The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Eugenie Besserer

    Playing Auntie Em in the first screen adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) was the first of over 200 appearances by Eugenie Besserer (1868-1934).

    Born in France, Besserer was raised in Canada. Left an orphan, she ran away and found an uncle who lived in New York, and who agreed to take her in.

    Besserer worked on the legitimate stage for a number of years, and was 42 when she made her first film. Perhaps for that reason, she developed something of a specialism in playing mothers, culminating in the role of Mrs Rabinowitz, Al Jolson’s mother, in The Jazz Singer (1927).

    In her one MGM musical, Besserer played Doña Generosa, matriarch of the House of Troy in In Gay Madrid.

  • James Bradbury Jr

    James Horatio Bradbury Jr (1894-1936) was the son of two actors and made his stage debut while still a child.

    After serving in the First World War, Bradbury settled in Hollywood, where he maintained a steady career as a character actor and supporting player. In the silent era, he combined higher-quality pictures such as Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928) with many low-budget westerns.

    After the introduction of sound, Bradbury played one of the bandits in The Rogue Song, but the general quality of his parts declined and he eventually took his own life, self-immolating in a failed attempt at suicide by gas.

  • Burr McIntosh

    William Burr McIntosh (1862-1942) was a man of many parts: writer, publisher, photographer, entrepreneur. And silent film actor.

    McIntosh had already achieved success publishing The Burr McIntosh Monthly, an early example of the pinup magazine, when he turned to screen acting.  He starred in a series of 14 two-reel shorts playing J Rufus Wallingford, a con man.

    The high point of McIntosh’s acting career was his performance as Lillian Gish’s cruel father in D W Griffith’s Way Down East (1920).

    McIntosh’s sole outing in an MGM musical was as Count Peter in the lost film, The Rogue Song.

  • Kate Price

    Katherine Duffy (1872-1943) emigrated to America from Ireland as a child, and began a stage career in 1890. 

    It is claimed in some sources that she made her screen debut in 1902, but no film is named nor evidence provided. More certain is that she made shorts for the New York Kalem Company in 1910. Later, she worked in Florida, partnered with a young Oliver Hardy.

    Price relocated to Hollywood in 1917 and found regular character work at a variety of studios. In 1926 she played the matriarch of the Kelly family in The Cohens and the Kellys, the first in a popular series of seven ethnic comedies.

    Kate Price is thought to have made around 300 shorts and features, one of which was MGM’s The Rogue Song, in which she played the maidservant Petrovna. 

  • David Burton

    David Burton (1877-1963) was born in what is now Ukraine, though his original name and details of how he ended up in America are obscure.

    Burton was a theatre director who went out to Hollywood at the introduction of sound to work with Nick Grinde, directing the actors in The Bishop Murder Case (1929).

    Burton directed another sixteen pictures, for various studios. He never directed an MGM musical, but he did make an appearance as himself in the Hollywood-set Free and Easy, auditioning women to beat up Buster Keaton.

  • Lloyd Ingraham

    Lloyd Chauncey Ingraham (1874-1956) made around 300 screen appearances, but it is arguable that only one was of any significance in the context of film history. He plays the judge who sentences The Boy to go to the gallows in Intolerance (1916). 

    Otherwise, it was a career largely uncredited, and which included the role of Joan Crawford’s dad in Montana Moon. 

    Ingraham also directed over 100 shorts and features between 1913 and 1930.

  • Ricardo Cortez

    Jacob Krantz (1900-77) was the son of Jewish parents with East European backgrounds, but he grew up to have features that bore comparison with Latin lovers such as Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro. With this in mind, he took Ricardo Cortez as his screen name.

    By 1923, Cortez was getting featured character parts, and he occasionally played the lead, most memorably as the first Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1931). One of his prominent supporting roles, a year earlier, was with Joan Crawford in Montana Moon. 

    Cortez also directed seven low-budget programmers for 20th Century-Fox between 1938 and 1940.

    His last big screen appearance was in a film that gave a number of other actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age their last hurrah: John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (1958). After a guest spot in an episode of Bonanza in 1960, Cortex became a stockbroker.

    Ricardo Cortez’s brother, Stanley Cortez, was a celebrated cinematographer.

  • Pauline Paquette

    Belgian actors were few and far between in Old Hollywood, and Pauline Paquette (????-1950) had a career that included only five pictures.

    The possibility that she might have deserved better is suggested by one review of her first picture, Bluff (1924), which noted: “A bit contributed by Pauline Paquette stands out in the film”.

    Paquette appeared as Marie in Lord Byron of Broadway.

  • Hazel Craven

    Hazel Craven (dates unknown) was a chorus girl who, in a brief Hollywood career, played a series of…chorus girls. 

    She started out with a credited part in Lord Byron of Broadway, dancing alongside Rita Flynn. Thereafter, Craven was uncredited, though in a string of prestigious pictures (The Kid from Spain [1932, 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and Duck Soup [all 1933]). She apparently played a bit part in one Rainy Afternoon (1936), and there the trail seems to end.

  • Rita Flynn

    Edith Flynn (1905-73) was briefly Micky Flynn when performing on the stage in musical comedies, before settling on the “ritzier” Rita at the start of her film career.

    Flynn was generally cast in supporting roles, though she was a featured player, as a character with her own name, in a series of short comedies known Hollywood Girls, directed by Roscoe Arbuckle in 1931-32.

    A little earlier, Flynn appeared briefly in Lord Byron of Broadway, as one of the women inexplicably attracted to Charles Kaley.

    In a chorus girl cliché, Flynn retired from acting in 1933 after marrying a millionaire.

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