The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Sam Ash

    Samuel Howard Ash (1884-1951), the child of British immigrants, was a talented singer who was signed by Columbia records at the age of 20. He made his debut on Broadway the following year, starring in a Rudolf Friml operetta. He continued to record and perform on Broadway throughout the 1920s.

    In 1929, Ash relocated to Hollywood as part of the exodus triggered by talking pictures. He made his debut in a featured role in Unmasked (1929), but was largely uncredited thereafter. His most frequently-revived appearance is as the bank teller in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), but he made well over 200 pictures between 1929 and 1953.

    Sam Ash played Mark Thorne in MGM’s Stage Mother, uncredited even though he sang one of the picture’s relatively few songs. He subsequently made lesser uncredited appearances in The Merry Widow, San Francisco, Meet the People and Luxury Liner. 

  • Ben Alexander

    Nicholas Benton Alexander III (1911-69) became a child actor in 1916. By the age of 15 he had appeared in forty-three pictures.

    Alexander’s breakthrough as an adult came with All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), playing the tragic soldier Kemmerich. Unfortunately, none of his subsequent roles were as prestigious, and in the 1940s he largely turned to radio acting and announcing. 

    His return to high-profile screen acting occurred in 1952 after Jack Webb invited him to play Officer Frank Smith in Dragnet, first on radio and then transferring to television. Alexander played the part for seven years. After that, he acted occasionally, but had a sideline running car dealerships, which in turn sponsored his own local television series, The Ben Alexander Show.

    Alexander’s sole Metro musical performance was as would-be womanizer Francis Nolan in Stage Mother.

  • Alan Edwards

    The New York Times obituary of Alan Edwards (1892-1954) stated that he made his first screen appearance in 1912. Over seventy years later, it seems impossible to find any evidence of that; his earliest IMDb citation is Rose of the Alley in 1916. It is necessary to remember, however, that in the early 1910s it was rare for films to have onscreen credits and studios saw little reason to retain paperwork. So Edwards’s screen appearances could well have been in excess of the 38 listed in IMDb.

    Most of Edwards’s pictures were made in the sound era. They were mostly programmers, though he had a featured role in If You Could only Cook (1935), with Jean Arthur.

    Edwards’s only role in an MGM musical was the politician Al Dexter in Stage Mother. 

  • C Henry Gordon

    Wikipedia tells us that the character actor Henry Racke (1883-1940) owned a silver mine in Mexico before he took to the stage. No source is cited and it is difficult to see where the information could have come from. Gordon certainly did not mention it in an interview he gave to Picture Play Magazine in February 1935. 

    According to Gordon, he returned as a young man from being educated in Europe to find that his sister was now acting. This led to actor/producer William Elliott casting him in a play. He spent many years performing on the stage until Hollywood opened its arms to actors who could speak in 1929.

    His breakthrough screen role came in Mata Hari (1931), as the detective who tracks down Greta Garbo. The following year he played Paul Muni’s nemesis in Scarface (1932).

    Gordon was more likely to be cast as a villain than a hero, a notable example being his brownface Surat Khan in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). 

    Gordon’s only appearance in an MGM musical was as Ricco, the unscrupulous political agent in Stage Mother.

    He died suddenly as the result of complications following the emergency amputation of his leg.

  • Ted Healy

    Ernest Lea Nash (1896-1937) is best-known today as the co-founder of the act ‘Ted Healy and his Three Stooges’, but he also had a successful acting career in both comic and dramatic roles.

    After working for some years in vaudeville, Healy teamed with schoolfriend Moe Howard, Moe’s brother Shemp (subsequently replaced by Curly) and comic Larry Fine. There were tensions in the act, largely owing to Healy’s heavy drinking, and the three stooges eventually signed with Columbia to make a series of shorts. 

    Healy signed a contract with MGM, who occasionally loaned him to other studios. He played Jean Harlow’s freeloading brother in Blonde Bombshell (1933) and Reagan the reporter in Mad Love (1935). 

    Ted Healy acted in six MGM musicals. Probably his best role was as the vaudeville performer Ralph Martin in Stage Mother. He appeared with the Stooges in Dancing Lady and did an uncredited bit in the all-star Hollywood Party. He was also in Reckless, Here Comes the Band and San Francisco.

    Healy died from symptoms related to his drinking that were triggered by a serious and mysterious beating sustained outside a nightclub.

  • Phillips Holmes

    Phillips Raymond Holmes (1907-42) never achieved the Hollywood career to which he aspired, and his potential was ended by his early death as a flyer in the Second World War.

    Holmes was talent spotted while still a student and offered a screen test. (IMDb suggests he was an extra in Her Market Value in 1925, but this seems unlikely, given it was shot in California while he was at Princeton on the East Coast.)

    His first verifiable appearance was in Varsity (1928). After a variety of supporting roles at Paramount, he starred alongside Walter Huston in The Criminal Code (1931). Other notable lead roles were in Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy (1931) and Ernst Lubtisch’s Broken Lullaby (1932).

    Holmes made the mistake of moving to MGM, where he was never given the same quality of roles. After making a couple of pictures in the UK in 1938, he worked on the stage until joining the Royal Canadian Air Force at the start of the war.

    Holmes’s sole MGM musical was as Lord Aylesworth in Stage Mother.

  • Franchot Tone

    Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone (1905-68) became an actor after graduating from Cornell in 1927. After gaining extensive experience on the New York stage, he joined the influential Group Theatre, where he became a proponent of Stanislavsyan techniques. Tone made his first film, The Wiser Sex (1932) at New York’s Astoria Studios.

    In 1933, Tone signed with MGM and moved to Hollywood. He gained early prominence playing the romantic lead in Gabriel Over the Whitehouse (1933). Metro often loaned him to other studios, where he made some of his most interesting films, including John Ford’s The World Moves On (1934) at Fox and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) at Paramount. In 1937, he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in RKO’s Quality Street.

    When his contract ended in 1939, Tone went back to work on Broadway for a year or so. During the war, he appeared in two outstanding pictures, Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and the seminal film noir Phantom Lady (1944).

    In 1949, Tone produced, co-directed and starred in RKO’s The Man on the Eiffel Tower. He performed the same functions in an independent film of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1957. One of Tone’s last major films was Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965).

    Franchot Tone acted in three MGM musicals during his 1930s contract: Stage Mother, Dancing Lady (with future wife Joan Crawford) and Reckless.

  • Maureen O’Sullivan

    Maureen Paula O’Sullivan (1911-98) is immortal, to those in the know, as Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan in the earliest and best of MGM’s series. She is also known, less excitingly, as Mia Farrow’s mother.

    Like the wild colonial boy, O’Sullivan was born and raised in Ireland. Shortly after leaving school, she was spotted in Dublin by Frank Borzage, who was there shooting footage for Song O’ My Heart (1930). He cast her in a substantial role.

    She moved to Hollywood to complete the picture, and made further films for Fox, including the bizarre sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine (1930), before signing with MGM in 1932. By the time she retired in 1994, she had notched up about seventy film credits, plus considerable work on television. 

    In addition to six Tarzan films, O’Sullivan had featured roles in The Thin Man (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), David Copperfield (1935, as Dora), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Big Clock (1943, directed by her husband, John Farrow) and The Tall T (1957). Late in life she acted in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, playing the mother of her daughter Mia).

    O’Sullivan appeared in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and A Day at the Races.

  • Una Merkel

    Joan Bennett, Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow, Eleanor Powell, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Powell: just a few of the stars who had the delightful Una Merkel (1903-86) as a best friend during Hollywood’s Golden Age. With an unmistakeable Kentucky twang, Merkel was rarely the star of her pictures, but was also rarely unmemorable in them.

    Aged 17, Merkel worked as a stand-in for Lillian Gish on Way Down East (1920), which means it is sometimes her you see in the famous ice floe sequence. After plying the acting trade in the legitimate theatre and in vaudeville, she worked for D W Griffith again when he cast her as Ann Rutledge in Abraham Lincoln (1930).

    A hard-working supporting player, Merkel appeared in forty pictures released in the five-year period 1930 to 1934, perhaps most famously partnered with Ginger Rogers in the ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ number in 42nd Street (1933).

    Una Merkel’s most famous scene is unquestionably her fight with Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939). Both actors eschewed stunt doubles and ended up heavily bruised, as well as soaking wet from James Stewart’s bucket of water.

    In the 1950s, Merkel was a successful and Tony award-winning stage actor, and was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for Summer and Smoke (1961). 

    Merkel’s nine MGM musicals took her from Alice Brady in 1933 (Broadway to Hollywood) to Elvis Presley in 1966 (Spinout). In between came The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1936, Born to Dance, Rich Young and Pretty, The Merry Widow (again) and I Love Melvin.

  • Edwin Maxwell

    Irish-born Edwin Maxwell (1886-1948) emigrated to America as a child and made his first stage appearance aged seven. This led to a long career in the theatre and on screen. He made one silent film, but began to concentrate on films in 1929. He never abandoned the stage, however, and toured the country in the 1940s in the road show version of Life With Father.

    Maxwell was a character actor, often credited, sometimes not. Some of his most notable roles included: the Chief of Detectives in Scarface (1932), the chief villain in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the first Secretary of War in Duck Soup (1933), corrupt Will Vickery in Fury (1936), John T Stuart in Young Mr Lincoln (1939), the jeweller in Ninotchka (1939) and the inept state psychiatrist in His Girl Friday (1940).

    Edwin Maxwell appeared in four Metro musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Great Ziegfeld and the 1940 version of New Moon, his only credited role.

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