The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • A Lady’s Morals

    Some ThoughtsNo thesaurus is needed to find the best word to describe A Lady’s Morals. ‘Dull’ is the obvious choice. 

    Jenny Lind (Grace Moore) is affronted by the ardour of stalker Paul Brandt (Reginald Denny)

    Grace Moore was the second star of the Metropolitan Opera signed up by MGM but, unlike Lawrence Tibbett, she has no onscreen charisma. In real life–and judging from her enjoyable autobiography–Moore was lively and vivacious, but none of that comes across in her film debut. Her performance is far too weak to carry the picture, and no one knew that better than Moore herself, who wrote scathingly about it. 

    She is not helped by the fact that the film’s subject, Jenny Lind, lived a stainless and uneventful life, reflected in the fact that the only moment of drama in A Lady’s Morals is a bout of stage fright.

    Reginald Denny’s mannered performance aonly adequate support. In his first scenes he seems to be continuing his irritating performance as Bob in Madam Satan; later, he is self-sacrificing. Wallace Beery makes nothing of his brief appearance as P T Barnum, because he is given nothing to do. He was given another, and better, stab at the role in The Mighty Barnum (1934).

    Jenny Lind is about to be overwhelmed by stage fright

    Sidney Franklin’s direction and George Barnes’s cinematography are workmanlike, but it is the screenplay that really disappoints. Dorothy Farnum was forced to fictionalize Jenny Lind’s unexciting life, but produces only a hackneyed tale involving blindness brought on by being hit on the head with a bottle. 

    MGM scored something of a coup by persuading the venerable Carrie Jacobs-Bond to contribute the song ostensibly written by Denny’s character, but otherwise the newly-written score is workaday. This is in contrast to the songs by Donizetti and Bellini. The studio had put a toe in the water of Grand Opera in Call of the Flesh, and continues the experiment here. Further steps were curtailed, however, by the 1932 moratorium. 

    Jenny and Paul are reunited in a happy ending that would have surprised the real Jenny Lind’s husband

    By all accounts, Jenny Lind (1931), the French remake of A Lady’s Morals, was a better film. Running slightly longer, it was directed by the talented Arthur Robison and playwright Jacques Deval worked on the screenplay.

  • James Brock

    James Kendall Brock (1901-63) was a sound recording engineer who spent most of his career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and worked on sixteen musicals during that time.

    Brock began, under the supervision of Douglas Shearer, on A Lady’s Morals. Here, as for most pictures, he was uncredited.

    Barnes was the sound mixer on The Merry Widow and A Night at the Opera, then sound engineer on The Great Ziegfeld, Maytime, The Girl of the Golden West, Du Barry Was a Lady, On an Island With You, Easter Parade, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Band Wagon, Easy to Love, The Student Prince, Interrupted Melody, Merry Andrew and Gigi.

  • George Barnes

    Lush is a word often applied (though not in the South Wales sense) to the work of cinematographer George Scott Barnes (1892-1953). His lighting of black-and-white film, combined with effortless tracking shots, made him an exemplar of the classical Hollywood style. He also served as a mentor to Glenn Toland, who further developed Barnes’s interest in dep focus.

    Barnes made his first film as cinematographer for the Thomas Ince Company, but was for many years a mainstay of Samuel Goldwyn Productions. He worked for a variety of studios during his career, and for many of the foremost directors, including Hitchcock (winning the Oscar for Rebecca [1940]), Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Henry King, Billy Wilder, Cecil B DeMille and John Ford (for whom he shot the infamous Sex Hygiene [1942]).

    Barnes, shot one MGM musical, A Lady’s Morals.

  • Carrie Jacobs-Bond

    Carrie Minetta Jacobs-Bond (1862-1946) was a prolific songwriter and by far the most successful female composer of her day. But she is remembered today, if she is remembered at all, for one piece: the parlour song ‘I Love You Truly’, of which about eight million sheet music copies were sold.

    A late song by Jacobs-Bond, ‘Lovely Hour’, was performed by Grace Moore in A Lady’s Morals. 

  • Harry M Woods

    Harry MacGregor Woods (1896-1970) was a Tin Pan Alley composer whose name is rarely heard, but who produced many standards from the Great American Songbook. These included ‘When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along)’, ‘I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover’, ‘Side by Side’ and ‘Try a Little Tenderness’.

    Woods rarely wrote directly for the screen, though his songs have been heard in hundreds of films. One exception was Metro’s A Lady’s Morals. 

    ‘When the Red, Red Robin’ is sung by Susan Hayward in I’ll Cry Tomorrow. 

  • Oscar Straus

    Oscar Nathan Strauss [sic] (1870-1954) was a highly-productive Viennese composer of operettas, orchestral music, film scores and songs. His most famous work, The Chocolate Soldier (1908), was ostensibly filmed by MGM, but little of Straus’s music was used.

    Straus spent a few years working in America from 1930, during which time he contributed music to A Lady’s Morals and, perhaps more memorably, to two Lubitsch musicals, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) and One Hour with You (1932).

    Late in life, Straus provided the scores for two masterpieces by Max Ophuls, La ronde (1950) and Madame de… (1953). 

  • Arthur Richman

    Arthur Reichman (1886-1944) was a successful playwright who dabbled in screenwriting during the 1930s.

    Richman wrote a string of successful plays performed on Broadway in the 1920, including The Awful Truth (1922), which was filmed several times, most successfully with Cary Grant and Irene Dunn in 1937. In 1924, he was elected President of the Dramatists Guild of America.

    Richman’s screen work was generally uninspiring, though he did work without credit on Imitation of Life (1934). For MGM, he contributed dialogue to A Lady’s Morals.

  • John Meehan

    John Meehan (1890-1954) was a Canadian actor and dramatist with some limited success on Broadway who made his greatest mark as a screenwriter for MGM. His play Bless You, Sister (1927) was the source for Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931). 

    Meehan signed a contract with the studio in 1929, along with many other Broadway alumni. Over the next twenty years, he worked on many pictures, including A Free Soul (1931), Dinner at Eight (1933, uncredited) and Boy’s Town (1938). 

    Meehan worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals, Stage Mother, Babes in Arms and Three Daring Daughters.

  • Claudine West

    Ivy Claudine Godber (1890-1943) was a British novelist and playwright (to little lasting effect, it would seem), who journeyed to Hollywood in 1929 to write for the talking pictures, where she found considerable success.

    Signed up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, West contributed to the scripts of some of the studio’s most successful films of the 30s and early 40s. These included Queen Christina (1933, uncredited), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Good Earth (1937), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest (both 1942). She shared Oscars for the last three pictures.

    West worked on four Metro musicals: A Lady’s Morals and, without credit, Maytime, The Firefly and The Chocolate Soldier.

    Claudine West worked as a codebreaker during the First World War, and it is noticeable that Mrs Miniver and her screenplay for Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940) were as fervently anti-Nazi as might be expected from somone with brothers serving in the RAF at the time.

  • Madam Satan

    Some Thoughts

    Madam Satan is a fascinating film. Fascinating in the sense that, while it is really not very good at all, it is almost impossible to look away from. And the nagging thought, while watching it, is: what were they thinking?

    Angela (Kay Johnson) as Madam Satan, vamps it up for an unsuspecting Bob (Reginal Denny in a miniskirt)

    This only applies to the second half, of course, because Madam Satan is a little like two different films spliced together. The first fifty minutes or so are the kind of sex comedy which had been so successful for Cecil B DeMille earlier in his career; films like Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). This is nowhere as good as those earlier films, but DeMille was seeking to find his feet in the sound era, following the melodrama of his first talkie, Dynamite (1929), by reverting to familiar territory.

    The second part of Madam Satan is something else entirely, the strangest musical made at MGM before Yolanda and the Thief came along fifteen years later to give it some competition. But while Yolanda is an extremely well-made oddity, Madam Satan is a farrago directed by someone who did not know one end of a musical from the other.

    Trixie (Lillian Roth) parachutes into a men’s sauna and doesn’t seem too put out

    Madam Satan is, considering the money spent on it and the records of the people involved in making it, largely incompetent. For example, the film was edited by DeMille regular Anne Bauchens, who cut all of his greatest films. But Madam Satan is filled empty space, a screen where nothing happens. And there is a moment during the sequence in Trixie’s apartment where Angela goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind her. After three seconds, the door clearly starts to reopen, but there is a cut to a shot inside the bedroom, showing Angela looking out with the door wide open. It is a jarring moment.

    Reginald Denny was a perfectly competent actor, but his line readings in Madam Satan are laboured, especially alongside the manic overacting of Roland Young, who gives the impression of being somewhere he would rather not be and desperately trying to act his way out of it.

    But it is in the extended party scene aboard the zeppelin that Madam Satan achieves genuine lunacy. The entrance of the revellers, the Ballet Mecanique, the auction–none of it makes any sense, and is clumsily staged, with choreography that is saved from looking as poor only because it is so badly photographed by, of all people, Hal Rosson.

    The sex comedy is picks up again at 1500 feet, only to be interrupted as almost the entire cast parachutes to earth, and the death of the Jazz Age is delivered in heavy-handed symbolism.

    The zeppelin awaits the arrival of the revellers, in one of Madam Satan‘s more interesting shots

    And yet, I have watched Madam Satan four times and will probably do so again. Its special effects are genuinely impressive, and its overall effect is mesmerizing. At its heart lie the puzzles of why Angela is wasting her time on an idiot like Bob, and why DeMille did not just try a musical version of The Squaw Man. Oh, the humanity.

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