The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Ramon Novarro

    José Ramón Gil Samaniego (1899-1968) was a Mexican actor who became a top star of silent cinema after playing the lead in Scaramouche (1923) and a phenomenon when he starred in the first version of Ben-Hur (1925). Handsome, or even beautiful in an androgynous way, he combined the roles of swashbuckler with the tag of ‘Latin Lover,’ especially following the death of Rudolph Valentino. 

    Novarro has a light but effective speaking voice and his transition to talking pictures was straightforward. Much earlier, he had worked as a singer, and MGM came up with the idea of having him record a theme song (‘Pagan Love Song’) for The Pagan (1929). The public liked it, so it was no great leap to cast Novarro in a musical feature, Devil-May-Care, where he was able to combine his newly-revealed skill with some of his practised swordplay. 

    Novarro went on to star in four more musicals: In Gay Madrid, Call of the Flesh, The Cat and the Fiddle (partnered with Jeanette MacDonald, and the best of his musical outings) and The Night is Young.

    Homophobia brought Novarro’s MGM stardom to an end. His sexuality was no secret in the business and the subject of public speculation. His contract was terminated when he refused to enter into a ‘lavender marriage’. He continued to work elsewhere as a supporting player, until his tragic and violent death during a robbery.

  • Willard Mack

    Charles Willard McLaughlin (1873-1934) worked as an actor, director and playwright before he took up screenwriting in 1916, carrying this out alongside work on Broadway.

    Mack contributed to the scenarios of It’s a Great Life and Lord Byron of Broadway. He also co-wrote and directed Broadway to Hollywood, the film in which producer Harry Rapf recycled content from the abandoned The March of Time. 

  • The Duncan Sisters

    Rosetta Duncan (1894-1959) and Vivian Duncan (1897-1986) did not come from a show business background, but became one of America’s top vaudeville acts. They got their start in 1911 as part of Gus Edwards’s Kiddies’ Revue and matured into a music-with-comedy act, writing much of their own material.

    The sisters’ most popular routine was the unashamedly racist ‘Eva and Topsy,’ in which they transformed Harriet Beechers Stowe’s tragic characters into blackface comedy. Rosetta was always the comedian, while Vivian’s persona was the naive innocent. 

    It is said that the Mahoney sisters in The Broadway Melody were based on the Duncans, and the ebullient Hank and demure Queenie have both physical and temperamental similarities with Rosetta and Vivian. But the Mahoneys are self-evidently a second-rate act that belongs in the boondocks, while the Duncans were at the top of their profession, headlining on Broadway and in the West End.

    Following the triumph of The Broadway Melody, Irving Thalberg decided to attempt to repeat the success by hiring the Duncans themselves, starring them in It’s a Great Life. Where Hank had lost Eddie to her sister, in the new version it is Casey who competes with Jimmy for the love of her sister, in a manner that is not entirely non-creepy.

    The film succeeded with Duncan fans, but was no great money earner. After working on the abandoned The March of Time, the Duncan Sisters’ film career was over.  

  • Gus Edwards

    Gustave Schmelowsky (1878-1945) grew up in Poland, was a song plugger in New York, performed in vaudeville and eventually became a songwriter, despite the fact that he could not read music. He was also known as the Star Maker, because he launched Sally Rand, Ray Bolger, George Jessel, the Duncan Sisters and may others on successful careers via his revues. He even gave Groucho Marx an early job as one of Gus Edwards’s Postal Telegraph Boys. 

    Edwards composed the majority of the songs used in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and also performed a novelty item alongside Cliff Edwards and Charles King, and appeared solo singing ‘Lon Chaney’s Gonna Get You If You Don’t Watch Out’. Edwards also participated in The March of Time.

    Edwards’s most famous number was ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon,’ with lyrics by Edward Madden.

  • Lionel Barrymore

    Although Lionel Herbert Blyth (1878-1954) apparently had no ambition to join the family business (the show business), by the time sound films were introduced he had been an actor for 36 years, with extensive stage and screen experience. Early on he had worked under D W Griffith at the Biograph Company and he was a contract player for MGM since its inception, having been signed by Louis B Mayer to work for Metro Pictures.

    Barrymore also directed pictures, though far less skillfully than he acted in them. It is ironic, therefore, that his first two appearances in MGM musicals both cast him in the role of a director. In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 he is directing Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. And in Free and Easy he is directing the bedroom scene that is disrupted by Elmer.

    Barrymore went from there to the director’s seat for real, taking charge of Metro’s new signing, Lawrence Tibbett, in The Rogue Song.

    In 1939 Barrymore had a supporting role in Let Freedom Ring and two years later was the judge in Lady Be Good.

    That was the end of Barrymore’s career in MGM musicals, though his most famous role, as Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) still lay in the future. 

  • Gwen Lee

    Gwendolyn Lepinski (1904-61) was a department store model doing occasional stage work when she was discovered by producer-director Monta Bell and offered a contract with Metro in 1925. She mostly played supporting roles and made a successful transition to sound.

    Lee appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and then secured a lead role as Peggy in Chasing Rainbows. She made a cameo as herself in Free and Easy, and was then let go by the studio. After a few years working on Poverty Row, Lee returned to MGM in 1935 as a stock player in minor roles. In that capacity, she turned up alongside Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera and was an audience member in The Great Ziegfeld.

    Lee retired from screen acting in 1938.

  • George K Arthur

    Scottish-born Arthur George Brest (1899-1985) was under contract to MGM when producer Harry Rapf teamed him with Karl Dane for a series of silent comedy features.

    Dane’s strong Danish accent posed problems when sound came along and their MGM career came to an end shortly after a short appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Arthur also appeared in Chasing Rainbows. After making a few shorts for Paramount, he and Dane split up.

    In 1957 Arthur won an Oscar for producing a short film, The Bespoke Overcoat (1956), an early film by director Jack Clayton.

  • Marie Dressler

    Leila Marie Koerber (1868-1934) began her stage career in the 1880s and was a star on Broadway by the time she was 24. In 1914 she appeared with Chaplin and Mabel Normand in Hollywood’s first feature-length comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance.

    By the early 1920s Dressler’s career was in decline, only to revive in 1927 when she was teamed with Polly Moran in The Callahans and the Murphys. Her stage experience meant that sound presented no problems, and by 1931 she was one of MGM’s top stars, winning an Academy Award for Min and Bill (1930). By 1934 she was dead from cancer.

    Dressler was a natural comedian and makes on the the few genuinely funny contributions to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 ‘singing’ ‘For I’m the Queen’. She went to feature in a supporting role in Chasing Rainbows, in which she and Moran combine to steal the picture.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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