The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Films

  • Carl ‘Major’ Roup

    Carl Roup (1915-2002) had a long career with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, briefly as a child actor, and then in various production capacities.

    Roup was discovered and cast in his first film, The Red Mill (1925), by Marion Davies, who saw him selling newspapers on the studio lot. She paid for his education at a military school, leading Lon Chaney to nickname him ‘Major’. 

    Roup made a number of other appearances in silent pictures, and played a young baseball fan in They Learned About Women. 

    Roupe later became a script clerk, including on A Day at the Races and At the Circus. In 1946, he started working as a second assistant director on Till the Clouds Roll By, and also carried out that role on On an Island With You, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Pagan Love Song, Show Boat, Lili, Dangerous When Wet, Rose Marie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jupiter’s Darling, Silk Stockings and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    The Los Angeles Times obituary described Roup as “as much a part of MGM as Leo the Lion”.

  • Mike Donlin

    Michael Joseph Donlin (1878-1933) was a Major League baseball player, nicknamed Turkey Mike, who is generally held to have frittered away his enormous talent. A chaotic lifestyle was exacerbated by an ill-conceived ambition to become an actor. He abandoned baseball in 1906 to perform in a Broadway play with a baseball theme. 

    After an ill-fated attempt to return to the game, Donlin sought a Hollywood career. He made around 70 films, often uncredited and generally without interest, though he did become an early member of John Ford’s stock company, making half a dozen pictures with him.

    Donlin’s bit as a baseball player in They Learned About Women would not have stretched his talents.

  • Eddie Gribbon

    Edward T Gribbon (1890-1965) started making comedy shorts in around 1917, doing a lot of work for Mack Sennett. He progressed to supporting roles in many features. Later in his career he did a lot of uncredited work, but was a regular in the Joe Palooka series, and showed up as a storm trooper in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). 

    Gribbon played Coach Brennan in They Learned About Women.

  • Bob Kortman

    Robert F Kortman (1887-1967) made around 300 screen appearances in a career lasting the best part of fifty years. The majority of his films were westerns, and was a favoured opponent of William S Hart. 

    The majority of Kortman’s roles were uncredited, but he was in a number of outstanding films, including: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927); The Criminal Code (1931), playing the convict barber who shaves the governor; Beau Geste (1939); The Big Clock (1948); Ace in the Hole (1951); Rancho Notorious (1952); and his last picture, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961).

    Kortman was also the forest ranger pursuing Laurel and Hardy in one of their early appearances together, Duck Soup (1927).

    Along the way, Kortman made an appearance as one of Ramon Novarro’s fellow Bonapartists in Devil-May-Care.

  • Clifford Bruce

    The AFI Catalog lists Devil-May-Care, made in 1929, as the final credit of the Canadian stage and film actor Clifford Bruce, who died in 1919. On balance, it seems unlikely that it is the same man.

    The Clifford Bruce who played Gaston the butler in the MGM film seems to have no other credited or uncredited roles, at least under that name. So far, he remains a mystery.

  • William Humphrey

    William Jonathan Humphrey (1863-1942) was an actor and director, from 1908 and 1910 respectively. He made around 140 appearances and directed about 80 pictures, with much of his early work being for the Vitagraph Company. He had a lengthy contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the mid-twenties.

    Humphrey made his screen debut playing Napoleon Bonaparte, a role he returned to at least eight times, including in MGM’s Devil-May-Care.

  • Wylie Watson

    Scottish actor John Wylie Robertson (1889-1966) has a secure place in cinema history thanks to his playing of Mr Memory in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), the character who holds the secret to the film’s MacGuffin. 

    Watson’s whole career was in the British stage and film industries. He was in a host of notable pictures, including Jamaica Inn (1939), Tawny Pipit (1944), Waterloo Road (1945), Brighton Rock (1948) and Whisky Galore! (1949). He emigrated to Australia in 1952 and his final role was in The Sundowners (1960). 

    All of which makes it puzzling that online sources cite him as playing an uncredited bit in It’s a Great Life. Wylie Watson is an unusual name, so it is difficult to see him being confused with another actor. But it is even more difficult to understand why he would be in Hollywood in 1929, playing uncredited in a Duncan Sisters’ flop.

  • Clarence Burton

    Clarence Forrest Burton (1882-1933) started working as a child in a family vaudeville act. By his 20s he was acting in plays and musicals, and moved into screen acting in 1912, making regular appearances in Cecil B DeMille pictures. His final role was in DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932). It was noted in the press at the time of his death that he had previously died more than 100 times in films.

    Burton played, uncredited, the cop who chases the Duncan Sisters at the start of MGM’s It’s a Great Life, and was also in They Learned About Women.

  • John J Richardson

    Harold Jack Joseph Richardson (1888-1942) was a British-born actor who appears to have travelled to the United States at the same time as Charles Chaplin and Stan Laurel, as part of the Fred Karno troupe. He made 160+ appearances in Hollywood films, starting with his debut as Goulash the lion tamer in Roaring Lions and Wedding Bells (1917). 

    Most of Richardson’s roles were uncredited, including that in MGM’s It’s a Great Life.

    Richardson’s wife Mabel, who appeared in a couple of pictures before becoming a makeup artist, is reputed to be the longest-living Hollywood performer, having died in 2001 at the age of 110.

  • George Periolat

    George E Periolat (1874-1940) was a Broadway who made his first film in New York in 1909, for the Vitagraph Company, but later moved to Hollywood. He was a busy character actor, playing, amongst other roles, the Governor in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Mark of Zorro and Mary Pickford’s father in the Lubitsch-directed Rosita (1923).

    Most of Periolat’s appearances in sound picture were uncredited, including his Mr Weill in It’s a Good Life. 

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