The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • Gene Markey

    Eugene Willford Markey (1895-1980) was a journalist and novelist who turned screenwriter with the coming of sound, and was occasionally credited as a producer. He also found time to marry  not one, not two, but three top Hollywood actors: Joan Bennett, Hedy Lamarr and Myrna Loy. And he had the honour of being described as “a skunk” by actor Louise Beavers.

    Markey served with distinction in the Second World War, unlike his close friends John Wayne and Ward Bond, and despite being older than both of them. He rose to the level of admiral, and reputedly demanded to be addressed as such for the remainder of his long life.

    Markey’s most enduring screen credit is as co-writer of the infamous Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Baby Face (1933), probably contributing the references Nietzsche. He also contributed, less memorably, to The Florodora Girl, devising the story and writing dialogue.

    In later life, Markey settled down as a horse breeder and Southern gentleman.

  • Leo White

    Born in Germany, raised in the UK, Leo Weiss (1873-1948) made at least 500 screen appearances in a career lasting a little over thirty years.

    After working in British music halls, White travelled to America and was working in films by 1911. He eventually settled at Essanay Studios, working regularly with Charles Chaplin. He also featured in Wallace Beery’s Sweedie shorts. By 1920, he had already made over 120 films.

    Despite his background in comedy, White ventured into more serious fare during the 1920s, with appearances in Blood and Sand (1922), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

    White was in eight MGM musicals (all uncredited). He started out in The Florodora Girl, followed by Call of the Flesh, The Devil’s Brother, Broadway to Hollywood, Stage Mother and The Cat and the Fiddle. He was one of the hirsute Russian aviators in A Night at the Opera, and bowed out with Broadway Melody of 1938.

    Later, White played the barber in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and Emile the waiter in Casablanca (1942).

  • Mary Jane Irving

    Mary Jane Irving (1913-83) made over sixty screen appearances, despite retiring when she was 25. This was owing to the fact that she made her debut at the age of 3 and had a busy career as a child actor. In her twenties, she also worked as Janet Gaynor’s stand-in.

    Irving was 16 when she played Lawrence Gray’s sister in The Florodora Girl. A year or so later, she was one of the students in Student Tour.

  • Claud Allister

    British actor William Claud Michael Palmer (1888-1970) made a career largely out of playing what Bertie Wooster would have called a silly ass. He was the quintessential Algy in a number of Bulldog Drummond films, having first played the character in the West End. He also appeared as the surprisingly English Duke Otto von Liebenheim in Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo(193

    Immediately before working with Lubitsch, Allister was Lord Rumblesham, the unlikely friend of Lawrence Gray in The Florodora. He then waited twenty-three years for his second appearance in an MGM musical, as Paul in Kiss Me Kate.

  • Ilka Chase

    In a varied career, Ilka Chase (1905-72) acted on stage and screen, presented radio and television shows, and found time to write a novel, two volumes of autobiography and several travel books. 

    Chase’s film career was not prestigious in itself, but involved some high-quality films. For example, she played Bette Davis’s sister-in-law in Now Voyager (1942), the catalyst for the Davis character’s transformation.

    Ilka Chase’s only Metro musical was The Florodora Girl, playing Fanny, one of the central character’s cynical but loyal friends.

  • Louis John Bartels

    Louis John Bartels (1895-1932) was at the tail end of his short film career when he made two MGM musicals, The Florodora Girl and The Prodigal.

    Bartels was a New York stage manager turned actor who Paramount cast in a few features and shorts, most notably in The Canary Murder Case (1929).

    Bartels was found dead at home, aged 36. An autopsy concluded he died from a stomach ailment brought on by acute alcoholism.

  • Walter Catlett

    For lovers of screwball comedy, Walter Leland Catlett (1889-1960) will always be the befuddled Constable Slocum who throws almost the entire cast of Bringing Up Baby (1937) into his jail. He also has immortality as the voice of J Worthington Foulfellow, the villainous fox, in Pinocchio (1940).

    But Catlett had a successful career on the stage in musical comedies before making Second Youth in 1924, the first of over 160 screen credits. He was a comic performer of exceptional ability. Howard Hawks asked him to coach Katharine Hepburn in playing comedy, contributing in no small part to her outstanding performance in Bringing Up Baby. But Catlett’s brief appearance in the closing minutes of A Tale of Two Cities (1935) shows that, like all great comic actors, he could play straight when he needed to.

    Catlett only appeared in one MGM musical, when he played the hero’s friend De Boer in The Florodora Girl. 

  • Xavier Cugat

    Francesc d’Assís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu (or Xavier Cugat i Mingall for short, 1900-1990), was one of the more idiosyncratic performers to work on musicals at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, reliably introducing an element of camp to every film he appeared in. 

    Born in Catalonia, Cugat and his family emigrated first to Cuba, and then to the United States in 1915. His beginnings in show business were as a classical violinist. He took time out to work as a cartoonist, and then formed his own band, which ended up performing at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Specializing in Latin music, Cugat, clutching his signature chihuahua while conducting or performing, became known as the ‘King of Rumba’. 

    Cugat’s first involvement in a Metro musical was behind the scenes, working with Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey on a couple of numbers for In Gay Madrid. Fourteen years later he made his debut on screen for Metro (having made a few musicals at Paramount), in Two Girls and a Sailor. Here, as on every other occasion, he played a fictionalized version of the band leader Xavier Cugat.

    Cugat appeared in four Esther Williams vehicles: Bathing Beauty, On an Island with You, This Time for Keeps and Neptune’s Daughter. He also supported Jane Powell in Holiday in Mexico, A Date with Judy and Luxury Liner, and showed up in No Leave, No Love.

  • Edwin Justus Mayer

    Edwin Justus Mayer (1896-1960) was a journalist and occasional playwright who, quite enterprisingly, wrote an autobiography when he was 25 and had achieved very little. From 1927 to 1945 he worked on a number of Hollywood films; in his own words, “I never gave up the stage, the stage gave me up. The pictures gave me a living and the theatre wouldn’t. I see no shame in using your professional weapons to make a living.” His crowning achievement was his final screenplay, for Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be (1945).

    Mayer had earlier been one of the three writers credited with the script for In Gay Madrid.

  • Salisbury Field

    Edward Salisbury Fields (1878-1936) was, amongst other things, a popular playwright, several of whose comedies were adapted into films.

    In the early 1930s Fields undertook writing projects for various Hollywood studios. Amongst these was a contribution to the screenplay for MGM’s In Gay Madrid.

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