William Hilton Terhune (1899-1940) directed half a dozen shorts for Hal Roach in the 1930s, but was predominantly an editor, starting at the studio as a cutter in 1926.
Terhune was the editor on Topper (1937) and its first sequel, Topper Takes a Trip (1938). He also worked on the Joan Crawford picture Susan and God (1940) for MGM.
William Terhune edited the four Laurel and Hardy musicals, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss, as well as the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus.
Albert Adrian Jordan (1887-1983) worked in the British film industry in the 1910s before emigrating to America, where he found work as a cutter at Vitagraph.
Jordan moved to the Hal Roach Studios in 1921, where he stayed for the bulk of his career. Stan Laurel, who was the creative force behind the Laurel and Hardy films, admired Jordan’s work to the extent of insisting that he edit all of their pictures, if he was available.
This meant that Jordan worked on virtually all of the Laurel and Hardy features, including their four musicals, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.
Jordan also edited one of the Roach studio’s most prestigious productions, Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men (1939).
After leaving Hal Roach, Jordan worked mostly in television until he retired, aged 75.
Arthur Raymond Lloyd (1897-1954) was a journeyman cinematographer who shot all of his 200 shorts (plus a handful of features) for the Hal Roach Studios.
Lloyd was a regular on both Laurel and Hardy and the Our Gang pictures. He shot such classics as Laughing Gravy (1931), County Hospital, Towed in a Hole (both 1932) and Block-Heads (1938).
He also shot all four of Laurel and Hardy’s operettas: The Devil’s Brother (with Hap Depew), Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.
Charles Rogers (1887-1956) is generally known as Charley and, like his namesake Charlie Chaplin and his close friend Stan Laurel, he started out working in British music halls, before emigrating to the United States in 1912.
In the same year, Rogers played the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, one of the earliest multi-reel features, produced by a New York studio. He continued to work in the East Coast film industry for several years, before finally making his way to Hollywood.
In 1927, Rogers appeared uncredited in Love ‘em and Feed ‘em, and stayed at the Hal Roach Studios for many years, quickly moving into writing and directing.
Rogers has been described as, in creative terms, second only to Stan Laurel on the Roach lot, and he worked on a number of Laurel and Hardy’s best shorts and features. These included, as a gag writer, We Faw Down, Two Tars (both 1928), Hog Wild and Laughing Gravy (both 1930). Rogers contributed the original stories and screenplays for Block-Heads (1938), A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea (both 1940).
Rogers directed or co-directed, and also contributed to the writing of, three of Laurel and Hardy’s operettas: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland (in which he also played Simple Simon) and The Bohemian Girl. He also wrote gags for Swiss Miss.
Away from Laurel and Hardy, Rogers played Josef Goebbels in the studio’s bizarre wartime semi-feature That Nazty Nuisance (1943). One of his last jobs was an uncredited appearance in Chaplin’s Limelight (1952).
Jacklyn DeVon (or Devon) Taylor (1926-2015) appeared in five of Hal Roach’s Our Gang pictures, and the producer also used her in Laurel and Hardy’s The Devil’s Brother and Babes in Toyland.
Taylor later wrote a book about ‘the Little Rascals’ who featured in well over 200 Roach films, and in the 1970s she co-hosted a television revival series called The Little Rascals Family Theatre.
IMDb states that Taylor’s career as a screen actor more or less ended in 1936 after eleven appearances. But then, it also insists on calling her Jacqueline Taylor. Obituaries published in 2015 suggested that she had been a bit-part player in 75 pictures, as well as doing theatre work.
She was later a host for KTTV in Los Angeles and worked as a reporter for a range of local TV stations, whilst maintaining a career in the theatre. She also became an ordained minister during the 1970s.
Six feet five inch, 300 pound Stanley John Sandford (1894-1961) was fated to be given the nickname ‘Tiny’. With over 150 appearances, Sandford is best known for his work in comedies, usually cast as the heavy.
Sandford made his screen debut for Metro Pictures in 1919, and in the same year played a bit part in Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands. He later worked regularly for Chaplin, including in The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and, most prominently, as Big Bill in Modern Times (1936).
Sandford was also a regular collaborator with Laurel and Hardy, including in three of their musical features, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl. He was the police officer who attempts to restore peace in the classic Big Business (1929).
Winfield Scott Mattraw (1880-1946) weighed 362 pounds at his heaviest, and was discussed as a possible new Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. He never achieved that level of success, but did appear in over fifty films in sixteen years.
And Mattraw didn’t even make his first film until he was 44. Although well-known as an amateur comedian and actor in his home town, his day job was managing a local theatre, which included booking the acts and shows.
In 1922, Mattraw made a tentative move towards professionalism by accepting a three-day vaudeville engagement. Then, in 1923, he decided to try his luck in Hollywood. He made a good start, with a two-reel comedy western bringing him to the attention of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. This led to an uncredited comic turn as a eunuch in Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
Mattraw worked steadily thereafter, including as comic relief in a series of Universal ‘B’ westerns. He was also uncredited but noticeable (Mattraw was always noticeable) in some ‘A’ pictures, including The Invisible Man and Design for Living (both 1933), Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). He lives on (though uncredited) as the voice of Bashful in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
He was in two MGM/Hal Roach musicals with Laurel and Hardy: The Devil’s Brother and Babes in Toyland (as the town crier).
Four feet and two inches tall, Tutie (or possibly Tufie) Fatella (1898-1968) emigrated with his family from Syria to the United States in around 1911. By the age of 18, he was in Hollywood, starting out on a career as a character actor that would last almost fifty years and about 250 performances.
George’s first film is believed to have been Bobbie of the Ballet (1916), which starred Lon Chaney. In the 1920s he worked regularly with both Chaney and director Tod Browning, being particularly memorable as Cojo in the macabre The Unknown (1927). He also featured in Rex Ingram’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and Scaramouche (1923).
In the sound era, George played a scientist in both Browning’s Dracula and its Spanish version, Drácula (both 1931). He renewed his acquaintance with Bela Lugosi in Edgar G Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). Later appearances included The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Canyon Passage (1946) and a cameo in the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). George’s last big screen appearance was in One-Eyed Jacks (1963), but he continued working in television.
Amongst John George’s many roles were eleven in MGM musicals, all uncredited: The Cuban Love Song, Babes in Toyland, Rose-Marie, San Francisco, Let Freedom Ring, At the Circus, Du Barry Was a Lady, Two Sisters from Boston, Big City, Singin’ in the Rain and Deep in My Heart.
Early in his career, George Feder (1901-51) had some good supporting roles in silent pictures, most notably Josef Von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928).
From 1930 onwards, however, virtually all of Raymond’s 130+ appearances were without credit.
Four of these were in MGM musicals. He started in Love in the Rough, as Benny Rubin’s friend from the old country. Following that, he was in Babes in Toyland (as a bogeyman), Here Comes the Band and Broadway Serenade.
Jack Raymond should not be confused with the British actor and director of the same name, who was his contemporary.
Harry A Grinde (1893-1979) was a vaudeville performer who found work as a director at MGM in the late twenties. From then until 1945 he directed around sixty generally low budget features for a variety of studios.
Early on, Metro occasionally used Grinde to work in partnership with tyro directors who had joined the studio directly from theatre work. For example, he co-directed The Bishop Murder Case (1930) with Broadway director David Burton.
Another such was Good News, which Grinde co-directed with Edgar J MacGregor, director of the original broadway production.
Grinde did not direct any additional musicals at Metro, being far more at home with westerns and thrillers, though he did, out of left field, write the screenplay for Babes in Toyland.
