The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Alice Lake

    Alice Lake (1895-1967) is a textbook example of an actor who scaled the heights during the silent era, but ended in poverty, all but forgotten.

    Lake started out as a dancer while still in her teens, before making her first films in the mid-1910s. She did a lot of work for Mack Sennett, and often performed with Roscoe Arbuckle. In The Cook (1918) she was the waitress who had to be repeatedly rescued by Arbuckle and Buster Keaton from the attentions of Al St John.

    She also played straight roles in dramas, such as Jack Conway’s Lombardi, Ltd (1919). In 1921, she played Jean Oliver in the original version of The Hole in the Wall.

    Lake had leading roles in over eighty silent pictures, but the quality of her parts declined with the introduction of sound, and after 1933 she made only ten or so uncredited appearances. Two of these were in Metro musicals, Stage Mother and Babes in Toyland. 

  • Tiny Jones

    It is quite unusual that Elizabeth Jones (1875-1952) did not acquire her nickname ironically; she actually was diminutive.

    Jones was a Welsh actor who travelled to the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. She made her first screen appearance for John Ford, in The Iron Horse (1924), and he also directed her last film, The Quiet Man (1952). In between, she was in six other Ford pictures, including as one of the few genuine Welsh performers in How Green Was My Valley (1942).

    Jones worked regularly, always without credit, for some of Hollywood’s other great directors: Erich von Stroheim, including in Greed (1924); Frank Capra in Lady for a Day (1934); William A Wellman, as a resident of Warsaw, Vermont who sneers at Frederic March in Nothing Sacred (1937).

    She was in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942), and worked twice for Orson Welles, in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Macbeth (1948). She was also in two of Joseph Losey’s early pictures, M and The Prowler (both 1951).

    Tiny Jones made around 140 appearances, but only one in an MGM musical, as one of the stage mothers in Stage Mother.

  • Gladden James

    Gladden James (1888-1948) was starring in films as early as 1911, when he made several that were directed by the pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché when she was working in New Jersey.

    James continued to take leading or prominent supporting roles throughout the 1910s and 20s, in well over eighty pictures. But after 1929, he was almost wholly restricted to uncredited bit parts. He was one of the reporters greeting Nobel prizewinner Robert Taylor off the plane in Magnificent Obsession (1934) and the court clerk in Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936).

    Gladden James acted in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and For Me and My Gal, playing the doctor who declares Gene Kelly unfit for active duty.

  • June Gittelson

    June Gittelson (1910-93) was a character actor who appeared most frequently in comedies, with humour very often derived from her physical size. A glance at her IMDb entry will find repeated use of the word “fat”.

    Gittelson made her debut aged just sixteen, in a comedy short called The Glorious Fourth (1927). She was, as throughout her career, uncredited. She played a prisoner in Three on a Match (1932), and in Footlight Parade (1933) was the Myrtle who James Cagney mistakes for a Fanny.

    In 1939 Gittelson was one of the 130 or so women in the cast of The Women. But her most prominent roles tended to be in Three Stooges’ shorts, of which she made half a dozen, and similar short films with other comics.

    Gittelson made appearances in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Student Tour and the 1940 version of New Moon,

  • Lew Kelly

    Louis Kelly (1879-1944) was one of those experienced theatre actors who found work in Hollywood after the introduction of sound.

    Kelly’s first appearance was actually in one of the last of the silents, a Buck Jones western called The Branded Sombrero (1928). He followed this with Barnum Was Right (1929), a comedy made in both sound and silent versions. His first full-fledged talking picture was The Woman Racket (1930), a crime drama. 

    By 1944, Kelly had made around 230 films. They were mostly programmers and he was usually uncredited. The most prestigious pictures he appeared in were I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), as the cook in a diner, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

    Kelly played Jake, a stagehand, in Metro’s Stage Mother.

  • Luis Alberni

    Luis Alberni (1886-1962) had been acting for a few years in his native Spain when he travelled to the United States in 1914. He succeeded in finding stage work, but quickly made his screen debut in Children of the Ghetto (1915).

    Over the next forty years, Alberni appeared in over 170 pictures, playing a wide range of ‘ethnic’ parts. Most of them were programmers, but from time to time he secured featured roles in more prestigious films. In 1933, he played Dr Bomb in Topaze, alongside John Barrymore.

    Alberni was the nightclub owner in Roberta (1935) and had a notable role as Mr Louis Louis in Easy Living (1937). He played Basset for James Whale in The Great Garrick (1937) and was the Pike family’s chef in The Lady Eve (1941), made the same year that he played the King of Naples in That Hamilton Woman.

    Luis Alberni was in four Metro musicals, starting out uncredited in Stage Mother and Let Freedom Ring. He then had a featured role as Nick the cafe owner in Babes on Broadway, and finished, again without credit, in I Married an Angel. 

  • John Elliott

    John Hugh Elliott (1876-1956) worked his way through the acting ranks to make his debut on Broadway in 1917, at the relatively advanced age of 40. He made his first film two years later, in When a Man Loves (1919). 

    Elliott eventually acted in over 300 films, but only eighteen were made during the silent era, when he maintained his stage career. He came into his own with the introduction of sound, when stage experience became a valuable commodity in Hollywood. In 1930 he took a supporting role in The Rampant Age, and was also credited as dialogue director, a function that became common in the early years of talking pictures.

    Elliott was uncredited in well over half of his films, and only rarely in high-status productions. He played a bank director in the infamous Baby Face (1933) and was the Exalted Exhausted Ruler in Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert (1933).

    In Jesse James (1939), Elliott played a judge, while he was a party guest in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He also appeared in the film noir The Dark Corner (1946) and was directed by Jean Renoir in The Woman on the Beach (1947).

    Elliott’s lone performance in an MGM musical was in Stage Mother.

  • Margaret Jones

    Margaret Eugenia Jones (1917-2002) had three siblings who were also child actors, the most successful being her younger sister, Marcia Mae Jones. Margaret’s career lasted just ten years and comprised only five film appearances.

    Her one MGM musical was also her final film: she played a student in Stage Mother.

  • Shirley Jean Rickert

    Shirley Jean Rickert (1926-2009) was unfortunate enough to be the child of a stage mother, who hustled success in a baby contest into a Hollywood career for her child. 

    Rickert was in five of Hal Roach’s ‘Little Rascals’ pictures, and played Tomboy Taylor in Mickey Rooney’s Mickey McGuire series. She also played herself in the multi-studio charity fundraiser The Stolen Jools (1931).

    When the child parts ended, Rickert continued to make occasional appearances in films, usually as a dancer or chorus girl, while pursuing a range of other jobs. During the 1950s she worked in burlesque as an exotic dancer (stripper), under the title ‘Gloria and her Crowning Glory’, a reference to her long blonde hair.

    Rickert appeared in seven MGM musicals, starting with the aptly-named Stage Mother, where she played Maureen O’Sullivan as a child. Later on, she danced in Best Foot Forward, Meet the People, Good News, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain and I Love Melvin. All these appearances were uncredited.

  • Harrison Greene

    Vaudeville performer Harrison Greene (1884-1945) crammed around 150 features and 100 shorts into his fifteen-year screen career. Rarely credited in ‘A’ pictures, he at least earned a medium closeup in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), one of his first appearances.

    Greene’s parts were generally small, but more than simple walk-ons. He danced with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and was one of the (many) people looking for an apartment in The More the Merrier (1943).

    Greene was in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Broadway Melody of 1938 and The Ice Follies of 1939. The AFI also asserts that Greene was brought in to direct the Virginia Reel performed during the dream sequence in Going Hollywood, presumably because it was not in Albertina Rasch’s wheelhouse.

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