The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Hallelujah

    Synopsis

    [Old Folks at Home]. Zeke Johnson, his brother Spunk and the rest of their family pick cotton on a big plantation. The two brothers are about to go into town to sell their family’s share of the latest crop. A late supper [Dance 1] is interrupted by Adam, Eve and their 12 children. Adam and Eve ask Mr Johnson to marry them.

    While the ceremony is taking place, Zeke forces himself on his adopted sister Missy Rose and kisses her. He immediately apologizes, claiming the devil was in him. [Dance 2].

    The next day, Zeke and Spunk sell the cotton [Waiting at the End of the Road]. Zeke collects $100 and resists the temptation to join a dice game. But he sees a young woman named Chick dancing [Dance 3]. Chick is not interested in him, until she sees his money. Spunk waits for his brother, but he does not return.

    Nina Mae McKinney as the seductive Chick

    Chick takes Zeke to a night spot where she performs [Swanee Shuffle]. Chick introduces Zeke to Hot Shot, a gambler for whom she shills. Hot Shop plays dice with Zeke. Spunk, meanwhile, is searching for his brother. Zeke quickly loses all the money. Zeke accuses Hot Shot of cheating. Spunk enters while they are fighting and is shot and killed.

    Zeke arrives home the next morning with Spunk’s body in the wagon. After the funeral, Zeke repents of his sins and leads the people in prayer [Swing Low, Sweet Chariot].

    Some time later, Zeke has become the prophet Zekiel, a travelling preacher. He arrives in a new town and Chick and Hot Shot are in the crowd. They heckle Zeke, but he confronts and cows them. Zeke preaches to the crowd [(Gimme Dat) Old Time Religion], and Chick begins heckling again, but is eventually moved by Zeke’s preaching [Waiting at the End of the Road]. Later, Mrs Johnson and Missy Rose are shocked when Chick volunteers for baptism in the river. Zeke is tempted by Chick’s presence, but his mother intercedes.

    That evening, Zeke asks Missy Rose to marry him. Elsewhere, Hot Shot tries to stop Chick going to the service, telling her she will always be a sinner, but she beats him with a poker and gets away. At the service, Missy Rose sees that Zeke is still drawn to Chick, and she to him. In an apparent religious ecstasy, Chick seduces Zeke and takes him away with her.

    Months later, Zeke is working in a log mill and living with Chick. But Hot Shot has tracked down Chick and wants her to go with him [St Louis Blues]. Zeke is suspicious, but he still cannot resist her. When Zeke falls asleep, Chick packs a bag and leaves with Hot Shot in his buggy. Zeke chases them, and catches up when the buggy loses a wheel. Chick is thrown from the buggy and seriously injured. She begs Zeke’s forgiveness and dies in his arms. Zeke pursues Hot Shot through a swamp and kills him.

    Zeke spends time in prison doing hard labour. He is released on probation, and returns to his family [Goin’ Home]. They all welcome him back.                       

  • Hallelujah (1929)

    Synopsis
    Cast
    Principal Crew
    Songs
    Discussion

  • John Arnold

    John Arnold (1889-1964) had been photographing films at Metro since 1916 when he was assigned to The Broadway Melody. He followed this up with The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and was soon after kicked upstairs to become head of the studio’s Camera Department.

    Arnold was a co-founder and governor of the American Society of Cinematographers, with a particular interest in technical innovation. This bore dividends on The Broadway Melody when he was able to devise the “coffin on wheels,” a soundproof but mobile camera booth that enabled the film to transcend the existing limitations of sound cinema.

    Later in his career Arnold won Oscars for two of his inventions: in 1938, for a semi-automatic follow focus device; and in 1940 for a mobile camera crane.

    Arnold was also important to the campaign that secured the inclusion of cinematographers in Hollywood credits.

  • The Broadway Melody (1929)

    Many things make The Broadway Melody (1929) a noteworthy film in cinema history. It was the first feature-length musical: although Warners were filming The Desert Song (1929) at the same time, they held back its release and so missed a further opportunity to make history. 

    The Broadway Melody was also the first musical from the studio that became synonymous with that genre. It was the first musical to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and also the first talking picture to do so, the only previous winner, Wings (1927) having had only a synchronized score and sound effects.

    The Broadway Melody also saw the invention (or perhaps more accurately the discovery) of the playback system, whereby performers in musicals lip-synced to songs they had recorded earlier. The Wedding of the Painted Doll was the film’s biggest production number and Irving Thalberg was so dissatisfied with the original footage that he ordered it shot again. According to Bosley Crowther in The Lion’s Share (1957), it was sound engineer Douglas Shearer who suggested that money could be saved by reusing the live music previously recorded. Pre-recording musical performances went on to become standard operating procedure throughout the classical period.

    The Broadway Melody was the first backstage musical, putting in place many of the tropes that became genre clichés. This includes the convention that the show being staged is almost always a revue rather than a drama; and the recurring dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow music.

    It also includes the first musical number integrated into a film’s narrative. Eddie sings You Were Meant for Me not on stage but in Queenie’s apartment, to a non-diegetic musical accompaniment, sealing his declaration of love and moving forward the narrative.

     Conversely, The Wedding of the Painted Doll is a template for the extraneous production number, filmed on a large scale and without the participation of the film’s principal players. It is also the first musical number filmed in (two-strip) Technicolor.

    Arthur Freed, who would become MGM’s most important musical producer, made his first contribution to the genre with the seven songs he provided with his partner, Nacio Herb Brown. It is fitting that the trailblazing The Broadway Melody should have used original compositions rather than standards. Freed and Brown provided numbers that complemented the action. The lyrics of the title song, for example

    Broadway, you magic street

    River of humanity

    I have trudged my weary feet

    Down your Gay White Way

    Dreaming a million dreams of fame

    Yearning for you to know my name

    reflect the story and experience of Hank, the character at the heart of the picture.

    The Broadway Melody is unsophisticated to contemporary eyes, even in comparison to musicals made just a few years later. It is also a rare musical that also exists in a silent version, and even the talkie includes intertitles. And it is undeniable that the clod-hopping chorus line would not have made it into a Busby Berkeley number.

    But it is important to remember that, in 1929, Photoplay’s review described it as the film in  which talking pictures found new speed and freedom. Harry Beaumont and cinematographer John Arnold devised a “coffin on wheels”: a soundproof camera booth that was also compact enough to move around the set, enabling a sense of space. In a sense, The Broadway Melody was an experimental film: sound technology improved during the shooting period and it has been noted that the quality of sound recording is much better in the later scenes filmed. Irving Thalberg actually drew attention to the studio’s concern that audiences might be confused by a character bursting into song, accompanied by an unseen orchestra–bewilderingly, a stumbling-block to enjoyment of musicals that continues to this day.  

  • Norman Houston

    Norman Houston (1887-1958) was a sometime actor and director who spent most of his career as a screenwriter, making his mark as one of the principal writers on the extended Hopalong Cassidy series. His sole involvement in MGM’s musicals was to contribute dialogue to The Broadway Melody.

  • Sarah Y Mason

    Sarah Y Mason (1896-1980) is one of the forgotten women of early Hollywood, having made a significant contribution, and leaving little information behind. I am grateful to the Women Film Pioneers Project for summarizing what information there is. 

    Dr Roseanne Welch has credited Mason with being the person to name and develop the role of ‘continuity girl’ (now script supervisor): the person on set with responsibility for ensuring continuity from shot to shot and scene to scene. This was in 1918, when she began working for Douglas Fairbanks. 

    Mason later moved into script-writing, often in partnership with her husband, Victor Heerman. It was she who fleshed out Edmund Goulding’s story for The Broadway Melody into a continuity script, with dialogue added later by James Gleason and Norman Houston.

    Mason went on to script They Learned About Women and to adapt Love in the Rough from its stage original. She also worked uncredited on Meet Me in St Louis. She and Heerman won the Best Adaptation Oscar for Little Women (1933). 

  • Edmund Goulding

    Edmund Goulding (1891-1959) is best remembered as athe director of films including Grand Hotel (1932) and Nightmare Alley (1947). But his biographer, Matthew Kelly, has drawn attention to Goulding’s wide-ranging contributions at MGM, which included not only writing and producing but also consultation on music, makeup and costume. His singular contribution to film musicals was to extemporize the plot of The Broadway Melody for Irving Thalberg and Lawrence Weingarten. According to the latter, Thalberg’s secretary took notes because they were aware of Goulding’s ability to “tell a story in the morning and forget everything about it by the afternoon”.

    Goulding subsequently made an uncredited contribution to the screenplays of Hollywood Party (on which he was also an uncredited co-director) and, understandably, Two Girls on Broadway, the remake of The Broadway Melody. He directed some scenes in A Night at the Opera without credit.

    Goulding was never a credited director on a Metro musical, though some sources erroneously claim Blondie of the Follies (1932) to be a musical. The film has a show business background and features one musical number in long shot, but it is actually a romantic comedy with an excellent performance by Marion Davies.

  • Lawrence Weingarten

    Lawrence Weingarten (1897-1975) was working as assistant to  Irving Thalberg, his brother-in-law, when he was assigned to work on the supervision of what became Metro’s first musical, The Broadway Melody. Weingarten’s description of working on the picture is included in Samuel Marx’s Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints (1975).

    Weingarten had a lengthy career as a producer at MGM, but little subsequent involvement with its musicals.  He was an uncredited supervisor on A Day at the Races, but his only producer credit on a musical was Balalaika.  

  • Harry Beaumont

    Harry Beaumont (1888-1966) is not a well-known name, despite having directed the first feature-length musical and a winner of the best picture Academy Award. Originally an actor, he turned to film directing in 1916.

    In 1923 Beaumont directed The Gold Diggers, a play which was also the source of Warners’ Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). Perhaps his most notable achievement outside musicals was Metro’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928), which had a synchronized score.

    Irving Thalberg must have considered Beaumont a safe pair of hands when assigning him to The Broadway Melody, an ambitious and not inexpensive project. His reputation today is as a journeyman director grinding out assignments, but Richard Barrios points out, in A Song in the Dark (1995), that Beaumont was present at every script conference. Studio records indicate that his contribution to the picture’s dialogue was greater than that of the credited James Gleason.

    In 1930 Beaumont directed three further musicals for MGM, Lord Byron of Broadway (with William Nigh), Children of Pleasure and The Florodora Girl, before moving on to other things. Never more than a journeyman director, Beaumont carved himself a small, if often overlooked, niche in cinema history with The Broadway Melody,  

  • Jed Prouty

    Jed Prouty (1879-1956) began his film career in the silent period, but established himself as a comic supporting player with the coming of sound. In The Broadway Melody he plays Uncle Jed, Hank and Queenie’s vaudeville booker. 

    Hank and Queenie are a fictionalized version of The Duncan Sisters, and a few months later Prouty supported the Duncans themselves in It’s a Great Life. 

    He played Marion Davies’s father in The Florodora Girl and rounded off his Metro musical career as the theatre owner who critiques the Schnarzan pictures in Hollywood Party. 

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