The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Gus Kahn

    Gustav Gerson Kahn (1886-1941) was one of Tin Pan Alley’s most prolific and successful writers of popular songs.

    Khan started out writing for vaudeville performers in the 1910s before forming the first of many partnerships with composers. In 1924, he wrote his first standard, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’.

    Contributing to many Broadway scores throughout the 1920s, he also moved into writing for films, and by 1933 was effectively working full time for Hollywood. Khan’s lyrics featured in Flying Down to Rio (1933), Kid Millions (1934) and Captains Courageous (1937).

    Khan worked most frequently with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contributing to Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, A Day at the Races, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West and Bitter Sweet.

    Khan’s contributions to the Great American Songbook include ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’, ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’.

    Gus Kahn was played by Danny Thomas in a Warner Bros musical biopic, I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951).

  • Paul Gregory

    Paul Gregory (1904-42) made his Broadway debut as a teenager, and a few years later was cast as the ‘Native American’ character Wanenis in the original production of Whoopee! (1928).

    Gregory was one of several cast members who travelled to Hollywood to make the film version of Whoopee! in 1930. He remained there for a few years and made three other features.

    Gregory was an occasional songwriter, and collaborated on ‘You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)’, which was performed by the Three Radio Rogues in Going Hollywood.

    There is scant information about Gregory’s short live after Hollywood, though he appears to have returned to New York. He is frequently confused, including by the AFI, with producer Paul Gregory (1920-2015).

  • Ross Columbo

    Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolfo Colombo (1908-34) was the child of Italian immigrants. He started learning the violin at a young age and was hired professionally when just thirteen.

    In 1928, he performed with the Gus Arnheim orchestra in a Vitaphone musical short, which led to a few acting roles. He also continued with Arnheim, branching into singing. He was a crooner, like his friend and colleague Bing Crosby.

    Columbo was managed by Con Conrad, and collaborated with him in writing a number of songs. One of these, ‘You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)’, was parodied by the Three Radio Rogues in MGM’s Going Hollywood.

    Ross Columbo died young as the result of a tragic shooting accident. His mother was in poor health and Columbo’s girlfriend at the time of his death, Carole Lombard, assisted in hiding his the fact of his death from her for ten years.

  • Gladys DuBois

    Gladys Louise DuBois (1907-71) was an actor and songwriter who acted in a couple of Pre-Code musicals. She is best-known today for contributing songs, including the title number, to Mae West’s I’m No Angel (1933).

    DuBois co-wrote the lyrics to ‘You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)’, which featured in the Three Radio Rogues’s medley in Going Hollywood.

  • Con Conrad

    Songwriter Conrad K Dober (1891-1938) started out as a cinema pianist, first in Harlem, then in Keith vaudeville theatres.

    Conrad’s first song was published in 1912, and he found his greatest success during the 1920s, co-writing hits such as ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’. During this period he wrote regularly for Broadway shows.

    From 1929, Conrad worked in Hollywood, contributing songs to musicals by a variety of studios, his biggest hit being ‘The Continental’, written for Astaire and Rogers’s The Gay Divorcee (1934).

    Numbers co-written by Con Conrad can be heard in MGM’s Going Hollywood and The Great Ziegfeld.

  • Kate Smith

    Kathryn Elizabeth Smith (1907-1986) was born in Virginia and became known as ‘the Songbird of the South’. Her wholly untrained voice spanned two and a half octaves.

    After singing as an amateur from the age of eight, Smith found professional engagements, leading to performing in a Broadway show in 1926. Her weight led to her being represented as a rival to Sophie Tucker.

    Smith was the original Pansy Sparks in Flying High on Broadway, and the butt of cruel jokes by Bert Lahr. The MGM adaptation replaced her with Charlotte Greenwood, her physical opposite.

    She was a recording artist and, from 1931, appeared regularly on the radio, becoming a major star. She co-wrote her radio theme song, ‘When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain’, with Howard Johnson and Harry M Woods, and it was parodied by Jimmy Hollywood of the Three Radio Rogues in Going Hollywood. 

    During the Second World War, Smith became closely associated with Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ and, bizarrely, became involved in campaigning on moral grounds against Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity (1944). Her last recorded appearance was in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in in 1968.

  • Reg Connelly

    The people who wrote ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ deserve to be better known. One of them was Reginald John Connelly, a British songwriter and music publisher who, with his partner Jimmy Campbell, wrote the song immortalized by Otis Redding, and also the perennial ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’.

    The Campbell Connelly company was established in the mid-twenties and published hits by its owners and other songwriters, becoming internationally successful. Connelly later began composing for British films, including musicals starring Jessie Matthews

    Songs written by Reg Connelly were used in two MGM musicals. ‘Just an Echo in the Valley’ was a hit in 1932, and was sung the following year by Bing Crosby in Going Hollywood. Later, ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’ featured in Holiday in Mexico.

  • Donald Ogden Stewart

    Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) began writing after graduating from Yale and military service during the First World War. He found success writing satirical comedy, and became a member of the Algonquin Round Table. In the 1920s he wrote plays that were performed on Broadway, and published a novel.

    Stewart’s first work for the cinema was Brown of Harvard (1926), an adaptation of a Rida Johnson Young story. This was followed by contributions to around 40 Hollywood screenplays, including Dinner at Eight (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Holiday (1938), Love Affair (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay) and An Affair to Remember (1957).

    His work on An Affair to Remember was uncredited because Stewart had by then been blacklisted owing to his membership of the Communist Party. He and his wife eventually moved to the UK, where Stewart wrote for the cinema and for television. He remained there for the rest of his life.

    Stewart worked on the screenplays of three Metro musicals: Going Hollywood, Reckless (uncredited) and Smilin’ Through.

  • Raoul Walsh

    Albert Edward Walsh (1887-1980) had a fifty-two-year career as a film director and made around 130 feature films and a dozen or so shorts. His first feature was The Life of General Villa (1914), co-directed with Christy Cabanne, which he also co-wrote and in which he played Pancho Villa as a young man. 

    Walsh started out as an actor on the stage in 1909, before commencing film work. In 1915, he played John Wilkes Booth in D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Probably his best-known acting role–and his last–was in Sadie Thompson (1928), which he again wrote and directed. He had already directed dozens of pictures by the time sound was introduced, and in 1930 he made The Big Trail, the expensive Fox western that was a commercial failure and launched John Wayne into an unsuccessful first attempt at stardom.

    Raoul Walsh played an important part in edging Humphrey Bogart into the top rank, moving him from supporting player in The Roaring Twenties (1939) and They Drive by Night (1940) to a career-defining starring role in High Sierra (1940). He also made multiple films with James Cagney (including the classic White Heat [1949]) and Errol Flynn. He also directed three Clark Gable pictures in the 1950s. 

    Walsh is rarely listed alongside the acknowledged greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as Ford, Hawks and Wyler. But he was a gifted and versatile director.

    In 1933, Walsh directed his sole MGM musical, Going Hollywood.

  • Going Hollywood

    The Crew

    Raoul WalshDirector
    Frances MarionStory
    Donald Ogden StewartScreenplay
    Arthur FreedSongwriter
    Nacio Herb BrownSongwriter
    Harry M WoodsSongwriter (uncredited)
    Reg ConnellySongwriter (uncredited)
    Kate SmithSongwriter (uncredited)
    Howard JohnsonSongwriter (uncredited)
    Con ConradSongwriter (uncredited)
    Gladys DuBoisSongwriter (uncredited)
    Russ ColumboSongwriter (uncredited)
    Paul GregorySongwriter (uncredited)
    Gus KahnSongwriter (uncredited)
    Leo DanceSongwriter (uncredited)
    Eric LittleSongwriter (uncredited)
    Herbert StothartComposer (uncredited)
    Lennie HaytonConductor
    Walter WangerProducer
    George J FolseyCinematographer
    Frank SullivanEditor
    Merrill PyeArt Director
    Edwin B WillisInterior Decorator
    AdrianCostume Designer
    Joseph M NewmanAssistant Director (uncredited)
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    Albertina RaschChoreographer
    Harrison GreeneChoreographer (uncredited)

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