Florence Arnot (1910-95) had a strange career arc, which is epitomized by her roles in MGM musicals. She was uncredited as Flo in The Broadway Melody, then played the second female lead (below Bessie Love) in They Learned About Women. After that, there were just uncredited appearances as a jilted lover in Lord Byron of Broadway and as a Casquette girl in Naughty Marietta.
It is ironic that Doran’s career never really took off, given that she was married for a time to Joseph Sherman, a senior member of Metro’s publicity department.
The Biltmore Trio actually began as a quartet in The Broadway Melody and comprised Eddie Bush (1911-69), Paul Gibbons (1904-87), Ches Kirkpatrick (19??-19??) and Bill Seckler (1905-83). They performed ‘Truthful Parson Brown,’ the only song not written by Freed-Brown.
They appeared again, as the Biltmore Quartet, in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and also in a musical by Fox, Words and Music (1929). After that, Kirkpatrick seems to have disappeared and they became the Biltmore Trio, featuring in Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure and Love in the Rough. They were also the eponymous stars of a Metro musical short.
Charles Kenneth Thomson (1899-1967) was a featured player in silent and early sound films, notable for hosting the meetings that led to the formation of the Screen Actors Guild.
Thomson played the wolf Jacques Warriner in The Broadway Melody and Pat’s on-again-off-again fiancé in Children of Pleasure.
Grady Harwell Sutton (1906-95) was a hard-working supporting player for 60 years, often in codified gay roles. He is probably best-known today for his four films with W C Fields.
Sutton’s first uncredited appearance in a Metro musical was as a football spectator in So This Is College. He then waited sixteen years for his most substantial part, as Kathryn Grayson’s would-be suitor in Anchors Aweigh.
This was followed by uncredited appearances in Ziegfeld Follies, Two Sisters from Boston, Holiday in Mexico, No Leave, No Love and, after another sixteen years, Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
Frances Charlotte Greenwood (1890-1977) had aspirations to be a serious actor, but found that her destiny was to make people laugh. This was, in part, owing to her very long legs and the things she could do with them while dancing; as she said herself, “I’m the only woman alive who can kick a giraffe in the eye”.
Greenwood had been a Broadway star since 1916, and would always be a stage performer who made films rather than a film star.
Greenwood appeared in many film musicals, though only three at MGM. In 1931 she was Pansy Potts, Bert Lahr’s ‘love interest’ in Flying High. There followed a gap of 22 years until Dangerous When Wet, and then, just three years later, The Opposite Sex.
Charlotte Greenwood also notched up one entry as a Metro songwriter when she and her husband Martin Broones contributed ‘Campus Capers’ to So This Is College.
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).
