in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, where, although clearly nervous, her voice stands up well alongside an actor who learned his trade in the theatre. Crawford’s singing and dancing are somewhat forced but, again, reveal a gritty determination to pull off something new.

    Crawford did well enough to earn the lead in one of Metro’s first dozen musicals, Montana Moon, which was a commercial success despite its many shortcomings.

    It was intended that this be followed up with Great Day, an adaptation of a recent Broadway flop, in which Crawford would be reteamed with Johnny Mack Brown, her Montana Moon co-star. Shooting began in the autumn of 1930, under the direction of Harry Pollard, but was halted abruptly after two weeks, at a cost of $280,000. The reasons for this are unclear, but it may have been a victim of studio reaction to the public’s growing aversion to musicals.

    During the 1933 musical revival, Crawford was cast alongside Clark Gable in Dancing Lady, where she at least got to dance alongside Fred Astaire in his first film.

    By 1953 Crawford had long ceased being an MGM contract player, but she returned to the studio for a final musical outing in Torch Song, which played more to her melodramatic instincts. Unfortunately, she suffered the indignity of having her singing voice dubbed.

  • Norma Shearer

    Canadian-born Edith Norma Shearer was the Queen of MGM in the late 20s and throughout the 30s. This was undeniably owing in part to her status as the wife of Irving Thalberg, the studio’s presiding genius for most of that period. But she was also a talented actor who came into her own during the pre-code era playing sexually liberated women.

    Shearer’s Technicolor appearance as herself in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, rehearsing the balcony scene with John Gilbert, was by way of being a warm-up for her 1936 film of Romeo and Juliet, which paired her with Leslie Howard.

  • John Gilbert

    John Cecil Pringle (1897-1936) was one of the greatest stars of the late silent cinema. He had starred in Erich Von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow (1925) and King Vidor’s hugely successful First World War epic, The Big Parade (1925). Most significantly, his onscreen partnership, and offscreen relationship, with Greta Garbo had become the obsession of film fans and the magazines they read.

    The decline of Gilbert’s career after the introduction of sound is often wrongly attributed to the unsuitability of his voice, but his appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 demonstrates the falsity of this claim. His voice is perfectly acceptable, capable of speaking Shakespeare’s lines with clarity and as much fullness as the technology of the time permitted. Gilbert’s demise was much more to do with personal issues and, in particular, with the enmity of Louis B Mayer, who was prepared to destroy his own studio’s star for petty vengeance.

    The decline of his career spurred on Gilbert’s alcoholism and he was dead from a heart attack at 38.  

  • Jack Benny

    Benjamin Kubelsky (1894-1974) was one of the most popular American comedians of the mid-twentieth century, especially in his radio and television work. He was never as successful in films, though To Be or Not to Be (1942) stands out as a major achievement.

    Benny featured in four Metro musicals, beginning with the role of Master of Ceremonies in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. He then had a major supporting role in Chasing Rainbows. His voice was heard on a radio in Children of Pleasure. Finally, and best of the four, Benny starred as journalist Bert Keeler in The Broadway Melody of 1936, getting repeatedly punched in the face by Robert Taylor.

  • Conrad Nagel

    John Conrad Nagel (1897-1970) was a popular matinee idol of the 1920s who was as out of place in a musical as he looked in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. 

    Nagel’s only appearance in an MGM musical came as part of his successful and hectic transition to sound: he featured in 19 films released during 1929-31, though Hollywood Revue was perhaps not his greatest moment. It did him no harm, though: Nagel was still working in the late 60s.

  • Joel McCrea

    Joel Albert McCrea (1905-90) worked with many of Hollywood’s greatest directors during his career, including Hitchcock, Hawks, Vidor, Wyler, George Steven and Preston Sturges.

    Before all that, he was the guy who got the girl in Sam Wood’s So This Is College.

  • Richard Carle

    Charles Nicholas Carleton (1871-41) was a successful stage actor and director who did not start his film career-proper (he made one picture in 1915) until he was in his mid-fifties, where he became a successful, if fairly anonymous, supporting player.

    Carle was the entomology professor in So This Is College, a eunuch in Elmer’s movie in Free and Easy, Knapp in Hollywood Party (credited), Maurice Chevalier’s attorney in The Merry Widow and a member of the Founders’ Club in San Francisco.

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