The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Don Redman

    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.

  • George Graff

    George Graff (1886-1973) was an American songwriter who co-wrote over 400 songs. Of these, one has survived to become a standard: ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, written with Ernest Ball and Chauncey Olcott in 1912.

    Graff lived a long life and this song became a kind of pension fund, earning him an alleged $10,000 a year in royalties up to the time of his death. Only a few years earlier, it had been featured in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967). ‘Irish Eyes’ is often mistaken for a traditional Irish ballad, but Graff admitted that he had never even visited Ireland.

    MGM used the song twice in its musicals: it was tortured by Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer in Stage Mother; and sung sweetly by Nelson Eddy in Let Freedom Ring.

  • Chauncey Olcott

    John Chancellor Olcott (1858?-1932) was a stage actor, singer and songwriter. He started out performing in minstrel shows, but eventually became a regular on Broadway.

    Olcott was of Irish descent, and many of his songs took the form of Irish ballads. Three have become standards: ‘Mother Machree’, ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ and, most particularly, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.

    The last of these has been heard in many pictures through the years, and was used twice in MGM musicals. Olcott died in 1932, so did not live to hear Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer’s painfully off-key rendition in Stage Mother. A few years later, Nelson Eddy treated it with a little more respect in Let Freedom Ring.

  • Thomas J Gray

    Thomas Joseph Gray (1888-1924) was a writer and lyricist who was contributing songs to Broadway shows as early as 1914. He served in the First World War, then picked up his career both at home and for London revues. His most frequent songwriting collaborators were Fred Fisher and Ray Walker.

    Gray started contributing stories to films in 1917, writing for actor Victor Moore. In 1924, he began writing titles for Harold Lloyd, working on films as that included Girl Shy (1924) and The Freshman (1925).

    Back in 1910, Gray and Fisher wrote a song with the catchy title ‘Any Little Girl That’s a Nice Little Girl Is the Right Little Girl For Me’. In 1933, MGM used it in Stage Mother, sung by Alice Brady, with a little help from Ted Healy.

    Gray died aged 36, from “a bronchial ailment”.

  • Bradford Ropes

    Bradford Ropes (1905-66) was one of the people who revived–perhaps saved–the Hollywood musical after its total slump in 1932. It was in that year that he published, at the age of 27, a novel called 42nd Street, inspired by his own experiences as a performer in vaudeville and, more specifically, on Broadway. The subsequent 1933 adaptation by Warner Bros revived the musical genre and became arguably the most successful musical of the first ten years of talking pictures.

    Ropes’s second novel, Stage Mother, came out in 1933 and was rushed into production by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Less successful as a musical–it had no Busby Berkeley–it was a grittier film, closer to the source novel. This is attributable to the fact that Ropes co-wrote the screenplay.

    Ropes went on to sign a contract with, of all studios, Republic, which resulted in some of the 1930s more interesting ‘B’ westerns. He also did further work for MGM, providing the stories for Hullabaloo and Ship Ahoy.

    In the 1950s, Ropes moved into writing for television

  • Stage Mother

    The Crew

    Charles BrabinDirector
    John MeehanScreenplay
    Bradford RopesScreenplay
    Arthur FreedSongwriter
    Nacio Herb BrownSongwriter
    Fred FisherSonwriter (uncredited)
    Thomas J GraySongwriter (uncredited)
    Ernest BallSongwriter (uncredited)
    Chauncey OlcottSongwriter (uncredited)
    George GraffSongwriter (uncredited)
    Don RedmanSongwriter (uncredited)
    Hunt StrombergProducer
    Maurice De PackhComposer (uncredited)
    Louis SilverComposer (uncredited)
    Louis SilverConductor
    George J FolseyCinematographer
    Frank E HullEditor
    Stan RogersArt Director
    Edwin B WillisInterior Decorator
    AdrianCostume Designer
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    Joseph M NewmanAssistant Director
    Albertina RaschChoreographer

  • Arthur Jarrett

    Arthur Leonard Jarrett Jr (1907-87) was a singer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader of note during the 1930s and 40s.

    Jarrett had a distinctive high tenor voice and, from the late 1920s, he sang with a variety of bands and also developed a recording career. He also made occasional appearances on the vaudeville stage, and appeared in a Betty Boop animation in 1932. 

    Jarrett founded his own orchestra in 1936, and appeared in a handful of films during the 1930s, including a Poverty Row western.

    Jarrett’s first involvement with MGM musicals was offscreen, when he dubbed for Sam Ash in Stage Mother, singing ‘Beautiful Girl’. In the same year, he appeared as himself in Dancing Lady, followed by Hollywood Party in 1934.

    Later in life, Jarrett worked extensively on television.

  • Tammany Young

    Tammany Young (1886-1936) made regular appearances on Broadway throughout the 1920s, including creating the role of Schwartz in the original production of The Front Page in 1928. He was well-known enough in the theatre world to have his caricature in the collection at Sardi’s restaurant.

    Young’s parallel career as a film actor began way back in 1911, and in 1914 he appeared in a D W Griffith short. In 1914-15, he starred in thirteen short films as Bill the Office Boy. Altogether, he acted in over 100 silent pictures.

    In the sound era, he made many uncredited appearances, but also had featured roles in films such as She Done Him Wrong (1933), Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933), Tugboat Annie (1933) and It’s a Gift (1934).

    Young was only in one MGM musical, playing a taxi driver in Stage Mother. His career and well-publicized hobby of gatecrashing high-profile events were ended by his sudden death from a heart attack.

  • Beal Wong

    For a Chinese actor, making a career in Golden Age Hollywood was no easy task, but Beal Wong (1906-62) gave it a good go.He made his debut in an uncredited walk-on in MGM’s Stage Mother, and was still working almost thirty years later, with a final appearance in a Dean Martin comedy, Who’s Got the Action? (1962).

    Wong’s work could be niche, as suggested by the titles of some of the pictures he appeared in: The Mysterious Mr Wong (1934), Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935), China Passage (1937), Think Fast, Mr Moto (1937), Torchy Blane in Chinatown (1939), Escape from Hong Kong (1942), East of Chinatown (1942).

    He also had to be ‘ethnically flexible’. During the Second World War, there were plenty of roles as long as he was prepared to play a Japanese.

    But Wong did manage to get work in a better class of picture from time to time: Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July (1940); Across the Pacific (1942); Lady of Burlesque (1943); The Keys of the Kingdom (1944); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947); and Experiment in Terror (1962).

    In addition to Stage Mother, Wong appeared in two other MGM musicals, Student Tour and Lady Be Good. 

  • Glen Walters

    Canadian Glen Walters (1901-97) made one of her earliest appearances with Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1936). Her final acting role was in the television series Kung Fu (1973). You do not get careers like that any more.

    In close to 100 film appearances, Walters would seem to have gained only one role with an onscreen credit, in Henry King’s She Goes to War (1929), and, for some unknown reason, in the only surviving version of the picture, only her first name is given. But she was an exceptionally tall woman, and it is unmistakably her.

    For this reason, it is usually easy to spot Walters in her background roles in films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Swamp Water (1941), The Southerner (1942), Unconquered (1947), All the King’s Men (1947), Adam’s Rib (1949) and The Night of the Hunter (1955).

    Walters appeared in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Summer Stock and, most noticeably, in the ‘A Shine on Your Shoes’ number in The Ban Wagon.

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