The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Karen Morley

    The Hollywood career of Mildred Linton (1909-2003) is a cause for both anger and celebration. It was ended suddenly by the wickedness of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its stool pigeons. But it was carried out on her own terms by a person of great integrity.

    Morley dropped out of UCLA to begin acting on the stage. This led to a job offer from MGM director Clarence Brown, and then a contract with the studio. She played a variety of roles, in films good and bad, working on eight pictures in 1931 alone, one of which was the understanding fiancée/wife in The Cuban Love Song. In a very different type of role, she was a big hit as the slinky and opportunistic Poppy in Scarface (1932).

    Socially and politically progressive, Morley sought out, as best she could as a contract player, roles that interested her, such as Pendie in Gabriel Over the White House (1933), and Mary in King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934). She also refused parts she considered to be offensive.

    Morley was not cut out to be chattel at a studio and, declining the amorous inclinations of Louis B Mayer, she broke her contract with MGM and never signed another. It would be fair to say that the quality of her roles suffered.

    She spent some time away from Hollywood, working with the progressive Tobacco Workers’ Union in North Carolina. After returning to film work, she became one of the few progressive activists in the Screen Actors Guild. This, more than anything else, made her an obvious target for HUAC.

    At a hearing in 1952, Morley invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to confirm or deny that she had been a member of the Communist Party. Her career was then over. She never made another film, and even struggled to find stage work in the East. In 1954, much to her own amazement it would seem, she found herself the American Labor Party’ candidate for Lieutenant Governor of New York.

    Karen Morley lived to an advanced age, maintained her principles and, to the last, considered Elia Kazan a fink.  

  • Jimmy Durante

    James Francis Durante (1893-1980) had what in Britain might be called a Marmite personality: some people loved him, others hated him. For some, a little went a long way. (Personally, I’m a fan.) But what is undeniable is that Jimmy Durante had the longest career of any performer starring in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals. It began in 1931, ended in 1962, and included eleven pictures across all four decades.

    Durante started out in show business playing ragtime piano, and developed humour out of the musical performance. This led to vaudeville, and then radio, with time spent as part of a three-man comedy act. 

    He made his film debut in 1930, at Paramount’s New York studios. By the following year he was in Hollywood, working for Metro. Jimmy Durante, throughout his career, moved seamlessly between films, Broadway, radio, records and, later on, television. In 1934, for example, he made films in New York because he was appearing on Broadway in Jumbo, which he would film twenty-eight years later.

    Durante was sometimes the leading man in films; for instance, Palooka (1934), where he got top billing over Lupe Velez. More often, however, he was third or fourth billed, providing comic support.

    Durante’s first MGM musical, this time billed below Lupe Velez, was The Cuban Love Song. This was followed by Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party (playing versions of himself), then Student Tour, Two Girls and a Sailor, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, It Happened in Brooklyn, This Time for Keeps, On an Island with You and, finally, Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    Durante’s last big screen appearance was in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), but he continued to work on television. 

  • Lupe Velez

    María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez (1908-44) was one of a small group of Mexican actors–others included Ramon Novarro and Dolores del Rio–to become stars during Hollywood’s Golden Age.

    Velez started out by performing in Mexico’s version of vaudeville, before moving to the United States and appearing in a Hal Roach short with Charley Chase when she was eighteen. Her first feature film, The Gaucho (1927), in which she had a starring role, was made in the same year.

    Velez had started learning English as a young teenager during a period living in Texas, and had no problem in transitioning to sound films. Habitually cast in Hispanic roles, she often exaggerated her very slight accent when acting. Velez developed a stereotyped reputation as a fiery, volatile character both on and off the screen, which led to her starring in a series of eight pictures about Carmelita Lindsay, the Mexican Spitfire. 

    The private life of Lupe Velez was of great interest to sections of the press, and she had highly-publicized relationships with, amongst others, Gary Cooper, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams, and Johnny Weismuller, whom she married.

    Velez starred in two MGM musicals, The Cuban Love Song and Hollywood Party. 

    She took her own life at a young age, while pregnant, during what is now believed to have been a period of serious mental illness.

  • Gus Arnheim

    Gustavus Arnheim (1897-1955) was a band leader and songwriter, whose most lasting composition was ‘I Cried for You’, written in 1923, with Abe Lyman and Arthur Freed.

    Arnheim started out as a pianist, working for a time as accompanist to Sophie Tucker. He set up his own orchestra in 1927.

    Arnheim and his band appeared in Vitaphone shorts in 1928-29 before making their feature debut in Universal’s Broadway in 1929. The orchestra was in about a dozen pictures, one of which was Metro’s Flying High. They also showed up in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). 

    ‘I Cried for You’ was sung by Judy Garland in Babes in Arms, by Helen Forrest in Bathing Beauty and, briefly, by Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me. Arnheim’s song ‘Sweet and Lovely’ was ‘performed’ by June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven in Two Girls and a Sailor, with the voices of Virginia Rees and Dorothy Jackson.

  • Herbert Braggiotti

    Italian Sebastiano Herbert Braggiotti (1904-84) was an actor about whom there seems to be little public information, but whose earliest successes seem to have been during the years 1930-32.

    IMDb credits Braggiotti with three films, one of which is MGM’s Flying High. The Internet Broadway Database puts him in the opening night cast of a play called A Woman Denied, which ran for 37 performances in 1931.

    After that, a New York Times obituary suggests that he undertook stage work under the name Stiano Braggiotti. He appeared in around ten further Broadway productions and toured with Katherine Cornell.

    Btagiotti’s sisters Berthe and Francesca performed as risqué dancers, the latter also making several film appearances before becoming the wife of an American diplomat and Governor of Wisconsin.

  • Guy Kibbee

    As if to separate himself from the multitude of his contemporaries who started their show business careers in vaudeville, the teenage Guy Bridges Kibbee (1882-1956) started out entertaining on Mississippi riverboats. He later became a leading man for a variety of stock companies.

    The big time came well-on in his career: he made his Broadway debut in 1930, and soon afterwards was signed by Paramount. (He had previously made one short comedy for Warner Bros.) He went on to become one of those immediately-recognizable characters who helped make 30s’ Hollywood as great as it was. His speciality was jovial, a bit dim, occasionally lecherous. The last of these came to the fore in two great Warner musicals, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933).

    Kibee had a rare starring role in Babbitt (1934), the Warners’ less-than-faithful adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s prize-winning novel. He also played malleable Governor Hopper in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Dr Gibbs in the film of Our Town (1940). 

    Guy Kibbee was in four Metro musicals: Flying High, Let Freedom Ring, Babes in Arms and Girl Crazy. 

  • Charles Winninger

    Karl John Winninger (1884-1969), the son of Austrian immigrants, was a seasoned vaudeville performer by the time he made his first short film in 1915. He made the occasional film thereafter, but launched his film career proper after the advent of sound with Soup to Nuts (1930), which was the debut of the Three Stooges.

    Prior to this, Winninger had created the role of Cap’n Andy Hawks in Show Boat (1927), a role which he recreated in Universal’s 1936 film version.

    Winninger was a reliable supporting player throughout his film career, notably in Nothing Sacred (1937) and Destry Rides Again (1939). He only ever played one leading role, in John Ford’s frequently-misunderstood masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright (1953), where he played Judge Billy Priest.

    Charles Winninger co-starred in six MGM musicals, beginning as the doctor in Flying High in 1931. He followed this with Babes in Arms (playing Mickey Rooney’s father), Little Nellie Kelly and Ziegfeld Girl (playing Judy Garland’s father in both), Broadway Rhythm (as George Murphy’s father) and Living in a Big Way (as Gene Kelly’s father-in-law). 

  • Kathryn Crawford

    Kathryn Moran (1902-80) could have ruined her life when she eloped at 15 with her sister’s boyfriend. Luckily for her, that did not happen. She got her life back together and, aged 17, gave up a job as a shop assistant to pursue a career in musical theatre. 

    After a few years performing with stock companies, Crawford was spotted by director Wesley Ruggles, who got her a part in a Hoot Gibson western. She told a newspaper that she and Ruggles intended to marry, but that never happened.But Crawford did get a contract at Universal and made seven films in 1929. 

    Crawford made her only Broadway appearance in 1930, in Cole Porter’s The New Yorkers, where she controversially introduced the song ‘Love for Sale’.

    In 1931, Crawford’s career took a downturn. She starred in MGM’s Flying High, then the quality of her roles declined and she stopped acting in 1933 before marrying for the second time. She made one further appearance in 1941, in an obscure ‘B’ picture about sex trafficking, but had a long and successful career as an interior designer. 

  • Pat O’Brien

    William Joseph Patrick O’Brien (1899-1983) will be remembered as a key member of the Warner Bros company of the 1930s, alongside his friend James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Edward G Robinson and Bette Davis.

    O’Brien trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and pursued a successful stage career, including on Broadway. New York-based, he made his first short films for Vitaphone, before travelling to Hollywood to star in The Front Page (1931), in which he had appeared on Broadway. 

    He went on to star in around 100 pictures, playing more than his share of wiseguys, reporters and cops. In 1932 he was loud-mouthed flyer Duke Talbot in John Ford’s Air Mail, and, in1939, as a change of pace, he was the priest who persuades Cagney to turn yellow for the sake of the Dead End Kids.

    Musicals were not really Pat O’Brien’s things, but he did co-star (in a non-singing role)with Bert Lahr in Flying High. He played, of course, a fast-talking con man.  

  • Bert Lahr

    Although he appeared in around thirty films, Irving Lahrheim (1895-1967) was fundamentally a stage comedian, with a personality and technique that were too big for the screen. Nevertheless, he is an indisputably iconic figure in film history thanks to one performance, as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

    Lahr left school to start performing in vaudeville as a teenager, working his way up to become what was called ‘top banana’. He made his Broadway debut in 1927, and was a major draw there for the rest of his career. As late as 1965, Lahr won a Tony for the musical Foxy. 

    Much more serious off-stage than on it, Lahr was impressed by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), and played Estragon in a highly-praised 1956 Broadway production. A few years earlier he had won critical acclaim as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

    Lahr’s screen debut was in a 1929 short called Faint Heart. This was followed two years later by his first Metro musical, Flying High, based on Lahr’s own hit stage musical. He recreated the role of Rusty Krause.

    The Wizard of Oz followed eight years later, and Lahr made a further three musicals at MGM: Ship Ahoy, Meet the People and the 1954 version of Rose Marie. 

    Bert Lahr died during the production of his final film, The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), but the filmmakers worked around it and his performance was retained.

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