The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Nick Copeland

    Nicholas W Copeland (1894-1940) died aged 45, but still managed to notch up well over 100 screen appearances in a career lasting just twelve years.

    Copeland made a short at Fox in 1928, and followed this with his first feature, playing a henchman, at Warner Bros. He was usually uncredited, but showed up in some top-class pictures, including Twentieth Century and The Thin Man (both 1934), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

    Copeland played parts in five MGM musicals. Flying High was followed by Student Tour, Reckless, Swiss Miss and New Moon (his final film).

    He had served in the First World War and was buried with military honours.

  • Tommy Conlon

    Tommy Conlon (1917-2000) made the first screen appearance of his short career, at the age of 14, in MGM’s Flying High.

    Conlon went on to make about a dozen films, with a prominent role in DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932). His final role was also for DeMille, uncredited in Reap the Wild Wind (1942).

  • Edna Callahan

    Edwina G Callahan (1912-2007) was, unlike many of her contemporaries in studio chorus lines, a dancer with training. She had begun dancing professionally while still in high school and was working regularly on the stage by her late teens. 

    Callahan made her screen debut, aged 18, in Fox’s weird and wonderful Just Imagine (1930), and made an appearance the following year in MGM’s Flying High.

    Callahan’s film career was over by 1937, but she had by then been in four more Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance and Rosalie (her final film).

    In the 1930s, Callahan was briefly married to cinematographer Gregg Toland.

  • Mary Ashcraft

    Like many other young women of her time, the show business ambitions of Mary Ashcraft (1905-79) ended up with a few appearances as chorus girls and the like.

    One of those appearances was in Metro’s Flying High.

    In 1927, there were press reports that Ashcraft had been saved from drowning on the set of Swim, Girl, Swim by renowned swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who was starring in the picture. It may be true, but the story reeks of the studio publicity machine.

  • Loretta Andrews

    Loretta (possibly Lorena) Andrews (1911-2004)was a long-lived actor whose Hollywood career was quite short. She made her debut in Palmy Days (1931), and by 1936 had appeared in 29 pictures, mostly musicals, mostly in uncredited roles as chorus girls and models.

    Andrews’s greatest distinction was probably being present in four classic Warner Bros musicals with dance direction by Busby Berkeley: 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Dames. She had earlier worked under Berkeley on MGM’s Flying High. Andrews also appeared in The Great Ziegfeld.

    Andrews is described as a “former film actress” in a press report about a court case concerning the estate of her late husband.

    IMDb suggests Andrews made a one-film comeback in 1941 in a Judy Canova comedy.

  • Gus Arnheim

    Gustavus Arnheim (1897-1955) was a band leader and songwriter, whose most lasting composition was ‘I Cried for You’, written in 1923, with Abe Lyman and Arthur Freed.

    Arnheim started out as a pianist, working for a time as accompanist to Sophie Tucker. He set up his own orchestra in 1927.

    Arnheim and his band appeared in Vitaphone shorts in 1928-29 before making their feature debut in Universal’s Broadway in 1929. The orchestra was in about a dozen pictures, one of which was Metro’s Flying High. They also showed up in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). 

    ‘I Cried for You’ was sung by Judy Garland in Babes in Arms, by Helen Forrest in Bathing Beauty and, briefly, by Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me. Arnheim’s song ‘Sweet and Lovely’ was ‘performed’ by June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven in Two Girls and a Sailor, with the voices of Virginia Rees and Dorothy Jackson.

  • Guy Kibbee

    As if to separate himself from the multitude of his contemporaries who started their show business careers in vaudeville, the teenage Guy Bridges Kibbee (1882-1956) started out entertaining on Mississippi riverboats. He later became a leading man for a variety of stock companies.

    The big time came well-on in his career: he made his Broadway debut in 1930, and soon afterwards was signed by Paramount. (He had previously made one short comedy for Warner Bros.) He went on to become one of those immediately-recognizable characters who helped make 30s’ Hollywood as great as it was. His speciality was jovial, a bit dim, occasionally lecherous. The last of these came to the fore in two great Warner musicals, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933).

    Kibee had a rare starring role in Babbitt (1934), the Warners’ less-than-faithful adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s prize-winning novel. He also played malleable Governor Hopper in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Dr Gibbs in the film of Our Town (1940). 

    Guy Kibbee was in four Metro musicals: Flying High, Let Freedom Ring, Babes in Arms and Girl Crazy. 

  • Charles Winninger

    Karl John Winninger (1884-1969), the son of Austrian immigrants, was a seasoned vaudeville performer by the time he made his first short film in 1915. He made the occasional film thereafter, but launched his film career proper after the advent of sound with Soup to Nuts (1930), which was the debut of the Three Stooges.

    Prior to this, Winninger had created the role of Cap’n Andy Hawks in Show Boat (1927), a role which he recreated in Universal’s 1936 film version.

    Winninger was a reliable supporting player throughout his film career, notably in Nothing Sacred (1937) and Destry Rides Again (1939). He only ever played one leading role, in John Ford’s frequently-misunderstood masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright (1953), where he played Judge Billy Priest.

    Charles Winninger co-starred in six MGM musicals, beginning as the doctor in Flying High in 1931. He followed this with Babes in Arms (playing Mickey Rooney’s father), Little Nellie Kelly and Ziegfeld Girl (playing Judy Garland’s father in both), Broadway Rhythm (as George Murphy’s father) and Living in a Big Way (as Gene Kelly’s father-in-law). 

  • Kathryn Crawford

    Kathryn Moran (1902-80) could have ruined her life when she eloped at 15 with her sister’s boyfriend. Luckily for her, that did not happen. She got her life back together and, aged 17, gave up a job as a shop assistant to pursue a career in musical theatre. 

    After a few years performing with stock companies, Crawford was spotted by director Wesley Ruggles, who got her a part in a Hoot Gibson western. She told a newspaper that she and Ruggles intended to marry, but that never happened.But Crawford did get a contract at Universal and made seven films in 1929. 

    Crawford made her only Broadway appearance in 1930, in Cole Porter’s The New Yorkers, where she controversially introduced the song ‘Love for Sale’.

    In 1931, Crawford’s career took a downturn. She starred in MGM’s Flying High, then the quality of her roles declined and she stopped acting in 1933 before marrying for the second time. She made one further appearance in 1941, in an obscure ‘B’ picture about sex trafficking, but had a long and successful career as an interior designer. 

  • Pat O’Brien

    William Joseph Patrick O’Brien (1899-1983) will be remembered as a key member of the Warner Bros company of the 1930s, alongside his friend James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Edward G Robinson and Bette Davis.

    O’Brien trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and pursued a successful stage career, including on Broadway. New York-based, he made his first short films for Vitaphone, before travelling to Hollywood to star in The Front Page (1931), in which he had appeared on Broadway. 

    He went on to star in around 100 pictures, playing more than his share of wiseguys, reporters and cops. In 1932 he was loud-mouthed flyer Duke Talbot in John Ford’s Air Mail, and, in1939, as a change of pace, he was the priest who persuades Cagney to turn yellow for the sake of the Dead End Kids.

    Musicals were not really Pat O’Brien’s things, but he did co-star (in a non-singing role)with Bert Lahr in Flying High. He played, of course, a fast-talking con man.  

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