Tag: MGM musical

Dancing Lady

The Crew

Robert Z Leonard	Director
Allen Rivkin	Screenplay
P J Wolfson	Screenplay
Robert Benchley	Dialogue (uncredited)
Zelda Sears	Additional writer (uncredited)
Joan Crawford	Screenplay contributor (uncredited)
Burton Lane	Songwriter
Harold Adamson	Songwriter
Richard Rodgers	Songwriter
Lorenz Hart	Songwriter
Dorothy Fields	Songwriter
Jimmy McHugh	Songwriter
Arthur Freed	Songwriter (uncredited)
Nacio Herb Brown	Songwriter (uncredited)
David O Selznick	Producer
John W Considine Jr	Associate Producer
Oliver T Marsh	Cinematographer
Maurice De Packh	Composer (uncredited)
Louis Silvers	Conductor
Slavko Vorkapich	Special Effects
Douglas Shearer	Sound Recording Director
Paul Neal	Sound Recording Engineer (uncredited)
Margaret Booth	Editor
Merrill Pye	Art Director
Edwin B Willis	Interior Decorator
Adrian	Costume Designer
Sammy Lee	Choreographer
Eddie Prinz	Choreographer
Robert A Golden	Assistant Director (uncredited)

September 17, 2026

Charles C Wilson

Charles Cahill Wilson (1894-1948) was the type of stage actor with Broadway experience who was welcomed by Hollywood in 1929.

He started out as dialogue director on Lucky Boy (1929), a George Jessel musical in which he also took a small role. He worked in that capacity on one further picture, in 1933, but otherwise restricted himself to acting., appearing in around 250 films in just seventeen years.

Wilson was usually uncredited, but he did feature prominently in It Happened One Night (1934), playing Clark Gable’s irascible editor. This was one of several times he worked with Frank Capra; he played Charlie Dawson in Meet John Doe (1941).

Wilson also played the DA in the first version of The Glass Key (1935) and was Jim Green in James Whale’s Show Boat (1936). In 1945 he made an appearance in the Fritz Lang masterpiece Scarlet Street, and the following year was uncredited in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

Wilson acted without credit in four MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

September 17, 2026
Charles Williams

Charles Williams (1898-1958) is seen by millions every year in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), working away at the adding machine as the contributions pour in. But Williams appeared in well over 200 films in a career stretching from 1922 until 1956.

Williams started out in the East Coast film business, working as a writer and actor. He moved to Hollywood with the advent of sound, and worked as a busy character actor. Most of his appearances were uncredited, and notable pictures included The Thin Man (1934), Dames (1934), History is Made at Night (1937), A Star is Born (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), Roxie Hart (1942) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Williams was in two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Ice Follies of 1939.

September 16, 2026
Charles Sullivan

Charles Sullivan (1899-1972) was a ubiquitous character actor in American films between 1925 and 1966, accumulating around 550 appearances on the big screen.

Notable appearances include King Kong (1933, where he was also Robert Armstrong’s stunt double), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Glass Key (1942), State of the Union (1948) and The Last Hurrah (1958).

Sullivan can be seen, uncredited, in fourteen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Student Tour, San Francisco, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Music for Millions, Easy to Wed, Living in a Big Way, Big City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Rose Marie and It’s Always Fair Weather.

September 16, 2026
Pat Somerset

Patrick Holme-Sumner (1897-1974) was a stage actor who starred in British films during the late 1910s, including a series about the adventures of a couple called Adam and Eve.

After travelling to the USA to work on Broadway, Somerset ended up in Hollywood, where he was generally restricted to uncredited roles. He became a member of John Ford’s stock company, appearing in nine of the director’s films, including The Informer (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1936).

Somerset also worked with Rouben Mamoulian (Becky Sharp [1935]), Clarence Brown (Anna Karenina [1935]), George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett [1935]) and Frank Capra (Mr Deeds Goes to Town [1936]).

Pat Somerset appeared in three Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Maytime and The Firefly.

September 16, 2026
C Montague Shaw

Charles Montague Discombe Sparrow (1882-1968) was an Australian actor who acted in the UK and elsewhere before arriving in America. In 1919 he starred, as Charles Sparrow, in With Edged Tools, a rarity in being a film made in South Africa.

Shaw’s first American feature was The Set-Up (1926), a western. He went on to make over 140 appearances as a character actor, sometimes uncredited but often not. If he had an area of specialism, it was serials.

Shaw can be seen in Blondie of the Follies (1932), The Mummy (1932), Cavalcade (1933), Queen Christina (1933, as King Gustavus Adolphus), Becky Sharp (1935), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1936, as the Clay King), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Unconquered (1947).

The only MGM musical featuring Shaw is Dancing Lady, where he was uncredited.

September 16, 2026
Victor Potel

Victor Potel (1889-1947) appeared in around 450 films, most of them made in the 1910s, when they were churned out. He was in 19 releases in 1910, and that was by no means his busiest year.

Potel made around eighty appearances for Essanay as a character named Slippery Slim (including one with the bizarre title Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage [1915]). In another long-running series, he played Slim Hoover, and was a regular in ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s westerns. He also occasionally turned his hand to writing and directing.

The pace of work slowed down over the years, but Potel was always a hard-working character actor in silent and sound features, usually in comic roles. During the 1930s, he was credited and uncredited in equal proportions. His films were mostly programmers, though he appeared in Fury (1936) as the customer who listens trepidatiously while his barber talks about the urge to cut someone’s throat.

In the 1940s, Potel was one of Preston Sturges’s stock company, in nine pictures and credited as the newspaper editor in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943).

Victor Potel showed up in six MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.

September 16, 2026
Jess Mendelson

Jess Mendelson (dates unknown, some sources say Mendelsohn) was a dancer who worked throughout the United States during the 1920s and at one point led his own dancing troupe.

In 1933, MGM cast him as the dance director in Dancing Lady.

The AFI Catalogue also suggests that he played a reporter in Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and appeared in Call Me Mister (1951).

September 16, 2026
Florine McKinney

Florine McKinney (1909-75) was an actor and singer who worked in Hollywood for about ten years, making around 35 pictures.

McKinney played with the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers (1932) and was Little Em’ly in David Copperfield (1935). She was uncredited in Waterloo Bridge and The Philadelphia Story (both 1940).

Four MGM musicals featured uncredited appearances by Florine McKinney: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Student Tour and The Merry Widow.

McKinney continued to work on the stage after leaving Hollywood.

September 15, 2026
Frank Hagney

Australian Frank Sidney Hagney (1894-1973) had a long and industrious Hollywood career: 48 years and around 450 films. Out of all that work, it is unlikely he would have predicted that every Christmas millions of people would watch him pushing Mr Potter’s wheelchair in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

Hagney was a professional cyclist and boxer in Australia before moving to the United States and beginning his film career in 1919. During the 1920s he had many featured roles in low-budget pictures, and appeared uncredited as the army recruiter in Keaton’s The General (1926). The majority of his roles were in westerns.

By the late 1930s, Hagney was mostly playing uncredited bit parts, in films that included The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Northwest Passage (1940), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), Unconquered (1947), The Big Clock (1948), All the King’s Men (1949), The Wild One (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Hagney acted without credit in ten Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Naughty Marietta, Swing Fever, Meet the People, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, Easy to Wed, On the Town, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive (his final film).

September 15, 2026