Marshall Ruth (1898-1953) was an actor who worked steadily in films for twenty years, almost always uncredited. His size and shape made him a natural choice when 20th-Century-Fox were looking for someone to play Roscoe Arbuckle in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939).
In The Broadway Melody, Ruth played the impresario Zanfield’s assistant.
Alice Pitman (19??-??) appeared as a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody. Nothing else is known about her.
Charlotte Merriam (1903-72) started out as a screen actor playing in silent shorts, but graduated to features. Perhaps her most important role was the lead in The Brass Bottle (1923), which was directed by Maurice Tourneur. She also had an important part in the first screen version of Captain Blood (1923).
Merriam transitioned into sound pictures, where she memorably played the negligent mother in Night Nurse (1931). Less memorably, she made an uncredited appearance in The Broadway Melody, playing a flapper.
Elizabeth Kathryn Leopold (1910-2005) was a dancer who was, apparently, discovered at a young age by prima ballerina and dessert inspirer Anna Pavlova.
She made a handful of screen appearances in the late twenties,and her low point as a dancer may well have been in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody.
Edward Dillon (187?-1933) appeared on at least 340 films, most of them in the silent era, from 1908 onwards. He worked under D W Griffith and played leads opposite Mary Pickford. He also directed around 140 films, including a 1915 version of Don Quixote.
In sound pictures, Dillon was usually uncredited. This includes The Broadway Melody, which starred Bessie Love, whom Dillon had directed in A Daughter of the Poor (1917).
J Emmett Beck (19??-45) is an actor with just three citations in the AFI register.
One of these, and the last one, is Babe Hatrick in The Broadway Melody.
Lawrence Fredrick Schaetzlein (1897-1988) was a prolific songwriter with one immortal classic to his name. In 1928 he co-authored that paean to optimism, ‘When You’re Smiling (the Whole World Smiles With You)’.
Shortly before MGM appointed him Music Director, Shay co-wrote ‘Gee, But I’d Like to Make You Happy’ for the 1930 Good News.
George Waggner (1894-1984), or george waGGner as he sometimes, and inexplicably, chose to credit himself, is best known as a writer, director and producer.
Wagner produced and directed Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941), establishing himself in the horror pantheon. He also produced Cobra Woman (1944), the once-in-a-lifetime joining of Robert Siodmak with Maria Montez.
Much earlier in life, Waggoner worked as an actor (up against Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (1921) and songwriter.
In the latter capacity, Waggoner teamed with J Russel Robinson to write ‘I Feel Pessimistic’ for the 1930 version of Good News.
Joseph Russel Robinson (1892-1963) was a member of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and a notable jazz composer. He co-wrote the standard ‘Singin the Blues’, which was recorded by Bix Beiderbecke.
In the 1930s Robinson turned to songwriting, including for the screen. The title song for Portrait of Jennie’ (1948), with lyrics by Gordon Burge, became a hit record for Nat ‘King’ Cole.
Robinson co-wrote ‘I Feel Pessimistic’ for the 1930 version of Good News.
Raymond Brost (1896-1970) was a Tin Pan Alley composer whose many hits included ‘Has Anybody Seen My Girl’ and Shirley Temple’s ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’.
Perhaps the highpoint of Brown’s career was the six years he spent from 1925 in partnership with Buddy G DeSylva and Lew Brown. Their Broadway show Good News (1927) was filmed twice by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The pictures retained some, though not all, of the original show’s numbers, including ‘The Varsity Drag’.
