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.
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.
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 (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 (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).
The man who contributed greatly to the 20s’ ukelele craze. The performer who introduced ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to the world. The voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940). Just three of the reasons why Clifton Avon Edwards (1895-1971), or ‘Ukelele Ike,’ ought not to be quite as forgotten as he is.
Edwards was a successful vaudeville and café performer, allegedly dubbed ‘Ukelele Ike’ by a waiter who could never remember his name. He became a ubiquitous figure in the early Metro musicals, appearing in over a third of the studio’s productions in 1929-31.
Edwards’s rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, though lacking Gene Kelly’s familiar phrasing, was good enough to earn the song a reprise in the hastily-devised finale, in which also appeared.
His first acting role was as Soapy, one of the doughboys in Marianne. He then added musical support in So This is College and performed a speciality number in They Learned About Women. Lord Byron of Broadway saw him in the, not really challenging, role of a vaudeville singer, after which he was way out west as one of the hero’s buddies in Montana Moon.
Edwards made an uncredited appearance as himself in Children of Pleasure and has a featured role as the Coach’s assistant, Pooch Kearney, in the 1930 version of Good News. He was then one of Lawrence Tibbett’s hobo pals in The Prodigal.
The film musical hiatus of 1932 soon followed, and Edwards only appeared in one further musical for Metro, as Minstrel Joe in The Girl of the Golden West.
At his height, in the late 1920s, Cliff Edwards was earning $4000 a week. By the time of his death, he was an indigent charity patient in a Hollywood hospital; his body was unclaimed for several days because no one knew who he was.
Lawrence Gray (1898-1970) was a jobbing actor who began in silent pictures and whose good looks made him an amenable leading man for, amongst others, Gloria Swanson, Colleen Moore and Norma Shearer. His singing voice was also good enough to win him parts in four early MGM musicals: Marianne, It’s a Great Life, Children of Pleasure and, opposite Marian Davies for the second time, in The Florodora Girl.
The parts on offer started to decline and Gray retired in 1936. He and his wife moved to her native Mexico, where he worked in the distribution side of the film industry.
It is a regrettable side effect of Citizen Kane’s success that the name of Marion Davies (1897-1961) has become linked with that of Susan Alexander, the second-rate singer and mistress of the newspaper magnate. The second of these is undeniably a similarity: Davies was the long-term companion of William Randolph Hearst, the main inspiration for the character of Kane, and Hearst certainly made some inappropriate decisions about her career. But Marion Davies was far from being a second-rate performer. In David Thomson’s words, she was “a genuinely funny actress who did good work”. Davies’s most successful period was in silent films, but she made a successful transition to sound, overcoming the obstacle of a stammer.
Davies’s appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 was a less than triumphant start to her musical career, singing and dancing furiously to two songs, dressed in the military uniform Hearst loved to see her in.
She is seen to better effect as the eponymous Marianne (which she co-produced), though the musical demands made on her are admittedly far less than in the earlier appearance. Davies’s strengths are seen in the light comedy aspects of her role. Davies was an equally-fetching protagonist in The Florodora Girl (which she produced) and, in particular, opposite Bing Crosby in Going Hollywood.
Some commentators list Blondie of the Follies (1932) as a musical, but is actually a romantic comedy featuring an attractive performance by Davies.
It is typical of the unfathomable decisions sometimes made by MGM in its early musicals that it cast Victoria Spivey (1906-76) in a non-singing role in Hallelujah!. In her day job Spivey was a notable blues singer and songwriter who went on to work with artists ranging from John Lee Hooker to Bob Dylan, and whose personality bore no resemblance to Missy Rose. Hallelujah! was her only acting credit.
Very little is known about Harry Gray. It is probable he was born in the 1840s and lived the first decades of his life as an enslaved person. He was apparently working as a porter when he was cast as the patriarch in Hallelujah, joining a number of other non-professional actors. Gray has two subsequent credits, but remains something of a mystery.
