The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Larry Fine

    Louis Feinberg (1902-75) was the non-Howard Stooge: the member of the Three Stooges who positioned himself between Moe’s violence and Curly’s lunacy, and got poked in the eye a lot for his trouble.

    Fine had been working in vaudeville for a few years when he first became one of Ted Healy’s stooges in 1928. When he, Moe and Curly split up with the erratic Healy, they signed with Columbia and went on to make over 200 shorts and several feature films (latterly with Shemp Howard and other performers after Curly’s death).

    Fine appeared in three MGM musicals in the mid-thirties. He was by himself in Stage Mother (which also featured Healy); with Healy, Moe and Curly in Dancing Lady; and with just Moe and Curly in Hollywood Party.

    Fine was central to an important, though censored, gag in Dancing Lady. Throughout the film he is seen working on a jigsaw puzzle. The excised payoff was that, after adding the final piece, he sees that it is a picture of Adolf Hitler and overturns the table in disgust. If left in, this would have been a very early (1933) anti-Nazi protest by a Jewish actor. The footage has now been restored to some prints of the picture.

  • Elspeth Dudgeon

    Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Siodmak, Mitchel Leisen, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian: Scottish actor Elspeth Dudgeon (1871-1955) worked with some of Hollywood’s best directors in her twenty-four-year fil career.

    She was a particular favourite of James Whale, who used her in six of his films. Most memorably–and whimsically–he cast her as the centenarian Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932), keeping her real sex a secret even from the rest of the cast, and crediting her as John Dudgeon.

    In Sh! The Octopus (1937), Dudgeon played the Nanny whose before-your-eyes transformation into a cackling ‘hag’ was a masterpiece of in-camera special effects.

    Dudgeon spent the last twenty or so years of her life in California, but had previously had a long career on the British stage. Whale’s Waterloo Bridge (1931) was her first, uncredited, screen role.

    She made four appearances in MGM musicals, all of them without credit: Stage Mother, The Night is Young, Bathing Beauty and Till the Clouds Roll By.

  • Nora Cecil

    British actor Nora Cecil (1878-1951) began her acting career on the London stage before moving to the United States and Broadway in her early twenties. 

    She made her screen debut in Maurice Tourneur’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), and went on to appear in over 200 pictures. She worked for Tourneur again as one of Mary Pickford’s teachers in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).

    Cecil came into her own when she grew old enough to play prim or sour-faced ‘spinster types’, like the missionary in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Aunt Emily in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933) and the teacher in Nothing Sacred (1937). She was memorable in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as the landlady who throws out Doc Boone.

    In I Married a Witch (1942) she played Harriet Wooley, one of the nagging women who make miserable the lives of the cursed Wooley men.

    In Cecil’s final film, Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), she played Louisa Ames, the malicious town gossip.

    Nora Cecil was uncredited in six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Two Sisters from Boston and No Leave, No Love.

  • Phillips Smalley

    Wendell Phillips Smalley (1865-1939) was a notable, though somewhat controversial, figure in early American cinema. He was married, until 1922, to the pioneering actor-writer-director Lois Weber, and several hundred films are credited as being co-directed by the pair of them. It is now generally accepted, however, that Weber was the creative force behind the pictures, and that it was Smalley’s jealousy of her achievements, along with his alcohol problem, that led to their divorce. The shared credit seems to have been more to do with the patriarchy than with merit. It is noticeable that he directed nothing after their relationship ended.

    It is indisputable that Smalley acted in around 130 films during his time with Weber, and a similar number afterwards. In the 1920s, he appeared in John Ford’s Cameo Kirby (1923) and had an uncredited role as a waiter in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

    In the 1930s he had mostly uncredited bit parts, including in Stage Mother, as the manager who fires Kitty from the shop, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.

  • Ruth Gillette

    Ruth Gillette (1906-94) started appearing in musical comedies straight after school, making her Broadway debut in the Shubert Brothers’ 1925 production of Gay Paree. 

    Gillette’s first film was MGM’s Stage Mother. She was uncredited and named in documentation only as ‘Blonde’, even though she headlines in  three important scenes. She was also in The Great Ziegfeld, again uncredited, playing Lillian Russell (whom she also portrayed in David Harum [1934] and The Gentleman from Louisiana [1936]). And she was an earthquake survivor in San Francisco.

    Gillette continued acting in films, television and on stage until the age of 80. In 1950, she played Gloria Grahame’s masseuse friend in In a Lonely Place. She later took over from Reta Shaw the role of Mabel in the original Broadway production of The Pajama Game.

  • Sam Ash

    Samuel Howard Ash (1884-1951), the child of British immigrants, was a talented singer who was signed by Columbia records at the age of 20. He made his debut on Broadway the following year, starring in a Rudolf Friml operetta. He continued to record and perform on Broadway throughout the 1920s.

    In 1929, Ash relocated to Hollywood as part of the exodus triggered by talking pictures. He made his debut in a featured role in Unmasked (1929), but was largely uncredited thereafter. His most frequently-revived appearance is as the bank teller in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), but he made well over 200 pictures between 1929 and 1953.

    Sam Ash played Mark Thorne in MGM’s Stage Mother, uncredited even though he sang one of the picture’s relatively few songs. He subsequently made lesser uncredited appearances in The Merry Widow, San Francisco, Meet the People and Luxury Liner. 

  • Ben Alexander

    Nicholas Benton Alexander III (1911-69) became a child actor in 1916. By the age of 15 he had appeared in forty-three pictures.

    Alexander’s breakthrough as an adult came with All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), playing the tragic soldier Kemmerich. Unfortunately, none of his subsequent roles were as prestigious, and in the 1940s he largely turned to radio acting and announcing. 

    His return to high-profile screen acting occurred in 1952 after Jack Webb invited him to play Officer Frank Smith in Dragnet, first on radio and then transferring to television. Alexander played the part for seven years. After that, he acted occasionally, but had a sideline running car dealerships, which in turn sponsored his own local television series, The Ben Alexander Show.

    Alexander’s sole Metro musical performance was as would-be womanizer Francis Nolan in Stage Mother.

  • Alan Edwards

    The New York Times obituary of Alan Edwards (1892-1954) stated that he made his first screen appearance in 1912. Over seventy years later, it seems impossible to find any evidence of that; his earliest IMDb citation is Rose of the Alley in 1916. It is necessary to remember, however, that in the early 1910s it was rare for films to have onscreen credits and studios saw little reason to retain paperwork. So Edwards’s screen appearances could well have been in excess of the 38 listed in IMDb.

    Most of Edwards’s pictures were made in the sound era. They were mostly programmers, though he had a featured role in If You Could only Cook (1935), with Jean Arthur.

    Edwards’s only role in an MGM musical was the politician Al Dexter in Stage Mother. 

  • C Henry Gordon

    Wikipedia tells us that the character actor Henry Racke (1883-1940) owned a silver mine in Mexico before he took to the stage. No source is cited and it is difficult to see where the information could have come from. Gordon certainly did not mention it in an interview he gave to Picture Play Magazine in February 1935. 

    According to Gordon, he returned as a young man from being educated in Europe to find that his sister was now acting. This led to actor/producer William Elliott casting him in a play. He spent many years performing on the stage until Hollywood opened its arms to actors who could speak in 1929.

    His breakthrough screen role came in Mata Hari (1931), as the detective who tracks down Greta Garbo. The following year he played Paul Muni’s nemesis in Scarface (1932).

    Gordon was more likely to be cast as a villain than a hero, a notable example being his brownface Surat Khan in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). 

    Gordon’s only appearance in an MGM musical was as Ricco, the unscrupulous political agent in Stage Mother.

    He died suddenly as the result of complications following the emergency amputation of his leg.

  • Ted Healy

    Ernest Lea Nash (1896-1937) is best-known today as the co-founder of the act ‘Ted Healy and his Three Stooges’, but he also had a successful acting career in both comic and dramatic roles.

    After working for some years in vaudeville, Healy teamed with schoolfriend Moe Howard, Moe’s brother Shemp (subsequently replaced by Curly) and comic Larry Fine. There were tensions in the act, largely owing to Healy’s heavy drinking, and the three stooges eventually signed with Columbia to make a series of shorts. 

    Healy signed a contract with MGM, who occasionally loaned him to other studios. He played Jean Harlow’s freeloading brother in Blonde Bombshell (1933) and Reagan the reporter in Mad Love (1935). 

    Ted Healy acted in six MGM musicals. Probably his best role was as the vaudeville performer Ralph Martin in Stage Mother. He appeared with the Stooges in Dancing Lady and did an uncredited bit in the all-star Hollywood Party. He was also in Reckless, Here Comes the Band and San Francisco.

    Healy died from symptoms related to his drinking that were triggered by a serious and mysterious beating sustained outside a nightclub.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!