The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • P J Wolfson

    Pinkus Jacob Wolfson (1909-73) was a trained pharmacist who took to writing novels. His first, Bodies Are Dust, was published in 1931.

    The book’s success secured Wolfson an offer to write for the screen, and he started at Universal, forming a partnership with Allen Rivkin. They wrote around ten screenplays together in two years. Altogether, Wolfson worked on around thirty-five films in 23 years. He also worked as producer on half a dozen pictures, later moving into television.

    Wolfson co-wrote Mad Love (1935), and two Fred Astaire pictures at RKO (Shall We Dance and Damsel in Distress (both 1937). He also worked on the George Steven comedy Vivacious Lady (1938). In 1939 he directed for RKO a film with the sensational title Boy Slaves, an exposé of child labour.

    Wolfson co-wrote two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Reckless.

  • Allen Rivkin

    Allen Irwin Rivkin (1903-90) started out as an advertising copy writer before travelling to Hollywood to work on publicity for RKO.

    Rivkin met P J Wolfson and they established a screenwriting partnership at Universal, their first picture being Night World (1932). Over the next thirty years, working with Wolfson and also with his own wife, Laura Kerr, Rivkin contributed to about fifty screenplays, and also helped to establish the Screenwriters Guild.

    Rivkin’s more notable work included What Price Hollywood? (1932), Dead Reckoning (1946) and The Farmer’s Daughter (1947).

    He co-wrote three MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and, in the 1950s, Grounds for Marriage  and The Strip.

    Rivkin gave up screenwriting in 1962 to work full time for the Writers Guild of America.

  • Dancing Lady

    The Crew

    Robert Z LeonardDirector
    Allen RivkinScreenplay
    P J WolfsonScreenplay
    Robert BenchleyDialogue (uncredited)
    Zelda SearsAdditional writer (uncredited)
    Joan CrawfordScreenplay contributor (uncredited)
    Burton LaneSongwriter
    Harold AdamsonSongwriter
    Richard RodgersSongwriter
    Lorenz HartSongwriter
    Dorothy FieldsSongwriter
    Jimmy McHughSongwriter
    Arthur FreedSongwriter (uncredited)
    Nacio Herb BrownSongwriter (uncredited)
    David O SelznickProducer
    John W Considine JrAssociate Producer
    Oliver T MarshCinematographer
    Maurice De PackhComposer (uncredited)
    Louis SilversConductor
    Slavko VorkapichSpecial Effects
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    Paul NealSound Recording Engineer (uncredited)
    Margaret BoothEditor
    Merrill PyeArt Director
    Edwin B WillisInterior Decorator
    AdrianCostume Designer
    Sammy LeeChoreographer
    Eddie PrinzChoreographer
    Robert A GoldenAssistant Director (uncredited)

  • Charles C Wilson

    Charles Cahill Wilson (1894-1948) was the type of stage actor with Broadway experience who was welcomed by Hollywood in 1929.

    He started out as dialogue director on Lucky Boy (1929), a George Jessel musical in which he also took a small role. He worked in that capacity on one further picture, in 1933, but otherwise restricted himself to acting., appearing in around 250 films in just seventeen years.

    Wilson was usually uncredited, but he did feature prominently in It Happened One Night (1934), playing Clark Gable’s irascible editor. This was one of several times he worked with Frank Capra; he played Charlie Dawson in Meet John Doe (1941).

    Wilson also played the DA in the first version of The Glass Key (1935) and was Jim Green in James Whale’s Show Boat (1936). In 1945 he made an appearance in the Fritz Lang masterpiece Scarlet Street, and the following year was uncredited in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

    Wilson acted without credit in four MGM musicals:  Dancing Lady, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

  • Charles Williams

    Charles Williams (1898-1958) is seen by millions every year in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), working away at the adding machine as the contributions pour in. But Williams appeared in well over 200 films in a career stretching from 1922 until 1956.

    Williams started out in the East Coast film business, working as a writer and actor. He moved to Hollywood with the advent of sound, and worked as a busy character actor. Most of his appearances were uncredited, and notable pictures included The Thin Man (1934), Dames (1934), History is Made at Night (1937), A Star is Born (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), Roxie Hart (1942) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

    Williams was in two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Ice Follies of 1939. 

  • Charles Sullivan

    Charles Sullivan (1899-1972) was a ubiquitous character actor in American films between 1925 and 1966, accumulating around 550 appearances on the big screen.

    Notable appearances include King Kong (1933, where he was also Robert Armstrong’s stunt double), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Glass Key (1942), State of the Union (1948) and The Last Hurrah (1958).

    Sullivan can be seen, uncredited, in fourteen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Student Tour, San Francisco, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Music for Millions, Easy to Wed, Living in a Big Way, Big City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Rose Marie and It’s Always Fair Weather. 

  • Pat Somerset

    Patrick Holme-Sumner (1897-1974) was a stage actor who starred in British films during the late 1910s, including a series about the adventures of a couple called Adam and Eve.

    After travelling to the USA to work on Broadway, Somerset ended up in Hollywood, where he was generally restricted to uncredited roles. He became a member of John Ford’s stock company, appearing in nine of the director’s films, including The Informer (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1936).

    Somerset also worked with Rouben Mamoulian (Becky Sharp [1935]), Clarence Brown (Anna Karenina [1935]), George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett [1935]) and Frank Capra (Mr Deeds Goes to Town [1936]).

    Pat Somerset appeared in three Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Maytime and The Firefly.

  • C Montague Shaw

    Charles Montague Discombe Sparrow (1882-1968) was an Australian actor who acted in the UK and elsewhere before arriving in America. In 1919 he starred, as Charles Sparrow, in With Edged Tools, a rarity in being a film made in South Africa.

    Shaw’s first American feature was The Set-Up (1926), a western. He went on to make over 140 appearances as a character actor, sometimes uncredited but often not. If he had an area of specialism, it was serials.

    Shaw can be seen in Blondie of the Follies (1932), The Mummy (1932), Cavalcade (1933), Queen Christina (1933, as King Gustavus Adolphus), Becky Sharp (1935), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1936, as the Clay King), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Unconquered (1947). 

    The only MGM musical featuring Shaw is Dancing Lady, where he was uncredited.

  • Victor Potel

    Victor Potel (1889-1947) appeared in around 450 films, most of them made in the 1910s, when they were churned out. He was in 19 releases in 1910, and that was by no means his busiest year. 

    Potel made around eighty appearances for Essanay as a character named Slippery Slim (including one with the bizarre title Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage [1915]). In another long-running series, he played Slim Hoover, and was a regular in ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s westerns. He also occasionally turned his hand to writing and directing.

    The pace of work slowed down over the years, but Potel was always a hard-working character actor in silent and sound features, usually in comic roles. During the 1930s, he was credited and uncredited in equal proportions. His films were mostly programmers, though he appeared in Fury (1936) as the customer who listens trepidatiously while his barber talks about the urge to cut someone’s throat.

    In the 1940s, Potel was one of Preston Sturges’s stock company, in nine pictures and credited as the newspaper editor in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943).

    Victor Potel showed up in six MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.

  • Jess Mendelson

    Jess Mendelson (dates unknown, some sources say Mendelsohn) was a dancer who worked throughout the United States during the 1920s and at one point led his own dancing troupe.

    In 1933, MGM cast him as the dance director in Dancing Lady. 

    The AFI Catalogue also suggests that he played a reporter in Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and appeared in Call Me Mister (1951). 

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