The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Monte Vandergrift

    John Montanye Vandergrift (1893-1939) was a character actor who appeared in around 140 pictures, playing police officers in at least sixty of them.

    Prior to making films, Vandergrift worked in vaudeville, performing in a double act with his wife. He also acted on Broadway.

    Vandergrift made his screen debut in 1930, and mostly worked uncredited in programme features. Exceptions included John Ford’s Flesh (1932), King Kong (1933), Magnificent Obsession (1934), Captains Courageous (1937) and It’s a Wonderful World (1939).

    He acted in three Metro musicals, Stage Mother, Here Comes the Band and Balalaika (his final film).

  • Guy Usher

    James Guy Usher (1883-1944) was a theatre actor who became a character actor in films in his late forties, appearing in close to 200, predominantly ‘B’, pictures. His first credited role was as a murder victim in The Penguin Pool Mystery (1932), after which he was frequently cast as senior police officers, including Inspector Queen in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935).

    The few ‘A’ pictures Usher worked on without credit included Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Gabriel Over the Whitehouse (1933), It’s a Gift (1934, with onscreen credit), Fury (1936), Union Pacific (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941).

    Usher appeared in two MGM musicals in the mid 1930s: Stage Mother and Naughty Marietta (where he gets killed by pirates).

  • Henry Roquemore

    Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.

    The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.

    Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.

    Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.

  • Bradley Page

    Bradley Page (1901-85) had worked on Broadway before making his first film, Sporting Blood, in 1931. He eventually made over 100 pictures, split between credited feature parts and uncredited appearances.

    Page made few films of note. In fact, the two MGM musicals he appeared in–Stage Mother and The Big Store (credited as one of Douglass Dumbrille’s henchmen)–may be the most prestigious projects with which he was associated in a career that lasted just over ten years. 

    There seems to be no information about what Page did during the last forty years of his life.

  • Garry Owen

    Garry Owen (1902-51) was a hard-working character actor who laboured in the fields of programme pictures, usually without credit, over 180 times. But, unlike many of his peers, he was granted two standout appearances.   

    In 1936, Howard Hawks cast him as Mike Owens, the tragic figure in Ceiling Zero whose brain damage symbolizes the dangers inherent in early aviation. And, at the opposite end of the scale, Frank Capra gave him the final shot and the last line in his adaptation of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944): “I’m not a cab driver, I’m a coffee pot!”.

    Owen acted in six Metro musicals, starting with Stage Mother. This was followed by Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh, Ziegfeld Follies, No Leave, No Love and On an Island With You.

  • Frank O’ Connor

    It was quite an achievement for character actor Frank O’Connor (1881-1959) to cram well over 650 film appearances into even a forty-year career. Add in a couple of dozen pictures he directed and seven contributions to screenplays, and you have a very busy man.

    O’Connot starred in his earliest pictures, starting in 1915, but by 1921 he was pursuing a career as a director. Apparently it was an attempt to set up as a producer that ruined him financially, leading to over twenty years playing bits in hundreds of films. 

    But, amidst much dross, O’Connor showed up in some of Hollywood’s greatest pictures: King Kong (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Force of Evil (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Blue Gardenia (1953). Hawks, Capra, Welles, Curtiz, Wilder, Stevens, Ford, Lang: O’Connor kept good company.

    Frank O’Connor made appearances in six MGM musicals: Stage Mother, The Merry Widow, Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West and Little Nellie Kelly.

  • Billy O’Brien

    Like many other child actors, William Stephens O’Brien (1921-44) died young, but in his case heroically, when he was shot down during a mission in the South Pacific.

    O’Brien made his debut aged 5, in a Hal Roach short. A few years later he played in Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929). His first featured role was in The Lone Trail (1932), a Poverty Row western, and he continued to act, usually without credit, until he joined up following the attack on Pearl Harbour.

    In 1933, O’Brien made a brief appearance in Stage Mother.

  • Bert Moorhouse

    In a career lasting over a quarter of a century, character actor Herbert Green Moorhouse (1894-1954) made around 380 screen appearances. Some of these were in featured supporting roles, but later on he was predominantly an uncredited extra.

    Moorhouse made his debut, without credit, in The Cameraman (1928), the last really good film made by Buster Keaton before MGM crushed his spirit. In the same year, Moorhouse was a featured player in two Poverty Row pictures.

    Over the years, Moorhouse played a reporter in Mrs Deeds Goes to Town (1936); a nightclub patron in The Awful Truth (1937); Mary Astor’s dance partner in Midnight (1939); one of Hynkel’s officers in The Great Dictator (1940); another reporter in Sullivan’s Travels (1941); a party guest in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946); a pilot in A Foreign Affair (1948); the nitwit at Paramount who makes Nora Desmond think she is wanted for a fil in Sunset Boulevard (1950); and a newspaper editor in Ace in the Hole (1951).

    Moorhouse acted in fifteen Metro musicals in seventeen years, always uncredited, and starting with Stage Mother. He then played spectators at racetracks in Reckless, A Day at the Races and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. After that came Broadway Serenade, Broadway Melody of 1940, Two Girls on Broadway, Ziegfeld Girl, Thrill of a Romance, Easy to Wed, Till the Clouds Roll By, Living in a Big Way, Words and Music, Nancy Goes to Rio and Duchess of Idaho.

    Moorhouse became very ill in 1954 and took his own life.

  • Greta Meyer

    Greta Meyer (1883-1965) came from a German theatrical family and first appeared on stage, in one of her father’s productions, at the age of three. Later, she acted throughout Europe in plays and operettas. She also acted in a short film in 1917, and a couple of German features in the late 1920s.

    Meyer travelled to America as part of an operetta company, and stayed on after it had completed its run, becoming a US citizen in 1923. She performed widely in Yiddish theatre.

    Tonight or Never was Meyer’s first American film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1931, and in which she recreated a role she had played on Broadway a year earlier.

    Later, she appeared in John Ford’s Flesh (1932) as Jean Hersholt’s wife, and, uncredited, in Ford’s Pilgrimage (1933). She was the disturbed Madeline’s nurse in John M Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939) and uncredited as a masseuse in the all-female The Women (1939).

    Meyer acted in four MGM musicals, first of all uncredited as one of the stage mothers in the audition scene of Stage Mother. After that, she played the type of Mitteleuropean matron that was her speciality in Naughty Marietta (as Frau Schuman, with who Jeanette MacDonald shares her dreams), The Great Waltz and Bitter Sweet (as the cafe owner who sells a niece bottle of Tokay). 

  • Buddy Messinger

    Melvin Joseph Messinger (1907-65) had a successful career in silent shorts, initially as a child actor, and thereafter played uncredited supporting parts.

    Messinger made his debut in When Little Lindy Sang (1916), a rare film for its time in that it starred Ernestine Jones, a talented African-American child actor. The following year he was Captain Smollett in Treasure Island, a film in which the lead parts were all played by children and teenagers, and which also features his sister, Gertrude. He was in several of these ‘Sunset Kiddies’ productions of classic stories and fairy tales made by Fox.

    In 1920-21, Messinger had a recurring role in Goldwyn’s Edgar series, written by Booth Tarkington of Magnificent Amberson’s fame. In 1923-24, he starred as Buddy in his own series of shorts.

    From 1926, Messinger, no longer a child, starred in a series of comedy shorts with the Sunkist Bathing Beauties and a monkey. But after pictures started to talk, he was relegated to uncredited bit parts. Some of the better films of this period included Wild Boys of the Road(1933) and Modern Times (1936). He also appeared briefly in Citizen Kane (1941).

    Buddy Messinger was in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Hullabaloo and The Big Store.

    Later in life, he worked as ab assistant director in films and on television.

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