The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Arthur Jarrett

    Arthur Leonard Jarrett Jr (1907-87) was a singer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader of note during the 1930s and 40s.

    Jarrett had a distinctive high tenor voice and, from the late 1920s, he sang with a variety of bands and also developed a recording career. He also made occasional appearances on the vaudeville stage, and appeared in a Betty Boop animation in 1932. 

    Jarrett founded his own orchestra in 1936, and appeared in a handful of films during the 1930s, including a Poverty Row western.

    Jarrett’s first involvement with MGM musicals was offscreen, when he dubbed for Sam Ash in Stage Mother, singing ‘Beautiful Girl’. In the same year, he appeared as himself in Dancing Lady, followed by Hollywood Party in 1934.

    Later in life, Jarrett worked extensively on television.

  • Henry Roquemore

    Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.

    The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.

    Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.

    Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.

  • Greta Meyer

    Greta Meyer (1883-1965) came from a German theatrical family and first appeared on stage, in one of her father’s productions, at the age of three. Later, she acted throughout Europe in plays and operettas. She also acted in a short film in 1917, and a couple of German features in the late 1920s.

    Meyer travelled to America as part of an operetta company, and stayed on after it had completed its run, becoming a US citizen in 1923. She performed widely in Yiddish theatre.

    Tonight or Never was Meyer’s first American film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1931, and in which she recreated a role she had played on Broadway a year earlier.

    Later, she appeared in John Ford’s Flesh (1932) as Jean Hersholt’s wife, and, uncredited, in Ford’s Pilgrimage (1933). She was the disturbed Madeline’s nurse in John M Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939) and uncredited as a masseuse in the all-female The Women (1939).

    Meyer acted in four MGM musicals, first of all uncredited as one of the stage mothers in the audition scene of Stage Mother. After that, she played the type of Mitteleuropean matron that was her speciality in Naughty Marietta (as Frau Schuman, with who Jeanette MacDonald shares her dreams), The Great Waltz and Bitter Sweet (as the cafe owner who sells a niece bottle of Tokay). 

  • Luis Alberni

    Luis Alberni (1886-1962) had been acting for a few years in his native Spain when he travelled to the United States in 1914. He succeeded in finding stage work, but quickly made his screen debut in Children of the Ghetto (1915).

    Over the next forty years, Alberni appeared in over 170 pictures, playing a wide range of ‘ethnic’ parts. Most of them were programmers, but from time to time he secured featured roles in more prestigious films. In 1933, he played Dr Bomb in Topaze, alongside John Barrymore.

    Alberni was the nightclub owner in Roberta (1935) and had a notable role as Mr Louis Louis in Easy Living (1937). He played Basset for James Whale in The Great Garrick (1937) and was the Pike family’s chef in The Lady Eve (1941), made the same year that he played the King of Naples in That Hamilton Woman.

    Luis Alberni was in four Metro musicals, starting out uncredited in Stage Mother and Let Freedom Ring. He then had a featured role as Nick the cafe owner in Babes on Broadway, and finished, again without credit, in I Married an Angel. 

  • Mary Ann Jackson

    Mary Ann Jackson (1923-2003) made her screen debut aged two in the provocatively-titled Dangerous Curves Behind (1925). She went on to play Bubbles, the baby of the Smith family in around thirty Mack Sennett comedy shorts (1926-28).

    From 1928 to 1931, at the Hal Roach studios, she played Mary Ann in 33 ‘Little Rascals’ shorts. Jackson’s career was more or less over by the time she was ten, apart from one 1941 picture. Unlike many of her peers, however, she lived a long and happy life, looking back favourably on her years in the limelight.

    Jackson was near the end of her career when she made a memorable appearance as one of the child performers in Stage Mother, ‘singing’ and ‘dancing’ to ‘How’m I Doin’?’.

  • Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer

    IMDb gives Carl Dean Switzer (1927-59) 132 acting credits. Around half of these involved playing Alfalfa, a popular character in the Hal Roach Our Gang series. This led to him becoming better known by the nickname than his real name.

    Switzer was almost a stereotype of the Hollywood child actor: a prolific childhood career followed by a few low-budget features and an early, violent death. He was shot in a dispute about a dog, having become a dog breeder and hunting guide.

    Switzer is most often seen today in the seasonal revivals of White Christmas (1954). He is the brother, seen only in a photograph, of Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney.

    Switzer was seen in two Metro musicals. Most memorably, he demonstrated his gift for terrible singing with a rendition of ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ in Stage Mother. This was very much acting, as he apparently had a good singing voice. His other appearance was in The Ice Follies of 1939.

  • Tom Ricketts

    British-born Thomas B Ricketts (1853-1939) emigrated to the USA aged seventeen. After a career on the stage as actor and singer, he became a cinema pioneer, making his debut in A Christmas Carol (1908), the first actor to play Ebenezer Scrooge. In the thirty-year career that followed, Ricketts was incredibly prolific, acting in well over 200 pictures, directing around 180 and writing twenty or so.

    In 1911, Ricketts and a partner set up the Nestor Film Company and he directed The Best Man Wins (1911), one of the first films to be made in Hollywood. 

    Ricketts had a busy year in 1914, when he directed 48 pictures. One of them was Damaged Goods, a film about the current hot topic of venereal disease. It starred Richard Bennett and saw the first appearance on film of his three daughters, Barbara, Constance and Joan.

    Ricketts’s directing career ended in 1919, after which he restricted himself to screen acting, eventually becoming one of the oldest actors working in Hollywood. He made his final film, Son of Frankenstein (1939) shortly before he died, aged 86.

    In all that activity, Tom Ricketts only had time for one MGM musical: he played, Mr Lorraine, Fred’s father, in Stage Mother.

  • Lillian Harmer

    Lillian Harmer (1883-1946) had a career as a stage actor, including work on Broadway, before becoming a character actor in Hollywood from 1927. She had acted with May Robson, and later became her companion and secretary.

    Harmer appeared in more than sixty films in a relatively short (fourteen years) career. Her rare credited roles includedCarrie A Nation in The Bowery and the cook in Alice in Wonderland (both 1933).

    In MGM’s musical Stage Mother, Harmer played the uncredited role of Mrs Lorraine, Fred’s mother.

  • Larry Fine

    Louis Feinberg (1902-75) was the non-Howard Stooge: the member of the Three Stooges who positioned himself between Moe’s violence and Curly’s lunacy, and got poked in the eye a lot for his trouble.

    Fine had been working in vaudeville for a few years when he first became one of Ted Healy’s stooges in 1928. When he, Moe and Curly split up with the erratic Healy, they signed with Columbia and went on to make over 200 shorts and several feature films (latterly with Shemp Howard and other performers after Curly’s death).

    Fine appeared in three MGM musicals in the mid-thirties. He was by himself in Stage Mother (which also featured Healy); with Healy, Moe and Curly in Dancing Lady; and with just Moe and Curly in Hollywood Party.

    Fine was central to an important, though censored, gag in Dancing Lady. Throughout the film he is seen working on a jigsaw puzzle. The excised payoff was that, after adding the final piece, he sees that it is a picture of Adolf Hitler and overturns the table in disgust. If left in, this would have been a very early (1933) anti-Nazi protest by a Jewish actor. The footage has now been restored to some prints of the picture.

  • Ruth Gillette

    Ruth Gillette (1906-94) started appearing in musical comedies straight after school, making her Broadway debut in the Shubert Brothers’ 1925 production of Gay Paree. 

    Gillette’s first film was MGM’s Stage Mother. She was uncredited and named in documentation only as ‘Blonde’, even though she headlines in  three important scenes. She was also in The Great Ziegfeld, again uncredited, playing Lillian Russell (whom she also portrayed in David Harum [1934] and The Gentleman from Louisiana [1936]). And she was an earthquake survivor in San Francisco.

    Gillette continued acting in films, television and on stage until the age of 80. In 1950, she played Gloria Grahame’s masseuse friend in In a Lonely Place. She later took over from Reta Shaw the role of Mabel in the original Broadway production of The Pajama Game.

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