The Numbers
| Hold Your Man | Arthur Freed, Nacio Herb Brown | Winnie Lightner and chorus |
| Everything I Have Is Yours | Burton Lane, Harold Adamson | Art Jarrett |
| My Dancing Lady | Dorothy Fields, Jimmy McHugh | Art Jarrett |
| Heigh-Ho, the Gang’s All Here | Burton Lane, Harold Adamson | Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford, chorus |
| Let’s Go Bavarian | Burton Lane, Harold Adamson | Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford, chorus |
| (That’s the) Rhythm of the Day | Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart | Nelson Eddy, Mildred Carroll (for Joan Crawford) |
The Synopsis
Tod Newton and a bunch of swells get tickets for a burlesque show [Hold Your Man]. There is a police raid and both performers and audience are hauled off to the night court. Janie Barlow tells the judge she was stripping in a burlesque because it was the only dancing work she could find and she has to eat. She is sentenced to a $30 fine or 30 days in jail. Tod pays her fine and buys her a meal. Janie is grateful, but makes it clear she has no interest in being kept by a rich man.
At home, Janie reads a note given to her by Tod. It gives her advice on grammar and clothes, and contains $50, “to buy a dress without a zipper”. Janie tells her roommate Rosetta that she is quitting burlesque. Patch Gallagher is putting on a new show, and Janie is determined to get a part in it.
Next day, Janie goes to the Bradley Theatre, where Patch has, reluctantly, cast Vivien Warner in the lead. Janie cannot get in to see him, but she follows him out of the theatre and then follows him around for days. She runs into Tod, who has been looking for her. He gives her a letter of introduction to Jasper Bradley, Patch’s boss, and promises to ask for nothing in return.
Patch tells his assistant, Steve, to audition Janie and then give her the brush-off. But Steve is impressed by Janie’s dancing and calls Patch. Patch gives her a job and tells her to stop following him.
Next day, Tod and Bradley discuss Tod’s secret backing of the show. He arranges for Janie to be paid during rehearsals, unlike the other members of the chorus. Tod arranges a party for the whole company [Everything I Have Is Yours]. Tod and Janie kiss, but then she goes home.
Next morning, Patch finds Janie working out in the gym, even though she has the morning off. They spar with each other, and Patch mentions the possibility of giving Janie a speciality number. Tod takes Janie to his home in the country, where she meets his family.
Tod asks Janie to marry him, but she says her career is more important and tells him about the speciality number. She agrees to marry him if the show is not a success.
Patch decides he wants the show rewritten and modernized, and he offers Janie the top spot. [My Dancing Lady].
While rehearsing with Fred Astaire [Heigh-Ho, the Gang’s All Here], Janie’s leg gives way. Massaging her leg, Patch asks Janie about newspaper stories concerning the crowd she is running with. He advises her not to marry into money. Janies assures him she is not planning to quit on him.
Bradley suddenly cancels the show and leaves for France. Tod invites Janie on a cruise to Cuba. Patch shows his unhappiness when Janie tells him she is probably getting married.
Patch decides to produce the show using his own money. He tells Steve to bring back Vivien, because Janie has “gone Park Avenue”.
Janie has no fun in Cuba and asks Tod to take her home. Back in New York, Patch, who is not getting on with Vivien, learns that Tod had paid Bradley to close the show.
The night before the show opens, Janie finds Patch drunk in a nightclub. He tells her the truth about Tod’s involvement with the show. Janie follows Patch back to his apartment and goads him into putting her back in the show. They rehearse all night and the show opens [Heigh-Ho, the Gang’s All Here; Let ‘s Go Bavarian]. Tod is in the audience. [(That’s The) Rhythm of the Day]. The show is a success.
Tod asks Janie to marry him and continue with her career, but she says their worlds will not mix. Janie tells Patch that Tod is gone for good and they kiss.
Joseph Max Newman (1909-2006) was a highly-respected assistant director who worked his way up to become a mediocre director.
Newman started out in the film industry as an office boy, then a clerk. His first assignments as assistant director were in 1933, when worked on eight MGM productions, including Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor. He worked for Cukor again on David Copperfield (1934), for which he was nominated for the Assistant Director Academy Award.
MGM allowed him to start directing shorts in 1938, alongside his work as AD on features. His first full-length picture was Northwest Rangers (1942), Metro’s version of a ‘B’ movie.
Newman directed around 45 low-budget features before moving to television. His most high-profile picture This Island Earth (1955), though its more interesting aspects are attributable to Jack Arnold, who reshot some of Newman’s footage.
Seven MGM musicals had Newman as AD: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, San Francisco (another Oscar nomination), Maytime and The Firefly. Some sources claim that he directed the famous ‘Donkey Serenade’ sequence in The Firefly.
Frank Edgar Hull (1882-1968) was a film editor who spent most of his career working for MGM and, to a lesser extent, Fox. He worked on around eighty pictures in the period 1920-50.
Hull is famous to film historians for working closely with Erich von Stroheim on the editing of Greed (1924). He received no credit on the final version of the film after it had been drastically cut and re-edited by MGM. Hull also worked with von Stroheim on The Wedding March (1928), which was also subject to studio interference, this time by Paramount.
Hull’s projects were never as prestigious again, though he did work with John Ford on one of his masterpieces, They Were Expendable (1945).
Frank Hull edited six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Here Comes the Band, A Day at the Races and Panama Hattie.
No one photographed more MGM musicals than George Joseph Folsey (1898-1988). He spent 27 years at the studio, was credited cinematographer on twenty-one musicals and did uncredited work on another. Only Oliver T Marsh gets close.
Folsey was fourteen when he joined Jesse Lasky’s Famous Players company in New York as an office boy. Within a couple of years he was working as assistant cameraman [sic], with his first film believed to be The Incorrigible Dukane (1915), with John Barrymore.
He got his first credit as cinematographer, aged 23), on His Bridal Night (1919), and did so well that he became star Alice Brady’s photographer of choice. Folsey was prolific in the final years of the silent era, shooting 36 films from 1920 to 1928.
At Paramount, Folsey was cinematographer on Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), on Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, and on the Marx Brothers’ first two films.
Folsey moved to Hollywood in 1932, after signing with MGM. He got off to a flying start with his first picture, reunited with Barrymore on Reunion in Vienna (1933), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated thirteen times over the years, but never won.
Non-musical highlights of Folsey’s years at MGM included Marie Antionette (1938), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Under the Clock (1945), State of the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Forbidden Planet (1956).
The twenty-two MGM musicals shot by Folsey were: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Reckless, The Great Ziegfeld, Two Girls on Broadway, Lady Be Good, Rio Rita, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Thousands Cheer, Meet Me in St Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr Imperium, Lovely to Look At, Million Dollar Mermaid, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Band Wagon (uncredited), Deep in My Heart and Hit the Deck.
The status of Louis Silberstein (1889-1954) as the pioneer of film music is unassailable, given that he worked as musical director and composer on The Jazz Singer (1927), the ur-musical/talking picture.
Silvers had already claimed his place in musical history when, aged 24, he composed the music for ‘April Showers’, with lyrics by Buddy De Sylva. He also wrote the music for the experimental sound sequences in the D W Griffith turkey Dream Street (1921). He also composed for three other Griffith pictures.
Silvers had started out as a vaudeville pianist and was working as a musical director on Broadway when he went to Hollywood. His work on The Jazz Singer is far more nuanced and inventive than the film in general, or Al Jolson’s overblown performance in particular, though it rarely figures in discussion of the picture’s importance.
Silvers went on to compose music for over thirty films and act as musical director on around seventy. He also conducted the music for dozens of Warner’s early Vitaphone recordings. In 1935, he won the Oscar for Best Original Score for One Night of Love (1934).
For MGM, Silvers composed and conducted incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady, and co-wrote ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.
Composer Maurice De Packh (1896-1960) was already working as an orchestrator on Broadway by the time he was 22, and its was in that capacity that he excelled. He continued to work on Broadway for decades, while maintaining a parallel career in films.
De Packh, usually without credit, arranged the scores for some of Hollywood’s greatest Golden Age pictures. The total exceeded 240, but some of the highlights were: Queen Christina (1933), The Informer (1935), Top Hat (1935), Ninotchka (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939, one of several), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Nightmare Alley (1947), Unfaithfully Yours (1948), All About Eve (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Rio Bravo (1959) and Spartacus (1960, his final film).
De Packh started out in MGM musicals composing incidental music for Stage Mother and Dancing Lady. He was also the arranger on the latter, and later orchestrated Annie Get Your Gun, The Belle of New York, Singin’ in the Rain, The Merry Widow, The Student Prince, I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Gigi. He also co-wrote the song ‘Schnarzan’ for Hollywood Party.
Benjamin Hunt Stromberg (1894-1968) was, for eighteen years, one of the most powerful men at Hollywood’s most powerful studio.
After a brief career as a reporter, Stromberg became Samuel Goldwyn’s publicity director in New York, before being sent to Hollywood in 1918. He then joined Thomas Ince, and in 1920 directed a promotional short, A Trip Through the World’s Greatest Motion Picture Studios.
In 1921, Stromberg set up his own production company, and produced his first film, The Foolish Age. From 1921-25, he directed and/or produced a dozen or so, predominantly short, pictures.
Stromberg joined the newly-formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925, joining Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf as one of its senior executives. In 1928, he produced two of its early successes, the award-winning White Shadows in the South Seas and Our Dancing Daughters.
During the 1930s, Stromberg produced all of Jean Harlow’s pictures and, running into the 40s, the Thin Man series. He also supervised Marie Antoinette (1938), The Women (1949) and Pride and Prejudice (1940).
After falling out with Mayer, Stromberg produced a number of independent pictures, with varying degrees of success, the best being Lady of Burlesque (1943) and The Strange Woman (1946), which he co-wrote with director Edgar G Ulmer.
Stromberg was an important producer of MGM musicals in the 1930s. Cutting his teeth on Stage Mother, he then worked on six Jeanette MacDonald vehicles: Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Maytime, The Firefly, Sweethearts and I Married an Angel. He also found time to produce the hugely successful The Great Ziegfeld.
Donald Matthew Redman (1900-64) was a bandleader, singer, songwriter and musical arranger for performers including Count Basie and Pearl Bailey.
Redman has been described as “one of the first great jazz arrangers and…a pivotal figure in the development of Swing and the Big Band style Jazz”. Which makes his one link with the MGM musical even funnier.
One of Redman’s most successful songs was ‘How’m I Doin’?’, written in 1926 and recorded by a number of artists, including Redman himself. But in MGM Stage Mother it is given a twelve-second rendition by ten-year-old Mary Ann Jackson that is arguably (certainly) the most memorable sequence in the film. She shakes her head, slaps her thigh, rotates her hips and bawls out the inappropriate lyrics in a way that only a true stage mother could love. It’s probably not what Don Redman had in mind.
