Laurence Stallings (1894-1968) is best known for co-authoring, with Maxwell Anderson, the First World War play What Price Glory?, which was filmed twice, and for writing the novel that formed the basis of The Big Parade (1925). Informed by his own wartime experiences, these helped qualify Stallings to contribute dialogue to the doughboy story Marianne.
Later in his career Stallings contributed to three of John Ford’s more personal pictures: Three Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953). But, after Marianne, his only involvement in MGM musicals was uncredited work on Let Freedom Ring and At the Circus.
Oliver Taylor Marsh (1892-1941) was an MGM company man for most of his career, and arguably achieved his greatest successes with some of the nineteen musicals he photographed, most of which were directed by Robert Z Leonard and W S Van Dyke.
Marsh’s earliest efforts were Marianne, In Gay Madrid and The Florodora Girl. He protographed the 1930 New Moon and also worked uncredited on the 1940 remake. He returned to the genre after the 1932 hiatus and shot Dancing Lady. The following year he worked with Lubitsch on The Merry Widow and moved immediately from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland.
Marsh photographed the Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld and the destruction of San Francisco in the film of the same name. Maytime was the first of his five MacDonald-Eddy operettas, and he also worked with MacDonald on The Firefly and with Eddy on Rosalie. The Girl of the Golden West was followed by an Academy Award, with Allen Davey, for their Technicolor work on Sweethearts.
Following the ridiculous Ice Follies of 1939, Marsh was with Jeanette MacDonald again for Broadway Serenade. He rounded off his career with Broadway Melody of 1940, Bitter Sweet (again Oscar-nominated for Technicolor) and Lady Be Good, made shortly before his untimely death.
Robert Zigler Leonard (1889-1968), commonly known as Pop, turned to directing in 1914 after a short career as a leading man, and was a workhorse producer-director at MGM from 1926 until 1957. He worked in pretty much every genre tackled by the studio, and was one of its most prolific directors of musicals, working on fifteen between 1929 and 1952.
Leonard directed and co-produced Marianne in 1929, one of his many collaborations with Metro’s female stars. A few years later he made In Old Madrid, then became the first person to direct Fred Astaire on film in Dancing Lady.
The Great Ziegfeld was the second musical to win the Best Picture Oscar, and Leonard was also nominated for his direction.
Leonard worked on five Jeanette Macdonald-Nelson Eddy vehicles–Naughty Marietta (uncredited), Maytime, Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts (uncredited) and New Moon–as well as two MacDonald solo pictures, The Firefly and Broadway Serenade.
Ziegfeld Girl returned him to the world of the Broadway impresario, and, after a gap of eight years, he was reunited with that film’s star, Judy Garland, for In the Good Old Summertime. Leonard then directed a new generation of musical performers in Nancy Goes to Rio (Jane Powell), Duchess of Idaho (Esther Williams) and Grounds for Marriage (Kathryn Grayson.
Leonard’s final musical outing was Everything I Have is Yours in 1951.
Benny Rubin (1899-1986), like Cliff Edwards, was a recurring presence in Metro’s earliest musicals. A talented dialect comedian, he was limited in most of his musical appearances to a Jewish characterization; it has been suggested that his career was hampered by the idea that he looked “too Jewish”.
Rubin’s first appearance was alongside Edwards in Marianne, and he followed this up as vaudeville booker Benny Friedman in It’s a Great Life. He is the Jewish half of a double act with Irish Tom Dugan in They Learned About Women, and an agent in Lord Byron of Broadway.
Rubin plays a doctor from the Bronx who finds himself amongst the cowboys in Montana Moon, while he is back in New York’s show biz as a pianist in Children of Pleasure. In Love in the Rough he is a fish-out-of-water Russian immigrant masquerading as Robert Montgomery’s valet.
The 1932 moratorium followed and Rubin was absent from MGM’s musicals until 1953’s Torch Song. He then had, mostly uncredited, roles in Easy to Love, Meet Me in Las Vegas, Ten Thousand Bedrooms and Looking for Love.
Benny Rubin’s final appearance was as another Jewish agent in Orson Welles’s film maudit The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the 70s, released 2018).
George Baxter (1905-76) made a steady living for over thirty years, often uncredited, in films, television and radio. Marianne was his first film role, as the noble André. He appeared without credit in Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, and reappeared in the Golden Age with a part in Lili.
The man who contributed greatly to the 20s’ ukelele craze. The performer who introduced ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to the world. The voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940). Just three of the reasons why Clifton Avon Edwards (1895-1971), or ‘Ukelele Ike,’ ought not to be quite as forgotten as he is.
Edwards was a successful vaudeville and café performer, allegedly dubbed ‘Ukelele Ike’ by a waiter who could never remember his name. He became a ubiquitous figure in the early Metro musicals, appearing in over a third of the studio’s productions in 1929-31.
Edwards’s rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, though lacking Gene Kelly’s familiar phrasing, was good enough to earn the song a reprise in the hastily-devised finale, in which also appeared.
His first acting role was as Soapy, one of the doughboys in Marianne. He then added musical support in So This is College and performed a speciality number in They Learned About Women. Lord Byron of Broadway saw him in the, not really challenging, role of a vaudeville singer, after which he was way out west as one of the hero’s buddies in Montana Moon.
Edwards made an uncredited appearance as himself in Children of Pleasure and has a featured role as the Coach’s assistant, Pooch Kearney, in the 1930 version of Good News. He was then one of Lawrence Tibbett’s hobo pals in The Prodigal.
The film musical hiatus of 1932 soon followed, and Edwards only appeared in one further musical for Metro, as Minstrel Joe in The Girl of the Golden West.
At his height, in the late 1920s, Cliff Edwards was earning $4000 a week. By the time of his death, he was an indigent charity patient in a Hollywood hospital; his body was unclaimed for several days because no one knew who he was.
Lawrence Gray (1898-1970) was a jobbing actor who began in silent pictures and whose good looks made him an amenable leading man for, amongst others, Gloria Swanson, Colleen Moore and Norma Shearer. His singing voice was also good enough to win him parts in four early MGM musicals: Marianne, It’s a Great Life, Children of Pleasure and, opposite Marian Davies for the second time, in The Florodora Girl.
The parts on offer started to decline and Gray retired in 1936. He and his wife moved to her native Mexico, where he worked in the distribution side of the film industry.
It is a regrettable side effect of Citizen Kane’s success that the name of Marion Davies (1897-1961) has become linked with that of Susan Alexander, the second-rate singer and mistress of the newspaper magnate. The second of these is undeniably a similarity: Davies was the long-term companion of William Randolph Hearst, the main inspiration for the character of Kane, and Hearst certainly made some inappropriate decisions about her career. But Marion Davies was far from being a second-rate performer. In David Thomson’s words, she was “a genuinely funny actress who did good work”. Davies’s most successful period was in silent films, but she made a successful transition to sound, overcoming the obstacle of a stammer.
Davies’s appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 was a less than triumphant start to her musical career, singing and dancing furiously to two songs, dressed in the military uniform Hearst loved to see her in.
She is seen to better effect as the eponymous Marianne (which she co-produced), though the musical demands made on her are admittedly far less than in the earlier appearance. Davies’s strengths are seen in the light comedy aspects of her role. Davies was an equally-fetching protagonist in The Florodora Girl (which she produced) and, in particular, opposite Bing Crosby in Going Hollywood.
Some commentators list Blondie of the Follies (1932) as a musical, but is actually a romantic comedy featuring an attractive performance by Davies.
