John Meehan (1890-1954) was a Canadian actor and dramatist with some limited success on Broadway who made his greatest mark as a screenwriter for MGM. His play Bless You, Sister (1927) was the source for Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931).
Meehan signed a contract with the studio in 1929, along with many other Broadway alumni. Over the next twenty years, he worked on many pictures, including A Free Soul (1931), Dinner at Eight (1933, uncredited) and Boy’s Town (1938).
Meehan worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals, Stage Mother, Babes in Arms and Three Daring Daughters.
Ivy Claudine Godber (1890-1943) was a British novelist and playwright (to little lasting effect, it would seem), who journeyed to Hollywood in 1929 to write for the talking pictures, where she found considerable success.
Signed up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West contributed to the scripts of some of the studio’s most successful films of the 30s and early 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933, uncredited), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Good Earth (1937), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest (both 1942). She shared Oscars for the last three pictures.
West worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals and, without credit, Maytime, The Firefly and The Chocolate Soldier.
Claudine West worked as a codebreaker during the First World War, and it is noticeable that Mrs Miniver and her screenplay for Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940) were as fervently anti-Nazi as might be expected from somone with brothers serving in the RAF at the time.
Madam Satan is a fascinating film. Fascinating in the sense that, while it is really not very good at all, it is almost impossible to look away from. And the nagging thought, while watching it, is: what were they thinking?
Angela (Kay Johnson) as Madam Satan, vamps it up for an unsuspecting Bob (Reginal Denny in a miniskirt)
This only applies to the second half, of course, because Madam Satan is a little like two different films spliced together. The first fifty minutes or so are the kind of sex comedy which had been so successful for Cecil B DeMille earlier in his career; films like Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). This is nowhere as good as those earlier films, but DeMille was seeking to find his feet in the sound era, following the melodrama of his first talkie, Dynamite (1929), by reverting to familiar territory.
The second part of Madam Satan is something else entirely, the strangest musical made at MGM before Yolanda and the Thief came along fifteen years later to give it some competition. But while Yolanda is an extremely well-made oddity, Madam Satan is a farrago directed by someone who did not know one end of a musical from the other.
Trixie (Lillian Roth) parachutes into a men’s sauna and doesn’t seem too put out
Madam Satan is, considering the money spent on it and the records of the people involved in making it, largely incompetent. For example, the film was edited by DeMille regular Anne Bauchens, who cut all of his greatest films. But Madam Satan is filled empty space, a screen where nothing happens. And there is a moment during the sequence in Trixie’s apartment where Angela goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind her. After three seconds, the door clearly starts to reopen, but there is a cut to a shot inside the bedroom, showing Angela looking out with the door wide open. It is a jarring moment.
Reginald Denny was a perfectly competent actor, but his line readings in Madam Satan are laboured, especially alongside the manic overacting of Roland Young, who gives the impression of being somewhere he would rather not be and desperately trying to act his way out of it.
But it is in the extended party scene aboard the zeppelin that Madam Satan achieves genuine lunacy. The entrance of the revellers, the Ballet Mecanique, the auction–none of it makes any sense, and is clumsily staged, with choreography that is saved from looking as poor only because it is so badly photographed by, of all people, Hal Rosson.
The sex comedy is picks up again at 1500 feet, only to be interrupted as almost the entire cast parachutes to earth, and the death of the Jazz Age is delivered in heavy-handed symbolism.
The zeppelin awaits the arrival of the revellers, in one of Madam Satan‘s more interesting shots
And yet, I have watched Madam Satan four times and will probably do so again. Its special effects are genuinely impressive, and its overall effect is mesmerizing. At its heart lie the puzzles of why Angela is wasting her time on an idiot like Bob, and why DeMille did not just try a musical version of The Squaw Man. Oh, the humanity.
The figures of 350+ film and TV appearances by Harry Wilson (1897-1978) is made more impressive by the fact that Wilson worked almost entirely in the sound era, when the turnover of pictures was not so great as in the silent days.
British-born Wilson dubbed himself ‘the ugliest man in movies’ (though there was competition), and he was many studios’ go-to actor for convicts and criminal henchmen. He features with Mike Mazurki in Some Like it Hot (1959) as one of George Raft’s goons.
Wilson appeared uncredited in no fewer than fifteen MGM musicals, across more than thirty years and four decades. In the 1930s he made A Lady’s Morals, The Bohemian Girl, A Day at the Races, Let Freedom Ring and The Wizard of Oz (as a Winkie Guard). In the 40s, Wilson was in Go West, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Luxury Liner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
His 1950s appearances were in Million Dollar Mermaid, It’s Always Fair Weather, Guys and Dolls and Merry Andrew. And finally, in 1963, Wilson played a roustabout in Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
As if Wilson was not busy enough making his own films, he worked for fifteen years as Wallace Beery’s stand-in.
William Carlton Stockdale (1874-1953) accumulated over 300 screen appearances in a thirty-year career that began in 1913 with Broncho Billy’s Last Deed. The title was misleading, because Stockdale went on to appear in more than thirty of Broncho Billy Anderson’s popular shorts, always playing a different character.
Prior to his film career, Stockdale was a stage actor and vaudeville performer. In pictures, he came to specialize in villains and heavies, though his first appearance in an MGM musical was on the right side of the law, playing the New York Chief of Police in A Lady’s Morals.
Stockdale made four additional contributions, in Stage Mother, Student Tour, San Francisco and Babes in Arms (though it would appear his scenes were not used).
Stockdale became a footnote in Hollywood history when he provided actor Charlotte Selby with an alibi when she was under suspicion for the 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor. Persistant rumours maintain that the alibi was bought and paid for.
Franz Reichert (1875-1965) was a German actor and director who found his greatest success in the United States.
Reicher first appeared on Broadway in 1899, and made his screen debut in 1915, the same year in which he directed his first picture .He then concentrated on directing until 1921, after which he mostly acted in character parts. His most notable role was as Captain Englehorn in King Kong, a role he repeated in Son of Kong (both 1933).
Reicher acted in three MGM musicals: A Lady’s Morals, I Married an Angel and Song of Love. He was also one of the directors of Wir schalten um auf Hollywood (1931), an alternative, German-language version of The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
Linda Parker (1915-69) was the younger sister of Cecilia Parker, the actor best-remembered for playing Marian Hardy in the Andy Hardy series.
In 1930, Linda ‘joined’ her sister to play Siamese twins in Lon Chaney’s sound remake of The Unholy Three. They were immediately asked to repeat the trick in A Lady’s Morals.
Linda Parker had uncredited parts in four other Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Student Tour and Naughty Marietta (which also featured Cecilia).
Cecilia Parker (1914-93) and her family emigrated from Canada to Los Angeles when she was a child, which was the gateway to her obtaining extra work and a place on a training course at Fox Studios.
Aged 16, she appeared (literally) alongside her younger sister Linda, playing Siamese twins in A Lady’s Morals. She went on to play in three other MGM musicals: Naughty Marietta, Love Finds Andy Hardy and Seven Sweethearts.
Cecilia Parker was in all but two of the Andy Hardy pictures, playing Andy’s sister, having previously appeared, as the love interest, in the series’s progenitor, Ah, Wilderness! (1935).
Parker more or less retired from acting in 1942, but returned for the failed Andy Hardy revival, Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958).
French-born Alphonse Martell (1890-1976) had a forty-year career as a character actor in Hollywood, making over 250 films and many television appearances.
In 1933, Martell became a Poverty Row auteur when he wrote and directed Tarnished Youth (also known as Gigolettes of Paris).
Martell played a variety of parts, but his speciality was waiters, in which role he made at least 80 appearances, as well as cropping up many times as a maitre d’.
Alphonse acted in twelve Metro musicals across three decades. A Lady’s Morals was followed by Student Tour, A Night at the Opera, Everybody Sing, Broadway Melody of 1940, I Married an Angel, Bathing Beauty, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Rich, Young and Pretty, Show Boat, Lovely To Look At and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.
