Tag: MGM musical
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Sandy Roth
Sanford Lewton Rothenberg (1887-1943) started out as an actor in some of Harold Lloyd’s Lonesome Luke pictures, and had a very minor career in occasional roles until 1933.
Roth arguably made a much greater mark as an assistant director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, working on a number of the studio’s musicals. He first carried out that role in 1922, and went on to support Buster Keaton and Charles Reisner on Steamboat Bill Jr (1928). He was also AD on Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940).
Roth’s Metro musicals were The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Flying High, Student Tour, Everybody Sing, Go West, The Big Store, This Time for Keeps, Thousands Cheer and Bathing Beauty.
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Busby Berkeley
The birth name of Busby Berkeley William Enos (1895-1976) is something of a mystery since, according to his biographer, his birth certificate’s ‘name of child’ section was left blank. Busby may have been a nickname.
IMDb declares that Berkeley “was one of the greatest choreographers of the US movie musical”. Technically, this is only true in part. He was certainly a great dance director, but choreographers usually know something about dancing, and Berkeley actually knew very little. As Jerome Delamater points out, Berkeley “used very little dance as such in his films”. He did not understand dance, but he did understand movement; specifically, the movement of human bodies in geometric patterns and shapes. As the artist Glen Baxter suggested, Busby Berkeley sequences were surrealism in action.
In the 1920s, Berkeley became a celebrated Broadway dance director, staging around twenty shows and becoming celebrated for his tightly regimented routines. Florenz Ziegfeld invited him to go to Hollywood to work on the film version of the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee! (1930), and he began honing the camera techniques that made his most famous numbers to stand out. It is important to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily of Berkeley’s devising. The overhead shot, for example, which is seen virtually as his signature, had been used in 1929 in MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and the Ziegfeld idea of using a plethora of chorus girls was emulated by Larry Ceballos in Warner’s The Show of Shows (1929). But Berkeley used these techniques with more creativity and greater discipline.
Berkeley’s reputation rests largely on the numbers he staged for the series of Warner Bros musicals that began with 42nd Street (1933). A couple of years earlier, however, he had staged the big number in MGM’s Flying High.
Berkeley returned to Metro in 1939, to direct Babes in Arms, and did a lot of work for the studio thereafter. He directed the Garland-Rooney follow-ups Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, as well as For Me and My Gal and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. He was the original director of Annie Get Your Gun, but most of his footage was scrapped when George Sidney took over. He was one of a number of directors who worked on Till the Clouds Roll By, and worked without credit on Swing Fever.
Berkeley also arranged musical numbers for The Wizard of Oz (though most of his footage was left out), Cabin in the Sky (uncredited), Lady Be Good, Ziegfeld Girl, Born to Sing, Girl Crazy, Two Weeks With Love, Million Dollar Mermaid, Small Town Girl, Easy to Love, Rose Marie and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
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George White
These entries usually start with the subject’s birth name and dates, but that is problematic with George White. Some sources claim he was Eassy White (1892-1968), born in New York. Others say he was George Weitz (1892-1968), born in Toronto. All we know for sure is that the dates are pretty certain.
White started out as a dancer in burlesque theatres, and worked his way up to the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. This inspired him to become a producer at the age of 27, launching his own Follies knock-off, George White’s Scandals in 1919. He continued with the format until 1939.
White also produced book-based Broadway shows, including Flying High (1931). It was typical of the early days of sound that MGM invited him, someone with no background in or knowledge of films, to go to Hollywood and produce a screen version of the hit musical comedy.
He continued working in Hollywood from time to time, even directing an eponymous musical based around his Broadway show.
White’s career took a downturn in the late thirties, culminating in a prison sentence in 1947 for being the driver in a fatal hit-and-run incident.
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Tom Kennedy
Thomas Aloysius Kennedy (1886-1965) had a face that bore testament to his first career as a heavyweight boxer. It was a face that brought him a fifty-year career as a character actor and appearances in more than 400 films and television programmes.
Kennedy made his first screen appearance in 1915 in The Lamb, a Douglas Fairbanks comedy-western. He later played First Officer Gibson, in hot pursuit of the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931). He was the gangster Slim Murphy in 42nd Street and appeared regularly as Gahagan in the Torchy Blane series (“What a day! What a day!”).
Right at the end of his career, Kennedy was one of Spencer Tracy’s colleagues in the Santa Rosita Police Department in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).
Kennedy made two uncredited appearances in Metro musicals in the 1930s: Flying High and Hollywood Party.
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Harry Watson
Harry Ruilton Watson (1921-2001) came from a family of child actors, and actually appeared in several films alongside some of his brothers. Most notably, he and his brothers Delmar, Billy and Gary played the Governor’s sons in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Harry Watson also played Albert, the gambling pageboy, in the Fred Astaire picture Damsels in Distress (1937).
As a ten-year-old, Watson appeared in Metro’s Flying High.
Watson was a combat photographer during the Second World War, and later pursued a career as a press photographer.
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Bee Stephens
Erma Beatrice Stephens (1907-88) played a chorus girl in her first film, After Midnight (1927), and she played a chorus girl in her final film, 21 years later (When My Baby Smiles at Me [1948]).
She also played a chorus girl or dancer in the majority of the fifty-odd pictures that came in between. She was well equipped for this as a career, having begun her dance training aged three.
Stephens appeared in two musicals for MGM: Flying High and I Married an Angel.
After leaving show business behind, Stephens had a long and successful career working for Procter & Gamble.
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Buddy Roosevelt
Kenneth Stanhope Sanderson (1898-1973) must be considered one of Hollywood’s nearly-men. After slaving away in dozens of Poverty Row westerns for four years, he was finally offered a part in an ‘A’ picture. Roaul Walsh had been forced to give up the role of the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona (1931) following the bizarre car accident that cost him his eye, and the part was given to Buddy Roosevelt. However, just before shooting was scheduled to start, he also had an accident, breaking his leg. The part ended up with Warner Baxter, who won an Academy Award and went on to a successful career. For Roosevelt, it was back to the cheapo westerns.
Buddy Roosevelt had started out as a Hollywood stuntman in 1916, after spending time as a cowboy. He got his first substantial acting role in 1924, and was soon on the ‘B’ western treadmill. He made occasional appearances in non-westerns, for example playing a secret service agent in Gabriel Over the White House (1933). He also continued to undertake stunt work, and doubled for Ronald Colman in Under Two Flags (1936) and Lost Horizon (1937). Roosevelt continued acting in films and television until 1962, with a final appearance in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Roosevelt made uncredited appearances in four Metro musicals, in none of them playing a cowboy: Flying High, Annie Get Your Gun, The Belle of New York and Merry Andrew.
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Betty Recklaw
Little is known about Betty Recklaw (19??-2002), not even the year of her birth.
IMDb suggests that she made her uncredited debut in the Betty Bronson version of Peter Pan (1924) as the mermaid queen. She then appears to have done very little until playing one of the chorus girls in The Broadway Melody. Her only other MGM musical is given as Flying High, again in the chorus line.
After Sis Hopkins (1941), nothing else is known.
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Nita Pike
Juanita Magda Pike (1913-54) became a Goldwyn Girl at the age of 18 and made her screen debut in the Eddie Cantor hit Palmy Days (1931). Immediately after this, she played a chorus girl in MGM’s Flying High.
Pike made a couple of dozen pictures during the 1930s and 40s, including appearing as a maid in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. She also played a secretary in The Great Dictator (1940).
Nita Pike’s life ended tragically when she committed suicide two days after the death of her husband.
