Charles Edward Butterworth (1896-1946) was one of those Hollywood character actors with a very defined onscreen persona which he carried with him from picture to picture: mild-mannered, courteous and hesitant/confused.
After starting out as a journalist, Butterworth dabbled in writing humorous pieces, which ended with him performing comic monologues in vaudeville. This led, in turn, to Broadway shows.
In 1929, Butterworth performed a monologue in a Paramount short called Vital Subjects, and followed this with 47 appearances in feature films, almost always credited. He was top-billed in a handful of pictures, for example Baby Face Harrington (1935), but was usually cast in a strong supporting role.
Butterworth played the Comte de Savignac in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and was Algy Longworth in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934). He provided comic relief in Magnificent Obsession (1935) and was the Duke of Ephesus in the, not wholly successful, screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (1940). Butterworth was an adept ad libber, and often improvised better dialogue than had been written for him.
Charles Butterworth featured in five MGM musicals of the 1930s: The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party, Student Tour, The Night is Young and Let Freedom Ring.
Butterworth died aged 49, when his car ran off the road in an unexplained accident.
Victor Potel (1889-1947) appeared in around 450 films, most of them made in the 1910s, when they were churned out. He was in 19 releases in 1910, and that was by no means his busiest year.
Potel made around eighty appearances for Essanay as a character named Slippery Slim (including one with the bizarre title Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage [1915]). In another long-running series, he played Slim Hoover, and was a regular in ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s westerns. He also occasionally turned his hand to writing and directing.
The pace of work slowed down over the years, but Potel was always a hard-working character actor in silent and sound features, usually in comic roles. During the 1930s, he was credited and uncredited in equal proportions. His films were mostly programmers, though he appeared in Fury (1936) as the customer who listens trepidatiously while his barber talks about the urge to cut someone’s throat.
In the 1940s, Potel was one of Preston Sturges’s stock company, in nine pictures and credited as the newspaper editor in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943).
Victor Potel showed up in six MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.
George Graff (1886-1973) was an American songwriter who co-wrote over 400 songs. Of these, one has survived to become a standard: ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’, written with Ernest Ball and Chauncey Olcott in 1912.
Graff lived a long life and this song became a kind of pension fund, earning him an alleged $10,000 a year in royalties up to the time of his death. Only a few years earlier, it had been featured in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967). ‘Irish Eyes’ is often mistaken for a traditional Irish ballad, but Graff admitted that he had never even visited Ireland.
MGM used the song twice in its musicals: it was tortured by Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer in Stage Mother; and sung sweetly by Nelson Eddy in Let Freedom Ring.
John Chancellor Olcott (1858?-1932) was a stage actor, singer and songwriter. He started out performing in minstrel shows, but eventually became a regular on Broadway.
Olcott was of Irish descent, and many of his songs took the form of Irish ballads. Three have become standards: ‘Mother Machree’, ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ and, most particularly, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.
The last of these has been heard in many pictures through the years, and was used twice in MGM musicals. Olcott died in 1932, so did not live to hear Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer’s painfully off-key rendition in Stage Mother. A few years later, Nelson Eddy treated it with a little more respect in Let Freedom Ring.
Luis Alberni (1886-1962) had been acting for a few years in his native Spain when he travelled to the United States in 1914. He succeeded in finding stage work, but quickly made his screen debut in Children of the Ghetto (1915).
Over the next forty years, Alberni appeared in over 170 pictures, playing a wide range of ‘ethnic’ parts. Most of them were programmers, but from time to time he secured featured roles in more prestigious films. In 1933, he played Dr Bomb in Topaze, alongside John Barrymore.
Alberni was the nightclub owner in Roberta (1935) and had a notable role as Mr Louis Louis in Easy Living (1937). He played Basset for James Whale in The Great Garrick (1937) and was the Pike family’s chef in The Lady Eve (1941), made the same year that he played the King of Naples in That Hamilton Woman.
Luis Alberni was in four Metro musicals, starting out uncredited in Stage Mother and Let Freedom Ring. He then had a featured role as Nick the cafe owner in Babes on Broadway, and finished, again without credit, in I Married an Angel.
Henry Branch Bell (1892-1950) had the nickname Handlebar, in reference to his ostentatious moustache.
Bell and his facial hair spent most of their time, from 1920 onwards, on the streets of the Old West, playing a variety of sheriffs, cowpokes and townsmen in literally hundreds of ‘B’ westerns.
His occasional forays into ‘A’ pictures included Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936, as an unemployed farmer), The Buccaneer (1938, as a pirate), They Died with their Boots On (1941) and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Bell was one of the patrons of the Opera House who was minded to ride the actor Granville around town on a rail.
Hank Bell can be seen (unmistakably) in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Girl of the Golden West and Let Freedom Ring.
John Waters (1893-1965) was one of the few people (men) to receive an Academy Award for Best Assistant Director; it was only presented for five years.
Waters joined the film industry as a young man, and many of his credits from the 1910s are thought to be missing. The earliest suggested by IMDb is The Shadow of a Doubt, produced by the Equitable Motion Pictures Corporation, which was based in New York.
In 1926, Famous Players-Lasky signed Waters as a director, and he made about a dozen pictures for them over the next couple of years, functioning as producer on at least one, Two Flaming Youths (1927).
Waters joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1928, and stayed for nearly thirty years. Pictures he worked on included Viva Villa! (1934), Ninotchka (1939, as second unit director) and The Desperate Hours (1955, as second unit director).
Waters was AD on Broadway to Hollywood and second unit director on Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Annie Get Your Gun.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
At the time of his death, the New Yorker described Ernest Roland Ball (1878-1927) as the most able ballad writer of his time, though scarcely known outside the profession.
Ball specialized in Irish ballads (though born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio), the two most famous being ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ and ‘Mother Machree’. Both songs were collaborations with lyricist Chauncey Olcott, with George Graff Jr contributing to the former and Rida Johnson Young to the latter.
Numbers composed by Ball appear in four MGM musicals. In Broadway to Hollywood, Nelson Eddy sings ‘In the Garden of My Heart’, written with Caro Roma. An uncredited boy sings ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ in Stage Mother and Jeanette MacDonald performs ‘Love Me and the World is Mine’ in San Francisco. Finally, it is back to Nelson Eddy for a rendition of ‘Irish Eyes’ in Let Freedom Ring.
Alex Elihu Tenenholtz (1887-1971) was a stalwart of Yiddish theatre, both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in his adopted home in the United States. In 1925 he established a Yiddish theatre company with Cecilia Adler, the half-sister of Luther and Stella, and in 1926 was offered a contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
In one of his early films, The Mask of Comedy (1926), he appeared with Norma Shearer, and over the next few years he acted with most of Hollywood’s top women actors: Marion Davies (The Cardboard Lover [1928]), Marie Dressler (Bringing Up Father [1928]), Joan Crawford (The Duke Steps Out [1929]), Blanche Sweet (The Woman Racket [1930]), Loretta Young (Three Girls Lost [1931]), Kay Francis (British Agent [1934]) and Carole Lombard (Nothing Sacred [1937]).
Holtz also appeared uncredited in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Hollywood Party and Let Freedom Ring.
When Hotz’s career was reduced to Poverty Row productions in the late 30s, he took up chicken farming instead. He returned to acting, predominantly on television, in 1959.
