Category: Films

Broadway to Hollywood

The Crew

Willard Mack	Director
Jules White	Director (uncredited)
Willard Mack	Screenplay
Edgar Allan Woolf	Screenplay
Robert E Hopkins	Dialogue (uncredited)
Gus Edwards	Songwriter (uncredited)
Al Goodhart	Composer (uncredited)
Edgar Allan Woolf	Lyricist (uncredited)
William H Penn	Composer (uncredited)
Dimitri Tiomkin	Composer (uncredited)
John Stromberg	Songwriter (uncredited)
Edgar Smith	Songwriter (uncredited)
Fred E Ahlert	Songwriter (uncredited)
Anton Rubinstein	Composer (uncredited)
Ernest Ball	Songwriter (uncredited)
Caro Roma	Songwriter (uncredited)
William Axt	Composer (uncredited)
Harry Rapf	Associate Producer
Norbert Brodine	Cinematographer
William Daniels	Cinematographer
William S Gray	Editor
Ben Lewis	Editor (uncredited)
Stan Rogers	Art Director
Edwin B Willis	Set Decorator
John Waters	Assistant Director (uncredited)
Douglas Shearer	Sound Recording Director
Sammy Lee	Choreographer
Albertina Rasch	Choreographer

August 16, 2026

Eddie Foster

Edward Eleck Foster (1906-89) had a fairly anonymous thirty-six-year career, but worked with some of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers.

Sullivan started at the top in 1926, performing in Buster Keaton’s The General. Later, he appeared in Howard Hawks’s The Road to Glory (1936), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941, and Frank Borzage’s Strange Cargo (1940).

He was in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943) and Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). He played a slave in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and one of his last films was Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961).

Along the way, Sullivan appeared without credit (as was normally the case) in Metro’s Broadway to Hollywood.

August 15, 2026
Billy Sullivan

William Arthur Sullivan (1891-1946) was a hard-working character who made around ninety films, none of which have attracted a great deal of attention from film historians. His best-known film may well be MGM’s musical Broadway to Hollywood, even though it is unclear what role he actually played.

Sullivan would have been 23 when he made his debut in the serial Million Dollar Mystery (1914). He bowed out with the Raoul Walsh picture Big Brown Eyes (1936), in the auspicious company of Cary Grant and Joan Bennett.

August 15, 2026
Forrest Taylor

Edwin Forrest Taylor (1883-1965) had already acted on the stage and made over two dozen films when America’s belated involvement in the First World War interrupted his career.

He returned to the stage after military service, for a time leading his own company. Screen work began again in 1926, and by the time he retired, shortly before his death, he had appeared in well over 400 films and television episodes.

Taylor was a character actor, mainly in uncredited parts, including in a couple of hundred ‘B’ westerns. He occasionally showed up in more prestigious pictures, including Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Wilson (1944), The Sea of Grass (1947) and Rancho Notorious (1952).

Despite all those appearances, Taylor was only ine one Metro musical, as a film director in Broadway to Hollywood.

August 14, 2026
Bobby Somers

Robert David Somers (1932-1982) made his screen debut aged seven months, playing Eddie Quillan as a baby in the MGM musical Broadway to Hollywood.

Some sources suggest that Somers also appeared with the Little Rascals, though it is unclear whether or not this is accurate. His adult career in the cinema began in 1953 when he worked as both actor and stunt performer on The War of the Worlds. Stunt work in film and television constituted the major part of his work over the next twenty years. Most of his work would appear to be uncredited and, in many cases, unrecorded.

August 14, 2026
Tom Nawn

Thomas Joseph Nawn (1863-1949) was a Scottish-born vaudevillian who specialized for many years in playing comic Irishmen. He and his wife Hettie toured the world with the Tom Nawn Polite Vaudeville Company, an iteration of which makes an appearance in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.

Nawn was in a few silent comedy pictures, most notably Buster Keaton’s masterpiece The General (1926).

August 13, 2026
Rice & Cady

Charles Rice (dates unknown) and Fred Cady (dates unknown) were vaudeville and burlesque performers who established a long-running partnership in 1900. They also worked in musical theatre, including touring productions of the Weber-Fields comedy Fiddle Dee Dee.

They appeared separately in a handful of films, and were seen together in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.

August 13, 2026
Una Merkel

Joan Bennett, Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow, Eleanor Powell, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Powell: just a few of the stars who had the delightful Una Merkel (1903-86) as a best friend during Hollywood’s Golden Age. With an unmistakeable Kentucky twang, Merkel was rarely the star of her pictures, but was also rarely unmemorable in them.

Aged 17, Merkel worked as a stand-in for Lillian Gish on Way Down East (1920), which means it is sometimes her you see in the famous ice floe sequence. After plying the acting trade in the legitimate theatre and in vaudeville, she worked for D W Griffith again when he cast her as Ann Rutledge in Abraham Lincoln (1930).

A hard-working supporting player, Merkel appeared in forty pictures released in the five-year period 1930 to 1934, perhaps most famously partnered with Ginger Rogers in the ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ number in 42nd Street (1933).

Una Merkel’s most famous scene is unquestionably her fight with Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939). Both actors eschewed stunt doubles and ended up heavily bruised, as well as soaking wet from James Stewart’s bucket of water.

In the 1950s, Merkel was a successful and Tony award-winning stage actor, and was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for Summer and Smoke (1961).

Merkel’s nine MGM musicals took her from Alice Brady in 1933 (Broadway to Hollywood) to Elvis Presley in 1966 (Spinout). In between came The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1936, Born to Dance, Rich Young and Pretty, The Merry Widow (again) and I Love Melvin.

August 13, 2026
Edward Peil Sr

Edward J Peil (1882/3-1958) studied drama at university, which ultimately led him to pursue a career in acting. His obituary stated that he was in a film, Charley’s Aunt, as early as 1906, , and that he starred in the first five-reel picture in 1910. What is certain is that he began to accumulate credits in 1913, following a period working in the theatre.

Peil worked for various studios in the 1910s, including playing a German officer in D W Griffith’s The Greatest Thing in Life (1918). He also performed in yellow face in Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), doing so again in John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924) and a number of other films of the 1920s.

Edward Peil acted in well over 420 pictures, though most of his appearances in the sound era were uncredited, apart from the many ‘B’ westerns he made for minor studios.

Seven of his uncredited appearances were in MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Girl of the Golden West, Two Girls on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Three Daring Daughters and Excuse My Dust.

August 11, 2026
Josephine Sabel

Josephine Domingue (1866-1945) was performing on the stage from 1887, initially in comic operas and musical comedies, and later in vaudeville.

Sabel was a singer more renowned for her comedic than vocal skills, yet was still known as ‘the Queen of Song’. The best-known song popularized by her was ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’, later sung in MGM’s The Florodora Girl.

Sabel was internationally known and toured widely. She was particularly appreciated in France, and Maurice Chevalier credited her with an important role in his early career.

Like many other aging vaudevillians, Sabel contributed to the aborted musical The March of Time. The footage was later used in Broadway to Hollywood, though the film’s IMDb page currently misspells her surname.

August 11, 2026