The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • Ann Brody

    Ann Brody Goldstein (1884-1944) made her theatrical debut aged nine and spent years working with Stock companies. The date of her first screen appearance is disputed, but her earliest indisputable performance was in the wonderfully-titled Cupid Puts One Over on the Shatchen, made for the Vitagraph Company in 1915. (A shatchen is a Jewish marriage broker.)

    Brody was commended for her combining of comedy with pathos, which inevitably led to Yiddisher Momma roles. She notched up fifty years in the show business, but was still working on Broadway in 1940.

    Ann Brody played Moe’s wife in So This Is College.

  • Douglas Scott

    British-born Douglas Frazer Scott (1925-88) moved with his parents to Los Angeles aged three, and almost immediately began working as a child actor.

    Scott’s career was over by the time he was eighteen, but it still encompassed working with Cecil B DeMille in Dynamite 1929), with Dorothy Arzner in Sarah and Son (1930), John Ford in Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and with William Wyler, as the young Hindley in Wuthering Heights (1939).

    Less auspiciously, Scott appeared without credit in Marianne.

  • Seymour Kupper

    Seymour Kupper (1915-34) made an appearance as a child actor in The Jazz Singer (1927), but his career was over a couple of years later. His last film was an uncredited role in Marianne. He would appear to have suffered a tragically-early death.

  • Emile Chautard

    Émile Chautard (1864-1934) was forty-four when he made his first screen appearance in 1910, following a successful stage career. He directed his first film in the same year, and was appointed head of production at Paris’s Éclair Films in 1913. Between 1910 and 1924, Chautard directed over 100 films, but stopped acting in 1917. During a period at the World Film Company in 1915, he trained an apprentice cutter named Josef Von Sternberg.

    Chautard took a job with Famous Player-Lasky in around 1922, but only directed a handful of films in America. He returned to acting, making around over sixty appearances. Notable films included 7th Heaven (1927) and three by his former protegé, Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus (both 1932). In the last of these, Von Sternberg cast him as a nightclub manager named Chautard. He was also in the French-language versions of several pictures.

    Chautard was in Marianne and Free and Easy. He was uncredited in the latter, which was increasingly the case during the final years of his career.

  • Robert Edeson

    Robert Edeson (1868-1931) was an actor on Broadway and a vaudeville performer before making his film debut in 1914, starring in Cecil B DeMille’s The Call of the North. He had played his role in the original stage production.

    Edeson continued to play leading roles throughout the silent era, including as Colonel Zapt in Rex Ingram’s 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. He also created the first screen version of lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1927).

    Edeson acquired his most unusual assignment when actor Rudolph Christians died before Erich Von Stroheim had completed Foolish Wives (1922). Edeson took over as the character, but always acting with his back to the camera. 

    Robert Edeson’s only involvement in MGM musicals was as the General in Marianne.

  • Scott Kolk

    Walter Scott Kolk (1905-93) was a professional drummer before becoming an actor, and also sang in revues.

    Kolk made his film debut in Marianne, and the following year experienced the harsher side of the First World War when he played one of the volunteers in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). 

    Shortly before finally retiring from acting (he had taken several years out in the early thirties), Kolk portrayed the eponymous hero on the 12-part serial Secret Agent X-9 (1937), based on a comic strip co-written by Dashiell Hammett.

  • Georgia Woodruff

    Georgia Rodgers Woodruff (1906-81) was a Memphis-based pianist who was cast to be the lead soprano for the Dixie Jubilee Singers in Hallelujah. She became a close friend of Eva Jessye, who also appeared in the film. Jessye had been assigned by King Vidor to find a soprano, and was told she would find what she wanted at Memphis’s Central Baptist Church.

    Woodruff had previously been working with the celebrated gospel songwriter Lucie Campbell. After making Hallelujah, she returned to playing in her church, and eventually became a teacher.

  • Blue Washington

    Edgar Hughes Washington (1898-1970) was a junior boxer, then a pitcher and first baseman in the Negro baseball leagues, mostly known for playing in Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri. His nickname, Blue, was apparently given him by Frank Capra when they were children.

    Washington began a parallel acting career in 1919, and had accumulated nearly 90 appearances by the time of his last film, The Hustler (1961). He was usually uncredited, and this was the case when he played a member of the congregation in Hallelujah.  

  • Arvert Potts

    Arvert Potts (1923-2005) was one of the four Potts brothers who played children in films of the 1920s and 30s.

    Arvert was the oldest, and made his first film aged 3, Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927). His connection with MGM musicals is an appearance in Hallelujah.

  • William Allen Garrison

    William Allen Garrison (dates unknown) played a heavy in Hallelujah. As with a number of Black performers in early Hollywood pictures, no other information seems available.

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