The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Tom Dugan

    Tom Dugan (1889-1955) was an Irish actor who appeared in well over 250 Hollywood films. He started out at the tail-end of the silent era, and featured in the first full-length talking picture, Lights of New York (1928). Two of his many appearances stand out. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942) he is the first character seen, the Polish actor Bronski wandering down a city street disguised as Adolf Hitler. And in On the Town he played the sentimental Officer Tracy, who passes around the hat for the three sailors and their girls.

    Dugan’s other MGM musicals were They Learned About Women, San Francisco (uncredited), Nobody’s Baby, Easy to Wed (uncredited), as Pooch in the 1947 Good News, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and The Belle of New York (uncredited).

  • J C Nugent

    John Charles Nugent (1868-1947) was a vaudeville performer who became a playwright, actor and screenwriter. Several of his plays were adapted for the screen. He was the father of Elliott Nugent, who appeared in So This Is College.

    Nugent had supporting roles in They Learned About Women and Love in the Rough. 

  • Van and Schenck

    August Von Glahn (1886-1968) and Joseph Thuma Schenck (1891-1930) were a popular vaudeville, Broadway and recording duo. They combined comedy and singing in their act, with Van’s baritone and Schenck’s light tenor combining in pleasant harmonies, which Schenck accompanied on the piano. They were the first to record, in 1917, ‘For Me and My Gal,’ which went on to become a standard. They also scored a big hit with ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’ in 1925, a song with almost anthemic significance in the 1920s. Gus Van was a talented dialect comedian, and was able to carry that skill into his singing. 

    Van and Schenck’s first Broadway success was in The Century Girl (1916), the show in which Ziegfeld first launched his signature celestial staircase. Throughout the 1920s they were regular top-liners at the Palace, the New York venue discussed in reverent terms in so many backstage musicals. 

    Van and Schenck appeared for Vitaphone and MGM in four musical shorts in 1928-29 before their feature debut in They Learned About Women. Any further film career was cruelly curtailed by Schenck’s sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 39. 

    Gus Van continued performing, latterly in nightclubs, for another 38 years, but never with the same success. His film career ended after a few more musical shorts.

  • Youcca Troubetzkoy

    Prince Yucca Troubetskov (1905-1992) was American-born to Russian nobility, and pursued a film career from 1925 to 1939 in both Hollywood and France. He had the kind of exotic, sultry good looks made popular by Rudolph Valentino.

    Troubetzkoy had a supporting role in Chasing Rainbows and also made an appearance in Madam Satan.

  • Eddie Phillips

    Eddie Phillips (1899-1965) acted in close to 200 films in his 40-year career. Between 1926 and 1929 he appeared over forty times as Don Trent in The Collegians, a series of shorts from Universal depicting the lives and loves of a group of students. His film career petered out in the early fifties, but he continued to have a successful career on Broadway.

    Phillips had a featured role in Chasing Rainbows, and subsequently made uncredited appearances in The Firefly and Two Girls on Broadway. 

  • Nita Martan

    Nita Martan (1898-1986) performed in vaudeville and appeared in a couple of Broadway shows in the mid-twenties.

    Martan worked sporadically in films from 1920 onwards, initially as Manilla Martan. A couple of years after making Chasing Rainbows, she formed a dancing partnership and featured at the Coconut Grove. She made no more films.

  • Marion Harris

    Marion Ellen Harris (1896-1944) was a popular jazz and blues singer from 1916 onwards, one of the first white women to record in those genres. She was the first artist to record ‘After You’ve Gone’, ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody’ and ‘It Had to Be You’. Harris also performed in vaudeville and on Broadway. 

    Harris starred in Devil-May-Care, but made only a couple of other minor film appearances.

  • John Miljan

    John Miljan (1892-1960) was a supporting actor who appeared in over 200 films during his thirty-four-year career. He made regular appearances in Cecil B DeMille pictures, notably as General Custer in The Plainsman (1936).

    Miljan’s four MGM musicals began with Devil-May-Care, as Ramon Novarro’s nemesis. He played himself in the Hollywood-set Free and Easy, and was with Novarro again in In Gay Madrid. His final appearance was as Pierre Brugnon in the remake of New Moon.

  • Dorothy Jordan

    Dorothy Jordan (1906-88) made her film debut in Black Magic (1929), one of the many trained stage actors to find employment in Hollywood with the advent of sound. After playing Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (1929), she starred opposite Ramon Novarro in his talking debut in Devil-May-Care. 

    Jordan and Novarro were teamed again in two more musicals, In Gay Madrid  and Call of the Flesh. She was also female lead to Robert Montgomery in Love in the Rough.

    Jordan retired in 1933 after marrying producer Merian C Cooper, returning later only in occasional supporting roles. She made notable appearances in two of John Ford’s greatest films: The Sun Shines Bright (1953), where she was the sex worker whose life and death are central to two plot lines; and as John Wayne’s sister-in-law, who meets a tragic end, in The Searchers (1956)

  • Ramon Novarro

    José Ramón Gil Samaniego (1899-1968) was a Mexican actor who became a star of silent cinema after his villainous turn in The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and a phenomenon with his heroics in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). Handsome, even beautiful, he combined the roles of swashbuckler with the tag of ‘Latin Lover,’ especially following the death of Rudolph Valentino. 

    Novarro had 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. He also co-wrote one of the songs in Call of the Flesh and directed the French and Spanish versions of the picture.

    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 in 1968.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!