He often worked with director James Whale at Universal Studios and MGM.
Among the films he worked on with Whale at Universal were Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and the 1936 version of Show Boat.
At MGM, McDonough worked with Whale on the unsuccessful Port of Seven Seas (1938), an American adaptation of the French Marcel Pagnol "Marius Trilogy".
He also worked on the W. C. Fields-Mae West classic comedy My Little Chickadee in 1940, and on the supernatural anthology film Flesh and Fantasy, in 1943.
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