The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • Ernest Belcher

    Ernest Belcher (1882-1973) is almost totally forgotten, but was a very significant figure in the presentation of dance in early Hollywood. One of the few writers on his work described him as “a figure of national importance”.

    Belcher studied ballet in the UK and worked in the music halls and as a principal danseur before travelling to the United States with a dance troupe in 1914. After various dancing jobs, he established himself as a teacher in Los Angeles.

    His career in film choreography began in 1918 he was hired by D W Griffith to stage dances for Broken Blossoms (1918). Working as a dance director, he taught, amongst others, Pola Negri, Betty Grable, Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Gwen Verdon and Gower Champion, as well as his own daughter, Marge Champion.

    Belcher provided dance direction in many silent films, including The Phantom of the Opera (1925), almost always without onscreen credit. But in 1928 the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers dubbed him ‘Dance Director of Movieland’. 

    He was there at the beginning of the sound era, arranging dance in The Jazz Singer (1927), and he trained Shirley Temple, staging the ballet in The Little Princess (1939).

    It is ironic, given the size of Belcher’s contribution to dance on film, that his only known involvement in MGM musicals was the appearance of Ernest Belcher’s Dancing Tots in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

  • The Rounders

    The Rounders was a popular vocal act of the 1920s and 30s which featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. They can be heard performing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ immediately after Cliff Edwards.

    The individual members of the group were Dudley B Chambers, Ben McLaughlin, Myron Niesley, Richard C Hartt and Armand Girard.

    The Rounders made one of the many recordings of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ that appeared after the song’s success in Hollywood Revue.

  • Natacha Nattova

    Russian-born Nathalie Schmit (1905-88) trained as a dancer at the Paris Opéra and, from 1924, was in a dancing partnership with Gene Myrio. They worked as headline dancers in London and New York, demonstrating a very acrobatic form of adagio dancing. 

    After that act broke up, Nattova toured the vaudeville circuit with other male dancers, marrying one of them along the way. One of their routines involved a giant flower pot: “Flying through space, she executed an arabesque on an azalea, a pirouette on a poppy and a toe-hold on a tulip. Nattova showed ‘great grace in movement’”.

    It was this iteration (miscredited as Natova and Company) that appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. 

  • Brox Sisters

    The Brock sisters–Eunice (1901-93), Josephine (1902-99) and Kathleen (1904-88)–became the singing Brox Sisters as children, and were touring the vaudeville circuit when barely in their teens. 

    By the early twenties they were singing in Broadway revues, and recorded a number of songs which they debuted for their friend Irving Berlin, notably ‘Everybody Step’. They performed in The Cocoanuts (1925) with the Marx Brothers and were featured performers with Eddie Cantor in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. 

    The Brox Sisters’ first screen appearances were in some of the very earliest Vitaphone shorts made by Warner Bros. Photoplay wrote at the time: “Low voices register most successfully on the Vitaphone, so the performance of the Brox sisters, with their mezzo-soprano and contralto, is flawless.”

    Later, they sang a couple of numbers, including ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. 

    The Brox Sisters became radio stars, but disbanded after Josephine (known professionally as Bobbe) got married. They reunited once, in 1939, for a radio tribute to Irving Berlin.

  • Dorothy Coonan

    Dorothy Rae Coonan (1913-2009) started dancing professionally aged 14, making her first screen appearance in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody. She worked several times on films choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

    In 1933, director William Wellman gave her one of the leads in Wild Boys of the Road. She played Sally, the teenage hobo who disguises herself as a boy to ride the freight trains. 

    She and Wellman married in the following year, and remained together for over four decades, until his death in 1975.

    Dorothy Wellman retired after her marriage, though she did make an uncredited appearance as a nurse in her husband’s The Story of GI Joe (1945). IMDb states she played a chorus girl in Sis Hopkins (1941), a low-budget Judy Canova comedy, but this seems unlikely.

  • Diana Verne

    Like a number of other performers, Diana Verne (19??-??) was a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody and nothing else is known about her.

  • Marshall Ruth

    Marshall Ruth (1898-1953) was an actor who worked steadily in films for twenty years, almost always uncredited. His size and shape made him a natural choice when 20th-Century-Fox were looking for someone to play Roscoe Arbuckle in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939).

    In The Broadway Melody, Ruth played the impresario Zanfield’s assistant.

  • Alice Pitman

    Alice Pitman (19??-??) appeared as a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody. Nothing else is known about her.

  • Charlotte Merriam

    Charlotte Merriam (1903-72) started out as a screen actor playing in silent shorts, but graduated to features. Perhaps her most important role was the lead in The Brass Bottle (1923), which was directed by Maurice Tourneur. She also had an important part in the first screen version of Captain Blood (1923).

    Merriam transitioned into sound pictures, where she memorably played the negligent mother in Night Nurse (1931). Less memorably, she made an uncredited appearance in The Broadway Melody, playing a flapper.

  • Betty Arthur

    Elizabeth Kathryn Leopold (1910-2005) was a dancer who was, apparently, discovered at a young age by prima ballerina and dessert inspirer Anna Pavlova. 

    She made a handful of screen appearances in the late twenties,and her low point as a dancer may well have been in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!