The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • Tammany Young

    Tammany Young (1886-1936) made regular appearances on Broadway throughout the 1920s, including creating the role of Schwartz in the original production of The Front Page in 1928. He was well-known enough in the theatre world to have his caricature in the collection at Sardi’s restaurant.

    Young’s parallel career as a film actor began way back in 1911, and in 1914 he appeared in a D W Griffith short. In 1914-15, he starred in thirteen short films as Bill the Office Boy. Altogether, he acted in over 100 silent pictures.

    In the sound era, he made many uncredited appearances, but also had featured roles in films such as She Done Him Wrong (1933), Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933), Tugboat Annie (1933) and It’s a Gift (1934).

    Young was only in one MGM musical, playing a taxi driver in Stage Mother. His career and well-publicized hobby of gatecrashing high-profile events were ended by his sudden death from a heart attack.

  • Beal Wong

    For a Chinese actor, making a career in Golden Age Hollywood was no easy task, but Beal Wong (1906-62) gave it a good go.He made his debut in an uncredited walk-on in MGM’s Stage Mother, and was still working almost thirty years later, with a final appearance in a Dean Martin comedy, Who’s Got the Action? (1962).

    Wong’s work could be niche, as suggested by the titles of some of the pictures he appeared in: The Mysterious Mr Wong (1934), Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935), China Passage (1937), Think Fast, Mr Moto (1937), Torchy Blane in Chinatown (1939), Escape from Hong Kong (1942), East of Chinatown (1942).

    He also had to be ‘ethnically flexible’. During the Second World War, there were plenty of roles as long as he was prepared to play a Japanese.

    But Wong did manage to get work in a better class of picture from time to time: Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July (1940); Across the Pacific (1942); Lady of Burlesque (1943); The Keys of the Kingdom (1944); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947); and Experiment in Terror (1962).

    In addition to Stage Mother, Wong appeared in two other MGM musicals, Student Tour and Lady Be Good. 

  • Glen Walters

    Canadian Glen Walters (1901-97) made one of her earliest appearances with Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1936). Her final acting role was in the television series Kung Fu (1973). You do not get careers like that any more.

    In close to 100 film appearances, Walters would seem to have gained only one role with an onscreen credit, in Henry King’s She Goes to War (1929), and, for some unknown reason, in the only surviving version of the picture, only her first name is given. But she was an exceptionally tall woman, and it is unmistakably her.

    For this reason, it is usually easy to spot Walters in her background roles in films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Swamp Water (1941), The Southerner (1942), Unconquered (1947), All the King’s Men (1947), Adam’s Rib (1949) and The Night of the Hunter (1955).

    Walters appeared in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Summer Stock and, most noticeably, in the ‘A Shine on Your Shoes’ number in The Ban Wagon.

  • Monte Vandergrift

    John Montanye Vandergrift (1893-1939) was a character actor who appeared in around 140 pictures, playing police officers in at least sixty of them.

    Prior to making films, Vandergrift worked in vaudeville, performing in a double act with his wife. He also acted on Broadway.

    Vandergrift made his screen debut in 1930, and mostly worked uncredited in programme features. Exceptions included John Ford’s Flesh (1932), King Kong (1933), Magnificent Obsession (1934), Captains Courageous (1937) and It’s a Wonderful World (1939).

    He acted in three Metro musicals, Stage Mother, Here Comes the Band and Balalaika (his final film).

  • Guy Usher

    James Guy Usher (1883-1944) was a theatre actor who became a character actor in films in his late forties, appearing in close to 200, predominantly ‘B’, pictures. His first credited role was as a murder victim in The Penguin Pool Mystery (1932), after which he was frequently cast as senior police officers, including Inspector Queen in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935).

    The few ‘A’ pictures Usher worked on without credit included Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Gabriel Over the Whitehouse (1933), It’s a Gift (1934, with onscreen credit), Fury (1936), Union Pacific (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941).

    Usher appeared in two MGM musicals in the mid 1930s: Stage Mother and Naughty Marietta (where he gets killed by pirates).

  • Henry Roquemore

    Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.

    The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.

    Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.

    Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.

  • Bradley Page

    Bradley Page (1901-85) had worked on Broadway before making his first film, Sporting Blood, in 1931. He eventually made over 100 pictures, split between credited feature parts and uncredited appearances.

    Page made few films of note. In fact, the two MGM musicals he appeared in–Stage Mother and The Big Store (credited as one of Douglass Dumbrille’s henchmen)–may be the most prestigious projects with which he was associated in a career that lasted just over ten years. 

    There seems to be no information about what Page did during the last forty years of his life.

  • Garry Owen

    Garry Owen (1902-51) was a hard-working character actor who laboured in the fields of programme pictures, usually without credit, over 180 times. But, unlike many of his peers, he was granted two standout appearances.   

    In 1936, Howard Hawks cast him as Mike Owens, the tragic figure in Ceiling Zero whose brain damage symbolizes the dangers inherent in early aviation. And, at the opposite end of the scale, Frank Capra gave him the final shot and the last line in his adaptation of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944): “I’m not a cab driver, I’m a coffee pot!”.

    Owen acted in six Metro musicals, starting with Stage Mother. This was followed by Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh, Ziegfeld Follies, No Leave, No Love and On an Island With You.

  • Frank O’ Connor

    It was quite an achievement for character actor Frank O’Connor (1881-1959) to cram well over 650 film appearances into even a forty-year career. Add in a couple of dozen pictures he directed and seven contributions to screenplays, and you have a very busy man.

    O’Connot starred in his earliest pictures, starting in 1915, but by 1921 he was pursuing a career as a director. Apparently it was an attempt to set up as a producer that ruined him financially, leading to over twenty years playing bits in hundreds of films. 

    But, amidst much dross, O’Connor showed up in some of Hollywood’s greatest pictures: King Kong (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Force of Evil (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Blue Gardenia (1953). Hawks, Capra, Welles, Curtiz, Wilder, Stevens, Ford, Lang: O’Connor kept good company.

    Frank O’Connor made appearances in six MGM musicals: Stage Mother, The Merry Widow, Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West and Little Nellie Kelly.

  • Billy O’Brien

    Like many other child actors, William Stephens O’Brien (1921-44) died young, but in his case heroically, when he was shot down during a mission in the South Pacific.

    O’Brien made his debut aged 5, in a Hal Roach short. A few years later he played in Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929). His first featured role was in The Lone Trail (1932), a Poverty Row western, and he continued to act, usually without credit, until he joined up following the attack on Pearl Harbour.

    In 1933, O’Brien made a brief appearance in Stage Mother.

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