Martin Broones (1892-1971) was a prolific, if little-remembered, composer who worked in theatre, radio, television and moving pictures. He was also the creator and first director of MGM’s music department.
Broones only composed songs for two of Metro’s earliest musicals: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and So This is College. For the latter, he collaborated on the number ‘Campus Capers’ with his wife, the actor and eccentric dancer Charlotte Greenwood.
Henrietta Frazer (1889-1966, née Henriette Gant) is not one of the big names of costume design. The only reference to her in Dressed A Century of Hollywood Costume Design is for helping Marion Davies spend $52,000 a year on clothes for her pictures.
It is a reasonable assumption that Frazer designed Davies’s military-style costume for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Her other musical credits are for Hallelujah and So This Is College.
Leonard Smith (1894-1947) photographed his first film in 1915 and spent most of his career at Metro. He was nominated four times for an Academy Award, finally winning for The Yearling shortly before his death. Smith was best known for his Technicolor work, but most of the thirteen musicals he worked on were in black and white.
In the 1929-30 period Smith shot So This Is College, They Learned About Women and Free and Easy.
After a seven-year break he worked uncredited on A Day at the Races and Rosalie, photographed Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, then shot the Marx Brothers next two pictures, At the Circus and Go West.
There followed Ship Ahoy and uncredited work on I Married an Angel and Seven Sweethearts. Finally, Smith photographed Best Foot Forward and Broadway Rhythm in colour.
Joseph White Farnham (1884-1931) is the permanent holder of two cinematic records. He was the only person to receive an Academy Award for writing title cards, for The Fair Co-Ed (1927), Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Telling the World (both 1928). And he was the first winner of an Academy Award to die.
Farnham’s more ignominious claim to fame is that it was he who reduced Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) to the bowdlerized version we have today. Von Stroheim said it “was like seeing a corpse in a graveyard…I found a thin part of the backbone and a little bone of the shoulder”.
Farnham’s brief career in talking pictures was less prestigious and/or deplorable, but did include work on six Metro musicals. He wrote a skit for The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and titles for Marianne (both without credit). He then contributed dialogue to So This Is College, Montana Moon, Good News and Love in the Rough. Farnham also appeared as himself in Free and Easy.
Delmer Lawrence Daves (1904-77) started out as a prop boy, dabbled in acting and screenwriting, and became a director with a distinctive style. He was singled out by Martin Scorsese as a neglected artist, and as a forerunner of his own approach to depicting indigenous Americans in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Daves’s best-known films include the westerns Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957).
In his mid-twenties Daves co-wrote So This Is College, and also appeared onscreen as one of the USC footballers. Sticking with the college background, he then played Beef in Good News.
Albert Isaac Boasberg (1891-1937) played a number of roles in his short career but was essentially a gag writer. In that capacity he worked with many of the major vaudeville and radio stars of the day, including Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Burns and Allen. In Hollywood, he also wrote for and, on occasion, directed dozens of shorts and features, most notably Battling Butler (1926) and The General (1927) with Buster Keaton.
Boasberg contributed to seven MGM musicals. He co-wrote So This Is College, (and also composed song lyrics, then worked on It’s a Great Life and Chasing Rainbows. Free and Easy reunited him, in less auspicious circumstances, with Keaton, and he provided additional dialogue for The Florodora Girl.
Back in his comfort zone, Boasberg script-doctored for the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, and then wrote most of the scripted jokes for A Day at the Races. Joe Adamson, in his book about the Marx Brothers, wrote of Boasberg that his “monumental ingenuity at packing sentences with insanities was matched only by his monumental indifference to the logical progression of a plotline”.
During his years at MGM, Samuel Grosvenor Wood (1883-1949) was a thoroughgoing studio man, one of Louis B Mayer’s favourite directors because, if Mayer told him to change something, he changed it.
Wood was a reliable journeyman director who was eventually assigned to pictures that were beyond his creative abilities. Sam Wood and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was not a match made in heaven, given the director’s extreme conservatism, but Paramount gave him the job anyway.
Earlier on, Wood provided unfussy, if uninspired, direction on So This Is College, It’s a Great Life (which he also produced) and They Learned About Women. He also did uncredited work on The Cat and the Fiddle and Hollywood Party.
There were few directors at Metro less suited to work with the Marx Brothers, yet Wood was assigned both A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
Ernie Alexander (1890-1961) was typical of Hollywood’s hardworking bit players. Out of over 200 mostly uncredited performances, sixteen were in Metro musicals.
Beginning as a doughboy in Marianne, Alexander was a student in So This Is College, a servant in Hollywood Party, and a townsman in Babes in Toyland.
Alexander’s contribution to Here Comes the Band was lost in the edit, but he came back with an elevator operator in Rose-Marie and a racetrack usher in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
He was a revolutionary in The Great Waltz, a photographer in Broadway Serenade and an expectant father in Little Nellie Kelly. He played a pageboy in Lady Be Good and stagehands in Ship Ahoy and For Me and My Gal.
He delivered flowers in Du Barry Was a Lady and finally acquired a name as Charlie the bellboy in I Dood It.
Finally, Alexander was back in uniform as a commissionaire in Swing Fever.
Max Davidson (1875-1950) was a German-born actor who found regular work in Hollywood as comedic Jews, including a rare lead role in Pleasure Before Business (1927).
Davidson has a bit in So This Is College as Moe Levine, the bemused tailor at the other end of Eddie’s fake call to a girl. He also made uncredited appearances in The Cat and the Fiddle and Rosalie.
Pauline Theresa Moran (1893-1952) was a seasoned vaudeville performer when she became a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty in 1914. After years of slapstick with Sennett she signed with MGM and was teamed with Marie Dressler for the first time in 1927, a partnership that lasted nine pictures in total.
Moran appeared alongside Dressler in two numbers in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. She was the fraternity cook in So This Is College, then sparring again with Dressler in Chasing Rainbows. Her final musical for Metro was Hollywood Party, as Henrietta Clemp, wife of the multi-est millionaire in Oklahoma.
