The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Walter Wanger

    Walter Feuchtwanger (1894-1968) studied at Dartmouth College and then went into theatrical production in New York. It was during his military service during the First World War that he had his introduction to filmmaking, when he was assigned to work on producing propaganda films.

    After the war, Wanger met Jesse Lasky, who hired him to work at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) in New York. He eventually became General Manager of Production, and produced the Marx Brothers’ first pictures, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). 

    Wanger left Paramount in 1931 and, after an abortive attempt at independent production, joined Columbia, where he was responsible for The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). He then had a short spell at MGM, producing Queen Christina (1933) and one musical, Going Hollywood. It was after this that he finally achieved independence, releasing productions through Paramount, and then United Artists.

    Pictures produced by Wanger over the next quarter of a century included John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and The Long Voyage Home (1940), Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). His career ended when he joined Twentieth Century-Fox for the debacle of Cleopatra (1963).

  • Reginald Barlow

    Reginald Harry Barlow (1866-1943) led a busy life. Stage actor and director, including twenty or so plays on Broadway. Distinguished military service in three different wars. Active in the leadership of the actors’ union Equity. Post Commander in the American Legion. Married six times. And he still found time to appear in over seventy feature films and a a number of shorts, even directing a short himself. Barlow was the son of a minstrel show performer and claimed descent from the Tudor Bishop Barlow. 

    Reginald Barlow’s early involvement with films was in New York in 1915, and this was where he directed The Toy-Maker of Leyden (1915). His first Hollywood picture was Love’s Flame (1920). His film career only got properly underway in 1932, when he appeared in fourteen releases, including If I Had a Million and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

    Barlow was a character actor, sometimes in credited roles, more often without credit. He was the College President in the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932) and stood with the eponymous hero in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933). He had a featured role in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and in James Whale’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1939).

    Barlow acted, without credit, in two MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle and (almost certainly) Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. 

  • Polly Bailey

    Polly Van (1882-1952) started out in local amateur shows until, during a Hollywood studio tour in 1917, she was spotted, reportedly by Oliver Hardy, and offered a role in the appropriately-titled short Back Stage (1917). This was the first of over eighty appearances in character roles in a thirty-four-year career (though she took an extended break in the period 1925-1934). She also made frequent radio appearances.

    Specializing in the mother/matron/landlady type, Bailey was usually uncredited. Her pictures included The Thin Man (1934), Kitty Foyle (1940), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), The Locket (1946), The Snake Pit (1948) and Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).

    Bailey was in five MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Unfinished Dance, A Date with Judy, Annie Get Your Gun and Excuse My Dust.

  • Harry Depp

    Harry William Depp (1883-1957) started out as a comedian in vaudeville and travelling theatre companies. By 1907, he was appearing on Broadway, in the first of many productions.

    Depp made his film debut in Between Midnight (1916), a Carter DeHaven short, but then travelled to Hollywood for the first of around 140 feature films. Early on, he worked for a number of small studios, always in comedic roles and with a penchant for cross-dressing. He also made appearances for Mack Sennett.

    He had many featured roles in the 1920s, but after 1930 tended to have smaller, uncredited parts. He cropped up in Howard Hawks’s Barbary Coast (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). In 1945, Depp played the pharmacist who supplies Gene Tierney with the arsenic needed for suicide.

    Harry Depp made uncredited appearances in six Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, The Big Store, Ship Ahoy!, I Dood It and Girl Crazy.

  • Irene Franklin

    Irene Lucille Marguerite Franklin (1885-1941) was reputedly carried on stage by her parents when she was six months old. Aged six, she appeared in a Broadway production, paving the way for a career in vaudeville, following a spell in British music halls in 1894.

    By the 1920s, Franklin was back again on Broadway, both as a performer and songwriter. 

    In 1929, Franklin was invited to commit part of her vaudeville routine to celluloid in a Vitaphone short. Four years later she acted in the first of around thirty feature films, her roles both credited and uncredited. The lower-status the picture, the more likely she was to have a named character and a credit. Her final screen role was in Fixer Dugan, made for RKO in 1939.

    Franklin appeared in just one MGM musical, as the drunken opera singer Lotte Lengel in The Cat and the Fiddle.

  • Joseph Cawthorn

    Joseph Bridger Cawthorn (1868-1949) had a long and varied career long before he went anywhere near a film set.

    Born into a show business family, he made his stage debut aged three. Later, he worked in minstrel shows and vaudeville, frequently as a dialect comedian (in his case, German). He also crossed the Atlantic and worked for a time in British music halls. 

    Cawthorn first appeared on Broadway in around 1897/8, with his first confirmed appearance in The Fortune Teller (1898). He sustained a Broadway career for over twenty years, starring in a variety of productions.

    Cawthorn moved to Hollywood in 1927 and played Olive Borden’s father in The Secret Studio, the first of around 55 screen appearances. Notable roles included Dr Armand de Fontinac in Love Me Tonight, where his experience in operettas came in useful for a duet with Jeanette MacDonald.

    Joseph Cawthorn had featured roles in three MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Naughty Marietta (reunited with MacDonald as her former music teacher) and The Great Ziegfeld (as the protagonist’s father).

  • Adrienne D’Ambricourt

    Adrienne Dumontier (1878-1957) had a successful career on the French stage prior to the First World War, working at the Comédie-Française. She emigrated to the United States after the war, and by 1922 was active on Broadway.

    D’Ambricourt made a few silent films at New York studios, but travelled to Hollywood, along with many others, in 1929, starting out with a featured role in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). She went on to play French character roles, often uncredited, in around seventy pictures. These included Design for Living (1933), Peter Ibbetson (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), The Song of Bernadette (1943) and To Have and Have Not (1944).

    During the early 1930s, D’Ambricourt also featured prominently in French-language versions of pictures, including MGM’s A Lady’s Morals, released in France with the more sensible title of Jenny Lind.

    D’Ambricourt acted in seven Metro musicals, across a 25-year period. She was credited as the concierge in The Cat and the Fiddle, then uncredited in The Merry Widow, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Two Girls on Broadway, Million Dollar Mermaid and Les Girls, her final film.

    Adrienne D’Ambricourt also terrified generations of French children as the voice of the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

  • Frank Conroy

    Frank Meinberg Conroy (1890-1964) acted on the British stage before emigrating to the United States in 1915. He became active in the New York theatre, and by 1917 was leading his own company at the newly-built Greenwich Village Theatre.

    Conroy appeared on Broadway in over forty productions, while maintaining a parallel career on screen, with around eighty feature films to his credit. His first picture, the aptly-titled Royal Family of Broadway (1930), was made in New York, but by 1931 he was travelling regularly to Hollywood.

    Conroy played the concierge Rohna in Grand Hotel (1932), was John Blake, the prospector’s son, in Call of the Wild (1935). But his most memorable screen role was in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), playing Major Tetley, the leader of the lynch mob.

    Frank Conroy appeared in one Metro musical, as the theatre owner in The Cat and the Fiddle.

  • Vivienne Segal

    Vivienne Sonia Segal (1897-1992) was a hugely successful theatrical star in musical comedies and operettas who never succeeded in a Hollywood career (perhaps because she did not really want one). 

    Segal made her first appearance on Broadway in 1915, when she was eighteen, and her final one in 1952, in a revival of Pal Joey. She had been in the original production in 1940, and debuted the song ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’.

    Segal’s Broadway career was wide-ranging. She starred with W C Fields in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1924 and 1925, and was also in The Desert Song in 1926.

    In Hollywood, Segal starred in four pictures at Warner Bros in the 1930 musical frenzy, and that was pretty much it. Apart from a supporting role in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and a couple of shorts, she restricted herself to the stage (apart from a handful of television appearances) until retiring in 1966.

  • Jean Hersholt

    Jean Pierre Carl Buron (1886-1956) was born in Denmark to a French father and Danish mother. He is known to have appeared in three short Danish films in 1906, amongst the country’s earliest cinematic works. After struggling to find acting work, he emigrated to America in 1913.

    Hersholt worked steadily throughout the silent era in features and shorts, and including an uncredited role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). His career moved up a level when he was cast by Erich von Stroheim as the second lead in Greed (1924), the great film maudit of the 1920s. As the duplicitous Marcus, Hersholt was at the centre of the gruelling shoot in Death Valley, where the cameras had to be wrapped in iced towels to prevent them from warping. He reportedly lost 27 pounds and ended up in hospital.

    The rest of Hersholt’s career was spent as a reliable supporting actor,often in character parts, in over 130 features. He was particularly effective as the cruel uncle victimizing Greta Garbo in Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931), and played opposite Shirley Temple, much more benevolently, in Heidi (1937). 

    During the late thirties, he played kindly Dr Christian in a radio series, and went on to recreate the character in a number of pictures and on television.

    Hersholt only appeared in one MGM musical, aged up to play Professor Bertier in The Cat and the Fiddle.

    Jean Hersholt’s name crops up most frequently today in relation to the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, presented by the American Academy to individuals whose actions have “brought credit to the industry”, Recent recipients have included Michael J Fox (2023) and Dolly Parton (2026).

    The award was established to honour Hersholt’s own role in establishing the Motion Picture Relief Fund, money from which was used to set up the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, where many actor have spent their final years. 

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