The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Robert Edeson

    Robert Edeson (1868-1931) was an actor on Broadway and a vaudeville performer before making his film debut in 1914, starring in Cecil B DeMille’s The Call of the North. He had played his role in the original stage production.

    Edeson continued to play leading roles throughout the silent era, including as Colonel Zapt in Rex Ingram’s 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. He also created the first screen version of lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1927).

    Edeson acquired his most unusual assignment when actor Rudolph Christians died before Erich Von Stroheim had completed Foolish Wives (1922). Edeson took over as the character, but always acting with his back to the camera. 

    Robert Edeson’s only involvement in MGM musicals was as the General in Marianne.

  • Scott Kolk

    Walter Scott Kolk (1905-93) was a professional drummer before becoming an actor, and also sang in revues.

    Kolk made his film debut in Marianne, and the following year experienced the harsher side of the First World War when he played one of the volunteers in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). 

    Shortly before finally retiring from acting (he had taken several years out in the early thirties), Kolk portrayed the eponymous hero on the 12-part serial Secret Agent X-9 (1937), based on a comic strip co-written by Dashiell Hammett.

  • Dixie Jubilee Singers

    The singing group the Dixie Jubilee Singers appeared in two feature films, both in 1929. One was Universal’s near-silent version of Show Boat, where they sang in an added two-reel sound prologue alongside performers from the original Broadway show. 

    There other film was Hallelujah, in which they joined Daniel Haynes in singing Irving Berlin’s ‘Waiting at the End of the Road’.

  • Everett McGarrity

    Everett McGarrity (1908-93) was discovered by King Vidor studying music at a conservatory in Chicago while the director was on a nationwide search for Black actors to appear in Hallelujah.

    McGarrity gives a strong performance, but never made another film.

  • Fanny Belle DeKnight

    Fanny Belle Johnson(1869-1950) began working with her pianist-husband as a comic reciter, usually in dialect, from the 1890s. 

    DeKnight did some legitimate theatre work, usually cast in ‘Mammy’ roles, and it was this that led King Vidor to choose her to play the mother in Hallelujah. 

    She made one further, uncredited, film appearance, then returned with her husband to their previous touring act.

  • June Pursell

    June Pursell (1902-??) was a radio singer and recording artist dubbed “the girl with the ballad voice”. 

    Pursell (whose name was frequently mispelled) appeared in two feature films, one of which was The Hollywood Revue of 1929. She performed ‘Low Down Rhythm’ and subsequently released the number as a recording.

  • Natacha Nattova

    Russian-born Nathalie Schmit (1905-88) trained as a dancer at the Paris Opéra and, from 1924, was in a dancing partnership with Gene Myrio. They worked as headline dancers in London and New York, demonstrating a very acrobatic form of adagio dancing. 

    After that act broke up, Nattova toured the vaudeville circuit with other male dancers, marrying one of them along the way. One of their routines involved a giant flower pot: “Flying through space, she executed an arabesque on an azalea, a pirouette on a poppy and a toe-hold on a tulip. Nattova showed ‘great grace in movement’”.

    It was this iteration (miscredited as Natova and Company) that appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. 

  • Brox Sisters

    The Brock sisters–Eunice (1901-93), Josephine (1902-99) and Kathleen (1904-88)–became the singing Brox Sisters as children, and were touring the vaudeville circuit when barely in their teens. 

    By the early twenties they were singing in Broadway revues, and recorded a number of songs which they debuted for their friend Irving Berlin, notably ‘Everybody Step’. They performed in The Cocoanuts (1925) with the Marx Brothers and were featured performers with Eddie Cantor in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. 

    The Brox Sisters’ first screen appearances were in some of the very earliest Vitaphone shorts made by Warner Bros. Photoplay wrote at the time: “Low voices register most successfully on the Vitaphone, so the performance of the Brox sisters, with their mezzo-soprano and contralto, is flawless.”

    Later, they sang a couple of numbers, including ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. 

    The Brox Sisters became radio stars, but disbanded after Josephine (known professionally as Bobbe) got married. They reunited once, in 1939, for a radio tribute to Irving Berlin.

  • Ann Sothern

    Harriette Arlene Lake (1909-2001) was described as “the greatest comedienne” by Lucille Ball, who was probably a good judge.

    In a career of almost sixty years, Ann Sothern was successful on stage, film, television and radio. In Hollywood, she moved from studio to studio before settling at MGM, where she was cast as Maisie Ravier in Maisie (1939). The film’s success gave a boost to her moderately successful career, as well as resulting in nine sequels and a radio series.

    When she stopped getting lead roles, Southern moved predominantly to television. But her last great big screen performance, in The Whales of August (1987) earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

    Ann Sothern was in seven Metro musicals. Early on, she made blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances in Good News and Madam Satan. Ten years later, she was back with the lead  in Lady Be Good (Eleanor Powell’s top billing being contractual rather than deserved). She next took the title role in Panama Hattie, then played herself in Thousands Cheer. She was Broadway star Joyce Harmon in Words and Music, and finished off playing Jane Powell’s mother in Nancy Goes to Rio. 

  • Dave O’Brien

    For someone who died aged 57, David Poole Fronabarger (1912-69) produced an astonishing body of work; he must have been one of the hardest-working people in Hollywood. He appeared in around 240 feature films and shorts. He contributed to at least 50 screenplays and won an Emmy in 1961 for writing for The Red Skelton Show. And he directed about 65 shorts. He even did some stunt work at the beginning of his career.

    O’Brien is probably best known as the lead performer in many Pete Smith Specialties, the series of comedy shorts produced by Pete Smith for MGM from 1935 to 1955. He also directed some of them as David Barclay. The acting in the Pete Smith films was always silent, with Smith himself providing narration. O’Brien was one of the last great adepts at silent cinema, with a particular skill at falls. 

    Dave O’Brien was in five Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals. In the 1930s he was uncredited in Good News, Madam Satan, Flying High and Student Tour. Two decades later he was Ralph the stage manager in Kiss Me Kate.

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