The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Renée Adorée

    French actor Jeanne de la Fonte (1898-1933) began performing as a child when she joined her parents in their circus act. As a teenager, she toured as a dancer, making her first film in Australia while on tour there in 1918.

    Adorée arrived in America in 1919 and worked both in vaudeville and the legitimate stage, performing in musical comedies. In 1920 she starred in Raoul Walsh’s The Strongest, based on a novel by French politician Georges Clemenceau.

    A Hollywood star, Adorée appeared opposite John Gilbert in nine films, including The Big Parade (1925), and made four with Ramon Novarro. 

    In spite of her French accent, Adorée made a successful transition to talking pictures, but her career ended abruptly after she contracted tuberculosis. She was cast in Call of the Flesh at Ramon Novarro’s insistence, but was extremely ill throughout production. She died shortly afterwards at the tragically early age of 35. 

  • Ernest Torrence

    Ernest Torrance-Thomson (1878-1933) was born in Scotland and trained at the Royal College of Music, being a highly-gifted pianist and baritone singer. He toured with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company until developing an untreatable problem with his vocal cords.

    Torrence emigrated to America in 1911 and worked successfully on the stage, including on Broadway. He made his first film in 1914, working steadily thereafter as a character actor, with occasional leads. He is most often seen today playing Buster Keaton’s father in Steamboat Bill Jr (1928).

    Torrence’s sole MGM musical was Call of the Flesh, in which he played the hero’s mentor.

  • Claud Allister

    British actor William Claud Michael Palmer (1888-1970) made a career largely out of playing what Bertie Wooster would have called a silly ass. He was the quintessential Algy in a number of Bulldog Drummond films, having first played the character in the West End. He also appeared as the surprisingly English Duke Otto von Liebenheim in Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo(193

    Immediately before working with Lubitsch, Allister was Lord Rumblesham, the unlikely friend of Lawrence Gray in The Florodora. He then waited twenty-three years for his second appearance in an MGM musical, as Paul in Kiss Me Kate.

  • Ilka Chase

    In a varied career, Ilka Chase (1905-72) acted on stage and screen, presented radio and television shows, and found time to write a novel, two volumes of autobiography and several travel books. 

    Chase’s film career was not prestigious in itself, but involved some high-quality films. For example, she played Bette Davis’s sister-in-law in Now Voyager (1942), the catalyst for the Davis character’s transformation.

    Ilka Chase’s only Metro musical was The Florodora Girl, playing Fanny, one of the central character’s cynical but loyal friends.

  • Louis John Bartels

    Louis John Bartels (1895-1932) was at the tail end of his short film career when he made two MGM musicals, The Florodora Girl and The Prodigal.

    Bartels was a New York stage manager turned actor who Paramount cast in a few features and shorts, most notably in The Canary Murder Case (1929).

    Bartels was found dead at home, aged 36. An autopsy concluded he died from a stomach ailment brought on by acute alcoholism.

  • Walter Catlett

    For lovers of screwball comedy, Walter Leland Catlett (1889-1960) will always be the befuddled Constable Slocum who throws almost the entire cast of Bringing Up Baby (1937) into his jail. He also has immortality as the voice of J Worthington Foulfellow, the villainous fox, in Pinocchio (1940).

    But Catlett had a successful career on the stage in musical comedies before making Second Youth in 1924, the first of over 160 screen credits. He was a comic performer of exceptional ability. Howard Hawks asked him to coach Katharine Hepburn in playing comedy, contributing in no small part to her outstanding performance in Bringing Up Baby. But Catlett’s brief appearance in the closing minutes of A Tale of Two Cities (1935) shows that, like all great comic actors, he could play straight when he needed to.

    Catlett only appeared in one MGM musical, when he played the hero’s friend De Boer in The Florodora Girl. 

  • Xavier Cugat

    Francesc d’Assís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu (or Xavier Cugat i Mingall for short, 1900-1990), was one of the more idiosyncratic performers to work on musicals at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, reliably introducing an element of camp to every film he appeared in. 

    Born in Catalonia, Cugat and his family emigrated first to Cuba, and then to the United States in 1915. His beginnings in show business were as a classical violinist. He took time out to work as a cartoonist, and then formed his own band, which ended up performing at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Specializing in Latin music, Cugat, clutching his signature chihuahua while conducting or performing, became known as the ‘King of Rumba’. 

    Cugat’s first involvement in a Metro musical was behind the scenes, working with Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey on a couple of numbers for In Gay Madrid. Fourteen years later he made his debut on screen for Metro (having made a few musicals at Paramount), in Two Girls and a Sailor. Here, as on every other occasion, he played a fictionalized version of the band leader Xavier Cugat.

    Cugat appeared in four Esther Williams vehicles: Bathing Beauty, On an Island with You, This Time for Keeps and Neptune’s Daughter. He also supported Jane Powell in Holiday in Mexico, A Date with Judy and Luxury Liner, and showed up in No Leave, No Love.

  • Beryl Mercer

    British-born Beryl Mercer (1882-1939) was a successful stage actor who had small roles in more than fifty pictures. Her place in film history depends on two maternal roles: as the mother of Lew Ayres’s character in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and as the mother of James Cagnet in Public Enemy (1931).

    In Gay Madrid was Mercer’s only appearance in an MGM musical.

  • Claude King

    British actor Claude Ewart King appeared on stage and in silent films in the UK, making his screen debut in 1912. After serving in the First World War, he emigrated to America, successfully continuing to work in both fields.

    King’s most significant American credit was probably as Roger Balfour, whose murder and resurrection were the focus of Tod Browning’s lost film London After Midnight (1927).

    King played Ramon Novarro’s disapproving father in In Gay Madrid, and followed this with uncredited appearances in Maytime and Broadway Serenade. His final MGM musical was the 1940 version of New Moon, where he played Monsieur Dubois. 

  • Florence Lake

    Florence Silverlake (1904-80) had a long career that took her from playing Edgar Kennedy’s long-suffering wife in a series of comedy shorts in the early thirties to a part in The Day of the Locust (1975), which was set in the early thirties.

    One of Lake’s earliest roles was as the tragic Nadja in The Rogue Song.

    Florence Lake was the older sister of Arthur Lake, Blondie’s very own Dagwood.

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