The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • 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.

  • John Larkin

    John Larkin Smith [?] (1877-1936) had a long career in minstrel shows and vaudeville, and was billed as ‘Jolly John Larkins–the Rajah of Mirth’. He toured the world as leader of the Dandy Dixie Minstrels.

    It was only in the final six years of his life that he devoted himself to films, in the usual menial role reserved for Black actors, and almost never playing to his comedic strengths. In this mode, he was the loyal family retainer to the Southern family in The Prodigal.

    Larkin acted in two further Metro musicals: Stage Mother (as a porter) and The Great Ziegfeld (uncredited, but at least as a named character, Sam).

    His last film, made in the year of his death, was Warner’s all-Black The Green Pastures (1936).

  • Gertrude Howard

    Gertrude Howard (1892-1934) was, like so many Black women, restricted to a limited range of acting opportunities, and most frequently cast as maids. This did, however, bring her screen immortality of a kind, as she played the maid to whom Mae West uttered the line “Beulah, peel me a grape” in I’m No Angel (1933).

    After some stage work, Howard made her first film in 1925. In 1931, she played a servant in MGM’s The Prodigal.

    Howard, who was described in 1927 as the highest-paid “colored actress” in Hollywood, died at only 41, and Mae West helped fund her funeral.

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