Category: Films

Sam Ash

Samuel Howard Ash (1884-1951), the child of British immigrants, was a talented singer who was signed by Columbia records at the age of 20. He made his debut on Broadway the following year, starring in a Rudolf Friml operetta. He continued to record and perform on Broadway throughout the 1920s.

In 1929, Ash relocated to Hollywood as part of the exodus triggered by talking pictures. He made his debut in a featured role in Unmasked (1929), but was largely uncredited thereafter. His most frequently-revived appearance is as the bank teller in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), but he made well over 200 pictures between 1929 and 1953.

Sam Ash played Mark Thorne in MGM’s Stage Mother, uncredited even though he sang one of the picture’s relatively few songs. He subsequently made lesser uncredited appearances in The Merry Widow, San Francisco, Meet the People and Luxury Liner.

August 24, 2026
Ben Alexander

Nicholas Benton Alexander III (1911-69) became a child actor in 1916. By the age of 15 he had appeared in forty-three pictures.

Alexander’s breakthrough as an adult came with All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), playing the tragic soldier Kemmerich. Unfortunately, none of his subsequent roles were as prestigious, and in the 1940s he largely turned to radio acting and announcing.

His return to high-profile screen acting occurred in 1952 after Jack Webb invited him to play Officer Frank Smith in Dragnet, first on radio and then transferring to television. Alexander played the part for seven years. After that, he acted occasionally, but had a sideline running car dealerships, which in turn sponsored his own local television series, The Ben Alexander Show.

Alexander’s sole Metro musical performance was as would-be womanizer Francis Nolan in Stage Mother.

August 24, 2026
Alan Edwards

The New York Times obituary of Alan Edwards (1892-1954) stated that he made his first screen appearance in 1912. Over seventy years later, it seems impossible to find any evidence of that; his earliest IMDb citation is Rose of the Alley in 1916. It is necessary to remember, however, that in the early 1910s it was rare for films to have onscreen credits and studios saw little reason to retain paperwork. So Edwards’s screen appearances could well have been in excess of the 38 listed in IMDb.

Most of Edwards’s pictures were made in the sound era. They were mostly programmers, though he had a featured role in If You Could only Cook (1935), with Jean Arthur.

Edwards’s only role in an MGM musical was the politician Al Dexter in Stage Mother.

August 23, 2026
C Henry Gordon

Wikipedia tells us that the character actor Henry Racke (1883-1940) owned a silver mine in Mexico before he took to the stage. No source is cited and it is difficult to see where the information could have come from. Gordon certainly did not mention it in an interview he gave to Picture Play Magazine in February 1935.

According to Gordon, he returned as a young man from being educated in Europe to find that his sister was now acting. This led to actor/producer William Elliott casting him in a play. He spent many years performing on the stage until Hollywood opened its arms to actors who could speak in 1929.

His breakthrough screen role came in Mata Hari (1931), as the detective who tracks down Greta Garbo. The following year he played Paul Muni’s nemesis in Scarface (1932).

Gordon was more likely to be cast as a villain than a hero, a notable example being his brownface Surat Khan in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936).

Gordon’s only appearance in an MGM musical was as Ricco, the unscrupulous political agent in Stage Mother.

He died suddenly as the result of complications following the emergency amputation of his leg.

August 23, 2026
Ted Healy

Ernest Lea Nash (1896-1937) is best-known today as the co-founder of the act ‘Ted Healy and his Three Stooges’, but he also had a successful acting career in both comic and dramatic roles.

After working for some years in vaudeville, Healy teamed with schoolfriend Moe Howard, Moe’s brother Shemp (subsequently replaced by Curly) and comic Larry Fine. There were tensions in the act, largely owing to Healy’s heavy drinking, and the three stooges eventually signed with Columbia to make a series of shorts.

Healy signed a contract with MGM, who occasionally loaned him to other studios. He played Jean Harlow’s freeloading brother in Blonde Bombshell (1933) and Reagan the reporter in Mad Love (1935).

Ted Healy acted in six MGM musicals. Probably his best role was as the vaudeville performer Ralph Martin in Stage Mother. He appeared with the Stooges in Dancing Lady and did an uncredited bit in the all-star Hollywood Party. He was also in Reckless, Here Comes the Band and San Francisco.

Healy died from symptoms related to his drinking that were triggered by a serious and mysterious beating sustained outside a nightclub.

August 23, 2026
Phillips Holmes

Phillips Raymond Holmes (1907-42) never achieved the Hollywood career to which he aspired, and his potential was ended by his early death as a flyer in the Second World War.

Holmes was talent spotted while still a student and offered a screen test. (IMDb suggests he was an extra in Her Market Value in 1925, but this seems unlikely, given it was shot in California while he was at Princeton on the East Coast.)

His first verifiable appearance was in Varsity (1928). After a variety of supporting roles at Paramount, he starred alongside Walter Huston in The Criminal Code (1931). Other notable lead roles were in Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy (1931) and Ernst Lubtisch’s Broken Lullaby (1932).

Holmes made the mistake of moving to MGM, where he was never given the same quality of roles. After making a couple of pictures in the UK in 1938, he worked on the stage until joining the Royal Canadian Air Force at the start of the war.

Holmes’s sole MGM musical was as Lord Aylesworth in Stage Mother.

August 23, 2026
Franchot Tone

Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone (1905-68) became an actor after graduating from Cornell in 1927. After gaining extensive experience on the New York stage, he joined the influential Group Theatre, where he became a proponent of Stanislavsyan techniques. Tone made his first film, The Wiser Sex (1932) at New York’s Astoria Studios.

In 1933, Tone signed with MGM and moved to Hollywood. He gained early prominence playing the romantic lead in Gabriel Over the Whitehouse (1933). Metro often loaned him to other studios, where he made some of his most interesting films, including John Ford’s The World Moves On (1934) at Fox and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) at Paramount. In 1937, he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in RKO’s Quality Street.

When his contract ended in 1939, Tone went back to work on Broadway for a year or so. During the war, he appeared in two outstanding pictures, Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and the seminal film noir Phantom Lady (1944).

In 1949, Tone produced, co-directed and starred in RKO’s The Man on the Eiffel Tower. He performed the same functions in an independent film of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1957. One of Tone’s last major films was Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965).

Franchot Tone acted in three MGM musicals during his 1930s contract: Stage Mother, Dancing Lady (with future wife Joan Crawford) and Reckless.

August 23, 2026
Maureen O’Sullivan

Maureen Paula O’Sullivan (1911-98) is immortal, to those in the know, as Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan in the earliest and best of MGM’s series. She is also known, less excitingly, as Mia Farrow’s mother.

Like the wild colonial boy, O’Sullivan was born and raised in Ireland. Shortly after leaving school, she was spotted in Dublin by Frank Borzage, who was there shooting footage for Song O’ My Heart (1930). He cast her in a substantial role.

She moved to Hollywood to complete the picture, and made further films for Fox, including the bizarre sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine (1930), before signing with MGM in 1932. By the time she retired in 1994, she had notched up about seventy film credits, plus considerable work on television.

In addition to six Tarzan films, O’Sullivan had featured roles in The Thin Man (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), David Copperfield (1935, as Dora), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Big Clock (1943, directed by her husband, John Farrow) and The Tall T (1957). Late in life she acted in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, playing the mother of her daughter Mia).

O’Sullivan appeared in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and A Day at the Races.

August 23, 2026

Stage Mother

The Cast

Alice Brady	Kitty Lorraine
Maureen O’Sullivan	Shirley Lorraine
Franchot Tone	Warren Foster
Phillips Holmes	Lord Aylesworth
Ted Healy	Ralph Martin
Russell Hardie	Fred Lorraine
C. Henry Gordon	Ricco
Alan Edwards	Al Dexter
Ben Alexander	Francis Nolan
Sam Ash	Mr. Mark Thorne (uncredited)
Ruth Gillette	Blonde friend (uncredited)
Jay Eaton	Mr. Sterling (uncredited)
Phillips Smalley	Music Store Manager (uncredited)
Nora Cecil	Miss Gilford (uncredited)
Elspeth Dudgeon	Music Store Customer (uncredited)
Larry Fine	Music Store Customer (uncredited)
Lowden Adams	Dexter’s butler (uncredited)
Aggie Herring	Landlady (uncredited)
Harry Holman	Mr. Rumley (uncredited)
Lillian Harmer	Mrs Lorraine (uncredited)
Tom Ricketts	Mr Lorraine (uncredited)
Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer	Irish Eyes’ singer (uncredited)
Mary Ann Jackson	Auditioning Child singer/dancer (uncredited)
Hank Bell	Mustached Man With Badge (uncredited)
Margaret Bert	Nurse (uncredited)
Harrison Greene	Stage Manager (uncredited)
Shirley Jean Rickert	Shirley Lorraine as a child (uncredited)
Margaret Jones	Student (uncredited)
John Elliott	Politician (uncredited)
Luis Alberni	Hors D’Oeuvres Waiter (uncredited)
Bud Geary	Orderly (uncredited)
Lew Kelly	Jake, a stagehand (uncredited)
June Gittelson	Laughing Woman (uncredited)
Gladden James	Audience Member (uncredited)
Tiny Jones	Stage mother (uncredited)
Alice Lake	Audience member (uncredited)
John Larkin	Porter (uncredited)
Buddy Messinger	Fellow in Third Row (uncredited)
Greta Meyer	Stage mother (uncredited)
Bert Moorhouse	Navy Officer (uncredited)
Billy O’Brien	Student (uncredited)
Frank O’Connor	Man at gangplank (uncredited)
Garry Owen	Jerry, a stagehand (uncredited)
Bradley Page	Tom Banton (uncredited)
Leo White	Percy, the audition manager (uncredited)
Henry Roquemore	Messenger (uncredited)
Larry Steers	Dexter’s party guest (uncredited)
Carl Stockdale	Stagehand (uncredited)
Guy Usher	Theater Owner (uncredited)
Monte Vandergrift	Stage Lighting Man (uncredited)
Glen Walters	Dancing Girl’s mother (uncredited)
Beal Wong	Stage extra (uncredited)
Tammany Young	Taxi Driver (uncredited)
Edmund Mortimer	Shipboard extra (uncredited)
Bill Elliott	Dexter’s party guest (uncredited)
Art Jarrett	Dubbing for Sam Ash (uncredited)

August 22, 2026

Stage Mother

The Numbers

Any Little Girl, That’s a Nice Little Girl , Is the Right Little Girl For Me	Fred Fisher, Thomas J Gray	Alice Brady, Ted Healy
When Irish Eyes are Smiling	Ernest Ball, Chauncey Olcott, George Graff	Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer
How’m I Doin’?	Don Redman	Mary Ann Jackson
The Wedding of the Painted Doll	Nacio Herb Brown	Maureen O’Sullivan, dance double and chorus line
Beautiful Girl	Arthur Freed, Nacio Herb Brown	Sam Ash and chorus; Maureen O’Sullivan, dance double and chorus line
I’m Dancing on a Rainbow	Arthur Freed, Nacio Herb Brown	Unnamed singer dubbing Maureen O’Sullivan

August 22, 2026