The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: 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. 

  • James Gleason

    James Gleason (1882-1959) became an easily-recognized supporting player specializing in hard-nosed, fast-talking types. But early in his career Gleason was a moderately-successful playwright, which explains his dual contribution to The Broadway Melody as both co-scenarist (dialogue) and bit player. (In what has been called a meta-touch, he plays a music publisher named James Gleason.)

    Gleason’s only other Metro musical was Babes on Broadway, as the actor-hating producer whose bacon is saved by Mickey Rooney and his troupe.

  • Bessie Love

    Bessie Love (1898-1986) was given her start in films by D W Griffith in 1915 and enjoyed a successful dramatic career in silent cinema. By the late twenties her film career was in decline and she spent time touring on the musical stage. This led to a part in Warners’ musical short The Swell Head (1928), which in turn secured her a contract with Metro. 

    Her role as Hank in The Broadway Melody won her a nomination for Best Actress and is the film’s standout performance. As well as appearing in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Love went on to star in three more Metro musicals: Chasing Rainbows (which reteamed her with Broadway Melody’s Charles King); They Learned About Women; and the 1930 version of Good News.

    The 1931-32 moratorium on musicals brought this stage of Love’s career to a halt and she went into semi-retirement before relocating to the UK in 1935, where she lived out a long life as a notable supporting player in television and films.

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