Frederick Liedtke (1874-1948) was a vaudeville performer and actor, and worked in theatrical management before directing his first film in 1916. A successful collaboration with Douglas Fairbanks, combined with directing Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand (1922), gave MGM the confidence to choose Niblo as a safe, if uninspired, replacement for Charles Brabin, who had allowed Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ to spend its $1.25 million budget in two months on unusable footage.
Fred Niblo never directed a musical, but he did act in one. In Hollywood-set Free and Easy he played himself, a director struggling to get Buster Keaton’s character to memorize, and say correctly, his one line of dialogue.
Actor, poet, suffragist and body-positive activist Delia O’Callaghan (1870-1955) had been a star in vaudeville for many years before making her first film appearance in 1923. She had a featured role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), but her best part was probably Ma Plunkett in Free and Easy, which allowed her to demonstrate some of the comedic and musical skills she had honed on the stage.
The weirdest item in Friganza’s filmography is How to Undress in Front of Your Husband (1937), an ‘educational’ short in which she and Elaine Barrymore demonstrate the right and wrong ways for a woman to get ready for bed. Friganza was 67 at the time, but still game.
Gopher City, Kansas. Elvira Plunkett, Miss Gopher City, boards a train for Hollywood, a prize from the Chamber of Commerce. She is accompanied by her mother, Ma Plunkett, and her manager, Elmer J Butts. Elmer, who has the tickets, is forced to ride on the caboose until the first stop. Elvira and Ma mistakenly occupy the room of Larry Mitchell, an MGM movie star, who is returning to Hollywood for the opening of his new picture. Ma and Elvira are reunited with Elmer when the train stops.
Elmer (Buster Keaton), stuck in the caboose
The following week, Larry’s picture premieres at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, with MGM contract players in attendance. Elmer, Elvira and Ma are there at Larry’s invitation. Elmer has to drive miles to park the car and enters the theatre just as the film is ending. He is mistaken for William Haines and dragged onto the stage. Back at their hotel, Elmer tries and fails to tell Elvira that he loves her.
Director Fred Niblo, playing himself, attempts to drum a single line into Elmer’s head: “Oh woe is me, the Quoon has sweened”
The next day, at the MGM studios, Elvira and Ma watch Larry film a musical number [It Must Be You]. Larry introduces them to director Fred Niblo. Elmer arrives, but cannot get through the studio gates. He finally sneaks in with a crowd of extras. Elmer is chased by a studio guard and accidentally sets off an explosion on an outdoor set, before running onto a sound stage where Lionel Barrymore is directing. He ruins a take, then runs onto the stage where Larry is filming and gets involved in a musical number.
The guard catches him, but Larry and Elvira intercede. They persuade Niblo to give Elmer a small part in the picture, but it all goes badly wrong. Larry sends Elmer to the transportation department so he can get a ride home, and Elmer ends up getting a job as a driver.
His first job is driving Elvira and Larry home from a party; they do not realize Elmer is the driver. He overhears Larry inviting Elvira to go to his house. While Larry sets about seducing Elvira, Elmer, who thinks Larry is asking her to marry him,rushes to fetch Ma. Elmer and Ma arrive to find Elvira in tears. Elmer tackles Larry and they both end up unconscious. Elvira and Ma leave. Larry is ashamed, and he and Elmer become friends. They discover they used to know each other when Larry was Heiny Schwartz, the butcher’s son, back in Kansas.
Larry arranges for Elmer to try another part in the picture, and apologizes to Elvira. Meanwhile, Ma unexpectedly wins a part in the picture. Elmer and Ma perform a comic skit in the musical comedy [Oh King, Oh Queen]. Elvira admires Elmer, but has given up on the idea of acting herself; she never wanted to come to Hollywood, it was all Ma’s idea. She could never be happy making-believe all her life. Elmer tells Elvira that a certain movie star loves her very much and only needs a little encouragement; Elvira thinks he means Larry.
Ma Plunkett (Trixie Friganza) and Elmer perform ‘Oh King, Oh Queen’
In another scene from the musical, Elmer is trying to take the girl back to his home in Brooklyn [The Free And Easy]. Elmer is considered a great comedian and offered a contract by the studio, but he is dismayed to learn that Elvira and Larry are getting married. Elvira watches as the final scene of the picture is filmed [The Free and Easy; It Must Be You], while Elmer gazes sadly at her and despairs.
Several commentators on Montana Moon have focused on the inadequacy of its sound recording. Richard Barrios, for example, points out to “Joan Crawford singing on horseback zillions of feet away from the camera sounding just as loud as the cowboy chorus warbling in the foreground. This may, in part, be attributable to shooting many sequences away from the soundstage. The number cited by Barrios, ‘Montana Moon,’ was filmed on location, enabling the distance he mentions. The staging may have been decided weeks after the recording for playback was made, resulting in the dissonance of sound and image.
Montana Moon gets little love from the few writers on early musicals. Edwin M Bradley goes so far as to claim that Joan Crawford “is not pleasingly photographed by the usually reliable William Daniels,” which is palpably untrue.
Gay young thing Joan (Joan Crawford), backlit by William Daniels
For my part, while the plot of Montana Moon is clearly nonsensical, I find it far more watchable than its immediate Metro musical predecessor, Lord Byron of Broadway. It is well-photographed (whatever Bradley says) and better-acted than many films of the period. And if Johnny Mack Brown is no great leading man, he is John Barrymore compared to Charles Kaley.
The songs provided by Stothart-Grey and Freed-Brown are mediocre but inoffensive, and in a couple of cases difficult to attribute. Crawford, as always, does her best with the talent she has, but much of the singing is left to supporting player Cliff Edwards, the world’s most-unlikely cowboy until you look at Benny Rubin (check out Rubin in the closing shot, grinning away as if he lived on horseback).
Larry (Johnny Mack Brown) carries off Joan, while Bloom (Benny Rubin) looks on
Montana Moon, in addition to William Daniels, had some classy people working offscreen. Director Mal St Clair was past his best, but he and editor Carl Pierson pace the picture quite well, while costumes were provided by Adrian.
Often cited as the first Singing Cowboy film, Montana Moon does not deserve a high reputation, but it does merit a better one than it has.
Austin Cedric Gibbons (1890-1960) has been called “the most powerful arbiter of style” at MGM after Mayer and Thalberg. He was head of the studio’s art department for more than 30 years, responsible for the look of all its pictures and was credited on most of them.
Clearly, Gibbons did not undertake the detailed design of over a thousand films, which has led some observers to treat him as merely a credit-hogging bureaucrat. He was that, of course, which is why he has more onscreen credits than any other individual in cinema history. But this is no reason to overlook the contribution he made to the visual style of the studio that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s.
Gibbons started out working for the Edison Studio in 1914 and then, after military service, for Samuel Goldwyn, and thereby to MGM in 1924. In 1925 he visited the Paris Exhibition, which consolidated the influence of contemporary art movements such as Futurism, Surrealism and Art Deco on his approach to design.
By 1931, Gibbons had 40 staff working under him, including six art directors. He was careful to recruit personnel whose style and influences were in line with his own. His role became supervisory, though in a genuine sense: Gibbons personally signed off on all designs and, frequently, constructed sets, until health issues curtailed this level of involvement in 1945.
It is difficult to say which musicals Gibbons had a direct involvement in, but his influence certainly dictated both the look of 1930s’ black-and-white pictures, and the Technicolor extravaganzas launched by The Wizard of Oz. Two of his eleven Oscars were for musicals: the first version of The Merry Widow (undoubtedly deserved) and An American in Paris (almost certainly not).
Carl Leo Pierson (1891-1977) edited several hundred films during his long career, almost all of which would be categorized as ‘B’ pictures. Indicative of this is the fact that his best-known work is Reefer Madness (1936), the ‘notorious exploitation shocker’.
Only six years earlier, Pierson had been in the refined setting of Metro’s Culver City studio, editing Montana Moon.
William H Daniels (1901-70) was one of the most eminent cinematographers working during Hollywood’s Golden Age. The American Cinematographer website refers to his “inconspicuously perfect execution”. Daniels’s career lasted fifty years, from silent cinema to the self-conscious kookiness of Move (1970).
Daniels started out as a camera operator at Universal, but followed Erich Von Stroheim to MGM, where he shot Foolish Wives (1922), Greed and The Merry Widow (both 1925). He then, famously, became Greta Garbo’s cinematographer of choice, shooting sixteen of her pictures.
Daniels worked with many major directors, including Clarence Brown, Frank Borzage, Raoul Walsh, George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Ida Lupino and Jules Dassin In 1950 he won an Oscar for Dassin’s The Naked City.
Daniels was photographing musicals for MGM for over thirty years, starting with Montana Moon in 1930 and ending with Billy Rose’s Jumbo in 1962. In between came Broadway to Hollywood, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Broadway Melody of 1938, New Moon, For Me and My Gal and Girl Crazy.
Frank Russell Butler (1889-1967) was a prominent screenwriter, though his most successful days were at Paramount rather than MGM.
Born in England, Butler started out as an actor at Famous Players-Lasky in 1920, writing his first scenario the following year. His acting career ended with silent cinema, and he directed only one film for Hal Roach: Flying Elephants, with Laurel and Hardy before they had established their comedy duo characters.
Butler signed on as a writer at Metro in 1929, and worked on four musicals during his time there. He worked with regular collaborator Sylvia Thalberg on Montana Moon and New Moon. He subsequently worked on two scripts for films involving Laurel and Hardy, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl.
Returning to Paramount, Butler wrote frequently for Bob Hope, including four of the Road pictures. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1942 for two very different screenplays, Road to Morocco and war drama Wake Island. He won two year later for Going My Way (1944).
It is hard to avoid describing Sylvia Thalberg (1907-88) as the younger sister of Irving Thalberg and the wife of MGM producer Lawrence Weingarten, though she would, quite understandably, not have welcomed it. Becoming the youngest writer at Hollywood’s biggest studio in 1927 inevitably attracted accusations of nepotism. This, along with writing a novel, led to her leaving Metro in 1933.
Having published the novel, Thalberg signed a contract with Paramount in 1935. Her last, uncredited, work on a screenplay was in 1937.
While at MGM, Thalberg worked on two musicals, Montana Moon and New Moon, both times with regular collaborator Frank Butler. Her brother’s opinion of his sister was, according to Douglas Shearer, “talented but lazy”. But that’s brothers for you.
