The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • Love in the Rough

    The Synopsis

    Jack Kelly and his friend Benny, a Russian immigrant, work in the shipping department of Waters Department Store. After they are both fired, Jack asks Waters why he has stopped being a regular guy and become one of the biggest crabs in town. 

    Jack (Robert Montgomery) and Benny (Benny Rubin), working hard for Mr Waters

    Waters confesses that he is terribly worried, not about the stock market but about his golf game. Upon discovering that Jack is the Municipal Golf Champion, Waters asks for coaching, to get him ready for his club’s forthcoming tournament. He will arrange for Jack to have two weeks’ membership at the club. The club is very exclusive, so he tells Jack not to reveal that he is Waters’s employee. 

    Jack agrees to take Benny with him as his valet, partly because Benny has $84 in savings. At the Oakmont Country Club, Jack struggles to stop Benny being a cheapskate who will not tip properly. 

    Jack and Marilyn Crawford see each other in the corridor and it is love at first sight. Marilyn is the wealthy daughter of Crawford the Wheat King. 

    On the terrace, Marilyn meets her friends, including Harry Johnson and Virgie [I’m Doing That Thing (Falling In Love)]. Jack looks down from his window and he and Marilyn exchange looks. 

    Marilyn (Dorothy Jordan) and chorus boys dance en plein air

    Jack realizes that Benny knows nothing about golf and tricks him into being a caddy. Jack and Marilyn meet again out on the course, to the obvious annoyance of Johnson. At the 8th hole, Jack interrupts Harry by unexpectedly reaching the green in two, which Harry and Virgie recognize is a spectacular shot. Jack joins them for the rest of the round. 

    Benny discovers that the other caddy, C Wesley Rappaport, is from the old country. Benny hires a car from a local farmer, so he can carry the clubs around the course more easily, but crashes into a tree. 

    The next morning, Jack wriggles out of playing with Waters so that he can join Marilyn and Virgie on the practice tee. Benny also turns up, having a crush on Virgie. Jack gives Marilyn a golf lesson [I’m Learning a Lot from You]. 

    While Jack, Marilyn and Benny are out on the course, there is a lightning storm and torrential rain. Jack and Marilyn shelter together and kiss for the first time [Go Home and Tell Your Mother]. 

    The evening before the tournament, Benny pretends to be sick so he can get out of caddying for Jack, who has been selected to go out in the top flight after setting a course record. 

    Jack tends to Benny in his ‘sick bed’

    Downstairs, at the pre-tournament dance, Johnson challenges Marilyn about a $3000 bet on Jack to win. 

    Following Waters’s instructions, Jack had told people he worked in shipping, but there is now a widely-accepted rumour that he is the president of a major shipping company. Waters hears the rumour and accuses Jack of fortune hunting. He accepts Jack’s denial, but says that it is still not right for someone in Jack’s position to be courting Marilyn. Jack agrees to leave immediately after the tournament. 

    Jack tries to tell Marilyn the truth, but she will not listen. He then tries to end their relationship but, after they dance [One More Waltz], he asks her to marry him right away. They rent a room for the night at the house of the Justice of the Peace who marries them. 

    Marilyn gets ready for bed, but Jack is compelled to tell her he is not rich. Jack sees that she presumes he is a fortune hunter. He tells her he loves her, but that she should get the marriage annulled. He then leaves. The next morning Jack and Harry tee off for the tournament title, but Jack is not playing at his best. 

    Back in her room at the club, Marilyn watches from her window. Mr Crawford arrives and is very opposed to the marriage until he learns that Jack is a great golfer. He then chases Marilyn outside to support her husband. Crawford introduces himself to Jack. 

    It is all even at the 18th hole, and Harry’s ball blocks Jack’s. But Jack performs a trick shot, sinks the ball and wins the tournament. Crawford offers Jack a job. Jack and Marilyn leave on a train for their honeymoon, with Benny still acting as valet.   

  • Adolph Milar

    Adolph Milar (1895-1950) was born in Switzerland, but had a career in American films that lasted over 25 years.

    From 1919, Milar played featured supporting roles in many silent films, but tended to be restricted to ethnic roles with the coming of sound, owing to his accent. He made an auspicious start with his first talking picture, Bulldog Drummond (1929). Later, he came to specialize in nazis, notably in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and in The Hitler Gang (1944), by which time he was usually uncredited.

    Milar appeared as a police officer in Call of the Flesh.

  • Lillian Leighton

    Lillian Brown (1874-1956) appeared in more than 250 films in a career that began in 1910 in Chicago, working with the Selig Polyscope Company. She made her final film in 1937.

    Most of Leighton’s pictures were silent (she even provided the stories for some of them in the early years). In the sound era, she tended to be credited in low-budget films, but uncredited in those with bigger budgets.

    One such was Call of the Flesh, in which she played the shawl seller.

  • Lillian Lawrence

    Lillian Lawrence (dates unknown) is frequently mistaken for Lillian Lawrence (1882-1926), who was a well-known stage actor.

    The screen Lawrence was a bit-part character actor between 1924 and 1953, rarely credited in over fifty appearances. The stage Lawrence made occasional screen appearances, with credit, and mostly in the last two years of her life: she played the Mother in Buster Keaton’s Three Ages (1923). 

    It was the little-known screen Lawrence, of course, who played a nun in Call of the Flesh, her namesake having died four years earlier. 

    She was in some very good pictures–Footlight Parade (1933), Judge Priest (1934), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Easy Living (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1940)–but always in a very minor role.

  • Ethel Sykes

    IMDb wrongly claims that Ethel Sykes (1906-61) made her screen debut in Into Society and Out (1914). She would have been eight years old at the time, making this unlikely.

    Sykes’s actual first film was The Complete Life (1926), a Fox short based on an O Henry story. The busiest period in her career was 1934-35, when she was in seventeen pictures, including the two John M Stahl classics Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935). Most of her appearances were without credit.

    Sykes played a chorus girl alongside Marion Davies in The Florodora Girl.

  • Patricia Caron

    Mary Marie Sittlow (1904-88) appeared in a couple of dozen pictures between 1927 and 1936. She played a couple of leads for minor studios in 1929, but was generally uncredited.

    In 1930, Caron played one of the Florodora Girls in The Florodora Girl.

  • Lenore Bushman

    Lenore Konti Teresa Bushman (1913-88) was the daughter of silent star Francis X Bushman, and made her first screen appearance aged 12 in one of her father’s pictures, The Masked Bride (1925).

    Aged 17, Bushman played one of Marion Davies’s fellow chorines inThe Florodora Girl. 

    Her screen career was short and sporadic, and Lenore Bushman made her final film in 1938.

  • Anita Louise

    Anita Louise Fremault (1915-70) was one of those rare child performers who went on to an adult career in acting and exhibited no major trauma.

    Louise made her debut on Broadway aged seven, making her first film appearance in the same year for an east coast company.

    By the mid-thirties, Anita Louise was playing leading roles, perhaps most notably as Titania in Max Reinhardt’s star-studded version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). She was generally the second female lead in the bigger pictures, supporting stars like Olivia de Havilland and Norma Shearer. Her final big screen role was in Joseph H Lewis’s evocatively-titled Retreat, Hell! (1952), but she continued working one-and-off on television until 1970.

    In The Florodora Girl, Anita Louise, aged 15, played the hero’s younger sister.

  • Jane Keithley

    Jane Neave Keithley (1908-44) was a local beauty pageant winner who gave up university to have a go in Hollywood.

    After playing a chorus girl for Paramount, and then a small role in Metro’s The Florodora Girl, she changed her name to Jane Keith and secured the lead in Fox’s Jack London adaptation, The Sea Wolf.

    Unfortunately, this was a false dawn in her career, and she made only two further appearances. The silver lining, however, was her marriage to the director of The Sea Wolf, Alfred Santell. By all accounts a story relationship, it produced four children, which makes her untimely death at the age of 36 even sadder.  

  • Robert Bolder

    Robert Joseph Edney (1859-1937) was a British actor who relocated to America and made his first films for the Chicago-based Essanay Company.

    Bolder eventually took up residence in Los Angeles and, by the end of his career, had made around 120 pictures. He was a regular performer in Wallace Beery’s Sweedie series.

    Bolder played the Commodore, a stage doorman, in The Florordora Girl.

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