The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Merrill Pye

    Merrill Manley Pye (1902-75) was an important member of Cedric Gibbons’s unit at MGM from 1925 until 1968, and one who had a significant impact on the look of the studio’s musicals across most of that period.

    Pye had studied architecture, which made him a desirable addition to Gibbon’s team. The respect in which he was held is suggested by his first picture, Edmund Goulding’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), where he shares equal credit with Gibbons for Settings.

    He was art director, uncredited, on Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and given associate art director credit for David Copperfield (1935). In 1959, Pye was Oscar-nominated for his art direction on Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest, responsible for recreating the Mount Rushmore monument on a sound stage.

    But it was in musicals that Pye made his real mark. He started out with the art direction of Dancing Lady, where he has been credited with introducing the Moderne style to MGM’s musical pictures: what has been described as “flat mise-en-scenes surfaces, horizontal accents, tonal values distinction, and smooth and curved lines with glossy surfaces”.

    Pye went on to be art director (or associate) on Going Hollywood, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Swing Fever, Bathing Beauty, Ziegfeld Follies, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive.

    But Pye also received another type of credit on some pictures: Musical Presentation. IMDb erroneously interprets this as him having a role in the music department, but it was actually a special credit for a role that involved the overall visual design of a musical number. This involved not only the structural design of sets, but also camera movement through the set, incorporating an element of direction.

    Pye carried out this function on musical numbers in Born to Dance, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Honolulu, Strike Up the Band, Bitter Sweet, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, The Chocolate Soldier, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy!, Panama Hattie, For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Broadway Rhythm and Meet the People.

    It is notable that Pye’s services in musical presentation were not required on the Freed Unit musicals of the later 1940s and 1950s, where directors like Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli would retain that creative control.

  • Slavko Vorkapich

    Slavoljub Vorkapić (1894-1976) is one of the more fa

    scinating and unexpected figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

    Born in Serbia, Vorapich studied to be a painter, and was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris in the late 1910s. He travelled to the United States in 1920, and found work as an actor, predominantly for the director Rex Ingram (he played Napoleon in Scaramouche [1923]).

    In 1928, Vorkapich directed, with the collaboration of Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, a short and influential experimental film called The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, allegedly with a budget of $98. The prowess in editing demonstrated in the film led to employment in Hollywood, initially by Paramount, and then RKO and MGM. He came to specialize in montage sequences, in which action over a lengthy period of narrative time is compressed into a few minutes of screen time in what he called “symphonies of visual movement”. Vorkapich would be brought in specifically to shoot and edit these, often expressionistic, sequences. He developed and utilized techniques in pacing action for maximum psychological impact on the viewer. 

    Vorkapic was also adept at in-camera special effects, such as the collapse of Wall Street at the end of The Conquerors (1932) and the locust attack in The Good Earth (1937).

    He made propaganda shorts during the Second World War, and then took up academic posts in California, and later in Yugoslavia. This was also where he directed his only feature film, Hanka (1955). He lectured on what he saw as the autonomous visual language of cinema, and never hesitated to criticize directors of high reputation, including Eisenstein and Ford, for what he considered incompetence.

    Vorkapich’s work at MGM can be seen in the musicals Dancing Lady, San Francisco, Maytime, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts.

    Quite why he was seen as simpatico with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is unclear.

  • John W Considine Jr

    Producer John William Considine Jr (1898–1961) had a more erudite background than most of his colleagues in the upper echelons of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, having studied at Stanford, Yale, Oxford and the University of Heidelberg. He was the son of a successful theatrical impresario.

    Considine started out writing and producing at Fox, and directing one picture, Disorderly Conduct (1932). He also wrote the original story for Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930). He joined MGM in 1932, and stayed at the studio for the rest of his career. He retired when he was 45, owing to health problems.

    Considine’s first picture at MGM was Flesh (1932), directed by John Ford. Subsequent successes included Mad Love (1935, one of MGM’s rare stabs at the horror film), Boy’s Town (1938) and A Yank at Eton (1942).

    Considine only produced two MGM musicals: Dancing Lady (in tandem with David O Selznick) and Broadway Melody of 1936.

  • David O Selznick

    David Selznick (1902-65, the ‘O’ was just an initial he adopted), was one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most successful independent producers, though his time at the top was not lengthy. His name will always be linked with Gone with the Wind (1939), the epic Civil War saga, and with Rebecca (1940), Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film. The two productions made him the only producer to win Best Picture Oscars in successive years.

    Selznick was born into a film family (his father was also a producer). Early on, he worked for MGM, Paramount and RKO before striking out on his own. Highlights of this studio period were What Price Hollywood? (1932), King Kong (1933), Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1935) and Anna Karenina (1935).

    For Selznick International he produced Nothing Sacred (1937), Intermezzo (1939), Spellbound (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946). Later on, he produced and then suppressed the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece Gone to Earth (1950), reshooting sections, re-editing it and releasing it under another title. The film was not seen as intended until a restoration in 1985.

    Selznick’s last major production was A Farewell to Arms (1957).

    During his time with MGM, Selznick produced two musicals: Dancing Lady and Reckless (for which he also wrote the original story under the name Oliver Jeffries).

  • Lorenz Hart

    The lyrics of Lorenz Milton Hart (1895-1943) were sophisticated, erudite, witty, conversational and amongst the finest contributions to the Great American Songbook. He stands with Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin as one of the foremost lyricists of the mid-twentieth century.

    In 1919, Hart met Richard Rodgers, and they formed a partnership that produced 26 of the most inventive Broadway shows of the late-1920s and 1930s These included A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Babes in Arms (1937), (The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and Pal Joey (1940).

    Hart and Rodgers worked in Hollywood for a period in the early 30s, with notable work for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933).

    Hart’s erratic behaviour eventually led to a rift with Rodgers, culminating in the latter working with Oscar Hammerstein II on Oklahoma! (1943). Hart died not long after the show’s premier.

    Lorenz Hart’s lyrics can be heard in eleven MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady  in 1933. The others were Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Words and Music (a less-than-accurate dramatization of the Rodgers and Hart partnership), Torch Song, Love me or Leave Me and Billy Rose’s Jumbo. 

  • Richard Rodgers

    There were better composers of popular music in the mid-twentieth century than Richard Charles Rodgers (1902-77), but none was as popular, prolific and influential. He was the first person to be awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Pulitzer.

    Rodgers’s career hinges on two partnerships with great, but very different, lyricists: Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. He met Hart while still a teenager, and they started out writing amateur shows, until contributing to their first Broadway show, Poor Little Ritz Girl in 1920. Rodgers had to work at other jobs to make a living, and was considering giving up music until the songs he and Hart wrote for a benefit show in 1925 received high praise from the critics. There was particular admiration for ‘Manhattan’, now an American standard.

    Rodgers and Hart wrote Broadway shows throughout the late 1920s before moving to Hollywood, where they scored a particular success with songs for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932). Another string of Broadway shows ran from 1935 till Hart’s death in 1943. 

    Rodgers had, by that time, already begun working with Hammerstein, with Oklahoma! (1943) establishing a new style of integrated musical. They went on to write some of the most successful shows on Broadway and throughout the world of musical theatre.

    Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer never filmed any of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, so it is Rodgers’s collaborations with Hart that feature in ten of the studio’s musicals: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Meet the People, Words and Music (a highly-fictionalized Rodgers and Hart biopic), Torch Song, Love Me Or Leave Me, This Could be the Night and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    Although none of their songs were used by MGM, the influence of Rodgers and Hammerstein can clearly be seen in the greater integration of music and plot from the late 40s onwards.

  • Harold Adamson

    Harold Campbell Adamson (1906-80) co-wrote a musical while at Harvard, where he was spotted by composer Vincent Youmans and invited to write the lyrics for a 1930 Broadway musical called Smiles. 

    Adamson then partnered with composer Burton Lane, while continuing to write with other composers. He and Lane then went to Hollywood, planning a short visit, but both stayed many years and worked on dozens of films.

    As well as Lane, Adamson wrote with many others, including Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Fain and Jimmy McHugh. He made a return to Broadway in the 1940s, writing lyrics for several shows.

    Harold Adamson songs were used in thirteen Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl, The Big Store, Thousands Cheer, Two Girls and a Sailor, Bathing Beauty, A Date with Judy, Everything I Have is Yours, Jupiter’s Darling and Seven Hills of Rome.

  • Burton Lane

    Burton Levy (1912-97) began writing songs while still a teenager, dropping out of school to do so. By the time he was 18, he had composed music for songs performed in Broadway shows, working regularly with Harold Adamson.

    Working for Irving Berlin Inc, Lane was sent to Hollywood with Adamson in 1934, and subsequently took up residence there. The pair worked together until 1936, writing songs for a number of studios. Lane then partnered with Ralph Freed (Arthur’s younger brother) at Paramount, followed by Frank Loesser. His final screen partnership was with Alan Jay Lerner in the 1950s.

    Lane composed the music for a number of Broadway musicals, the most successful being Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965).

    Notable songs composed by Lane include ‘How About You?’, ‘Old Devil Moon’, ‘I Hear Music’ and ‘ How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?’

    Lane songs were used in seventeen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, Seven Sweethearts, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Thousands Cheer, Meet the People, This Time for Keeps, Royal Wedding, Everything I Have is Yours, Torch Song, Give a Girl a Break and Jupiter’s Darling.

  • P J Wolfson

    Pinkus Jacob Wolfson (1909-73) was a trained pharmacist who took to writing novels. His first, Bodies Are Dust, was published in 1931.

    The book’s success secured Wolfson an offer to write for the screen, and he started at Universal, forming a partnership with Allen Rivkin. They wrote around ten screenplays together in two years. Altogether, Wolfson worked on around thirty-five films in 23 years. He also worked as producer on half a dozen pictures, later moving into television.

    Wolfson co-wrote Mad Love (1935), and two Fred Astaire pictures at RKO (Shall We Dance and Damsel in Distress (both 1937). He also worked on the George Steven comedy Vivacious Lady (1938). In 1939 he directed for RKO a film with the sensational title Boy Slaves, an exposé of child labour.

    Wolfson co-wrote two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Reckless.

  • Allen Rivkin

    Allen Irwin Rivkin (1903-90) started out as an advertising copy writer before travelling to Hollywood to work on publicity for RKO.

    Rivkin met P J Wolfson and they established a screenwriting partnership at Universal, their first picture being Night World (1932). Over the next thirty years, working with Wolfson and also with his own wife, Laura Kerr, Rivkin contributed to about fifty screenplays, and also helped to establish the Screenwriters Guild.

    Rivkin’s more notable work included What Price Hollywood? (1932), Dead Reckoning (1946) and The Farmer’s Daughter (1947).

    He co-wrote three MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and, in the 1950s, Grounds for Marriage  and The Strip.

    Rivkin gave up screenwriting in 1962 to work full time for the Writers Guild of America.

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