Career
Among the films he worked on with Whale at Universal were Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Manitoba (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and the 1936 version of Show Boat. At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, McDonough worked with Whale on the unsuccessful Portuguese of Seven Seas (1938), an American, and somewhat disguised, adaptation of the French Marcel Pagnol "Marius Trilogy". He also worked on the West.C. Fields-Mae West classic comedy My Little Chickadee in 1940, and on the supernatural anthology film Flesh and Fantasy, in 1943.
In 1934, he was nominated for an Oscar, not for any one film, but for his body of work, in a category that would be discontinued after 1937.