Gloria Foy (1901-77) was a Broadway musical comedy star who made only one film, playing a Broadway musical comedy star. Ironically, as Vivian Warner in Dancing Lady, she is bumped out of the lead in Patch Gallagher’s new show–twice.
Foy started dancing in revues as a teenager, gaining the lead role in Ziegfeld’s Up She Goes (1922) when she was just twenty-one. She was not only a talented singer and dancer, but also performed in vaudeville doing impressions and satirical comedy.
Foy continued with stage work throughout the 1920s, and returned to it in 1934 after her brief Hollywood career. She had effectively retired by the end of the decade. She lived quietly for the second half of her life, and spent her final years in Hollywood.
For those who grew up in the 60s and 70s, Sterling Price Holloway Jr (1905-92) is the voice of Winnie the Pooh; there can be no other. He was also the voice of the snake Kaa in The Jungle Book (1967) and, before that, of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (1951), amongst other Disney performances.
After training at the American School of Dramatic Arts, Holloway toured widely with stock companies, both acting and singing. He was only 21 when he moved to Hollywood, making his debut in a Fox short called The Battling Kangaroo (1928).
Holloway appeared in over 170 pictures, mostly credited, and almost always bringing something eccentric to the role, with his very distinctive voice and physical appearance. Typical examples would be the frenzied delivery boy in Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), or ‘Chilly’ Willie Simms in Mitchell Leisen’s comedy Remember the Night (1940).
He was cast against type, and to great effect, in Lewis Milestone’s war film A Walk in the Sun (1945). He plays the medic McWilliams, whose brief lack of concentration brings about his own death.
Sterling Holloway made appearances in four Metro musicals. In Dancing Girl he plays Pinky, the scene-stealing author of the show being staged. He was uncredited in Going Hollywood and The Cat and the Fiddle, and then featured as Mishka, Danilo’s orderly, in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, where he was finally allowed to demonstrate his singing voice.
Holloway carried on working into his eighties, bowing out by narrating the highly-respected ‘Atomic Shakespeare’ episode of Moonlighting in 1986.
Alex Maynard Holmes (1908-65) was a vaudeville performer and Broadway actor who had minor roles in Hollywood films from 1930 to 1952.
Holmes generally had uncredited parts, and his well over 50 appearances included Gold Diggers of 1933, Baby Face (both 1933), and two Orson Welles pictures, The Magnificent Amberson (1942) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947).
Maynard Holmes was given his best role in MGM’s musical Dancing Lady. He played Jasper Bradley Jr, feckless son of the show’s backer and a source of comic relief. He took lesser, uncredited, roles in Born to Dance and Big City.
John Grant Mitchell Jr (1874-1957) was the only son of a Union general in the American Civil War (not many could say that), and a Harvard Law School graduate who was actually practising law when he gave it all up to become an actor. Unsurprising, then, that as a character actor in Hollywood he looked like a disciplinarian and was often cast as lawyers and businessmen.
Mitchell initially worked on the stage, making his first Broadway appearance in 1902. He went on to play many leading roles. He made one film in New York in 1916, and starred in another in 1923, but his film career only began seriously in 1930. He travelled to Hollywood as part of the influx of experienced actors required by sound pictures. He was already 56, but he went on to appear in over 120 pictures, usually in credited supporting roles and always a recognizable face.
Mitchell was one of the guests who attended Dinner at Eight and the father of the central character in Wild Boys of the Road (both 1933). Almost inevitably, he was cast as Egeus, the father from hell, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). He played the French statesman Clemenceau in The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and one of the senators sitting in judgement on James Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939). John Ford gave Mitchell the sympathetic role of the caretaker in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). For Capra, he played the heroine’s father in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).
Grant Mitchell played character roles in four MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, the 1940 version of New Moon, Cairo and Easy to Wed.
Humourist Robert Charles Bentley (1889-1945) made his name writing for Vanity Fair and TheNew Yorker, and carousing with the other intellectuals (and Harpo Marx) at the Algonquin Round Table. He was also well known as a drama critic and reluctant stage performer.
Benchley appeared in films from 1928 (having earlier written titles, in two distinctly different ways. His first appearances were in very early Movietone sound shorts, in which he recreated revue monologues such as The Treasurer’s Report and The Sex Life of the Polyp (both 1928). Later on, he wrote and starred in a series of ‘instructional’ comedy shorts for MGM, starting with How to Sleep (1935), which won the Best Short Film Oscar. Other titles, in many of which he took the name Joe Doakes, included How to Be a Detective (1936), How to Figure Income Tax (1938) and Seeing Your Doctor (1939). After leaving MGM, who did not treat him well, Benchley made further shorts at Paramount. Many of these lecture films were based on his own earlier written material.
Alongside this, Benchley had a peculiar career as a character actor in around 50 feature films. Frequently cast as a drunk (reflecting his personal proclivity), Benchley was often permitted to write his own dialogue. Notable appearances included Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), The Major and the Minor (very much restricted to speaking Wilder-Brackett lines and I Married a Witch (both 1942).
Benchley’s two forays into MGM musicals were supporting roles in Dancing Lady and Broadway Melody of 1938.
Benchley’s early death was the result of cirrhosis of the liver.
Of all Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s great musical stars, Frederick Austerlitz (1899-1987) was technically the first. He did not star for the studio until 1940, but he made his first appearance seven years earlier, in Dancing Lady, playing himself. He stands alongside Gene Kelly as the two greatest dancer-choreographers in cinema.
After a very successful stage career, dancing with his sister Adele, Fred Astaire sought a Hollywood career after Adele got married and retired. He was 34 when he signed with RKO, who immediately loaned him to MGM, for Dancing Lady.
In the years that followed, Astaire and a new partner, Ginger Rogers, made nine pictures at RKO, a number of which are considered the high points of the 1930s musical. Astaire innovated in a number of areas, not least his insistence that dances be photographed with full-length shots, without cutaways to the face or feet.
When the Rogers partnership ended in 1939 with The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Astaire starred for the first time at MGM, dancing with Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940.
Then came perhaps Astaire’s most successful post-Rogers collaboration, when he danced in two pictures with the much-underrated Rita Hayworth at Columbia. He was back at MGM in 1945, dancing with Gene Kelly for the only time in Ziegfeld Follies, then starring in Vincente Minnelli’s strange Yolanda and the Thief.
After an attempted retirement, Astaire was lured back to MGM to replace the injured Gene Kelly in Easter Parade, after which he was reunited with Rogers in The Barkeleys of Broadway. He made five more musicals at Metro during the next ten years: Three Little Words, Royal Wedding (in which he danced on the ceiling), The Belle of New York (in which he danced on clouds), The Band Wagon (in which he and Cyd Charisse performed ‘Dancing in the Dark’ for the ages) and Silk Stockings (the final film in which he danced like Fred Astaire).
Astaire turned to straight acting from 1959, with the exception of Finian’s Rainbow (1968), where he anguished over Francis Ford Coppola’s inept style of shooting dance numbers. He made his final film in 1981.
Winifred Josephine Reeves (1899-1971) started performing as a singer in vaudeville when she was fifteen and was very quickly playing at New York’s Palace Theatre, the dream of every singer and hoofer in every Hollywood backstage musical.
From 1922, Lightner was starring in Broadway revues. She made a couple of early musical shorts in 1928-29, but then scored a huge success in the Technicolor Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929). Sadly, her biggest success is now a lost film, which was criminally careless of Warner Bros.
Lightner’s time as a film star was very short. The musicals she shot in 1932 were released with the music excised, and a subsequent attempt to recast her as a dramatic actor failed. By 1933, she was playing second fiddle to Joan Crawford in MGM’s Dancing Lady.
After just fourteen feature films, Lightner retired from show business in 1934 to raise a family with her Gold Diggers director, Roy Del Ruth.
A database of performers in musicals seems an unlikely place to find the King of Hollywood. But William Clark Gable (1901-60) was a contract player and did what he was told–twice, in the case of musicals.
Gable became a stage actor at the age of 21, touring in stock companies. From 1923, he laboured in the fields of extra work in Hollywood, including a bit part dancing in Erich von Stroheim’s version of The Merry Widow (1925). In Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), he played a Roman guard. He continued to do stage work during this period, spending time in New York.
In 1931, Gable undertook a range of supporting roles in Hollywood, with his appearance in Night Nurse (1931) bringing him particular attention, playing the villainous chauffeur, Nick. Immediately afterwards,MGM cast him opposite Greta Garbo in Susan Lenox (Her Rise and Fall) and Joan Crawford in Possessed (both 1931). The first true ‘Clark Gable’ picture was Red Dust (1932), with Jean Harlow, establishing him as MGM’s leading leading man.
Loaned out to Columbia as a punishment for being difficult, Gable won an Oscar for the hugely-popular It Happened One Night (1934), and was nominated again for playing Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty(1935), a role he hated. In 1939, he was the people’s choice to play Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind (1939). He had by hen been dubbed ‘the King’ in a nationwide poll.
Shattered by the sudden death of his wife, Carole Lombard, Gable took time out from 1942 to 1944 to serve in the air force during the Second World War. After his return, his career never reached the same heights as previously, but he remained a star until his death aged 59. His final role was in John Huston’s film maudit The Misfits (1961).
Gable’s two musicals for MGM were Dancing Lady and San Francisco. In deference to his macho image, his characters were named Patch Gallagher and Blackie Norton.
Stage Mother is a pretty good film, but a lacklustre musical. Based on the backstage novel written by Bradford Ropes immediately after 42nd Street, and with Ropes as co-author of the screenplay, it is a much darker film than the Warner Bros adaptation of the earlier novel, the improbable happy ending notwithstanding. But it lacks 42nd Street’s humour and, most essentially, Busby Berkeley’s production numbers.
Kitty (Alice Brady), and the new-born Shirley, who is blissfully unaware of what lies ahead
Albertina Rasch was no Busby Berkeley,and the two production numbers in Stage Mother, the first of which launches Freed-Brown’s ‘Beautiful Girl’, are mostly by-the-numbers parades of swaying chorus girls.
What saves Stage Mother is the central performance of Alice Brady, following up her benevolent mother in Broadway to Hollywood with a convincing portrait of the fixated stage mother. In an early scene with her dead husband’s parents and forbidding sister, she is very moving, entirely credible with her nervous laughter. Later, she is a ruthless blackmailer in her daughter’s supposed interests, even acting as a procurer for the gay dance instructor.
Ralph (Ted Healy) finally persuades Kitty to marry him
Maureen O’Sullivan was a lesser talent, and very inexperienced, but she holds her own as the manipulated, and later manipulative, daughter. The real problem with her performance is that she exhibits not one iota of the stage talent that everyone else in the picture is attributing to her.
Director Charles Brabin was beyond his best years when he made Stage Mother; he would only make two further films, before retiring to enjoy the wealth he and his wife, Theda Bara, had accumulated. But he was always more than a Hollywood journeyman, and he and cinematographer George J Folsey achieved a better-looking film than might be expected, often using unconventional camera angles.
Kitty has charged $10,000 for her daughter’s virginity. Warren (Franchot Tone) shares his thoughts with Shirley (Maureen O’Sullivan)
Stage Mother has been described as a musicalized soap opera, and there is some justification in that. But it is an entertaining soap opera, let down only by a final scene in which all the blackmail and pimping is brushed to one side. It also contains an audition sequence in which Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer and Mary Ann Jackson, together with an unnamed contortionist, demonstrate just how awful child performers can be.
