Lawrence Young Hill (1887-1963) made his uncredited screen debut in Shiver and Shake (1922), the first of many appearances for the Hal Roach Studios, where he also worked as an occasional stunt performer.
Hill was a regular in Laurel and Hardy pictures right from the beginning, working as an extra in their first screen pairing, Putting Pants on Philip (1927). In Two Tars (1928) he knocked Stan over with a mattress, while in Below Zero (1930) he helped throw the pair out of the restaurant. In Bonnie Scotland (1935), Hill had three different roles.
Inevitably, Jack Hill made appearances in three of MGM’s Laurel and Hardy musicals: The Devil’s Brother, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.
Arthur Taylor Goetze (1883-1940) was only making films for about twelve years, but still managed to notch up around 80 appearances. Prior to that, he had worked in vaudeville and, most recently, as a makeup artist. He was married to Dorothy Westmore, from the famous Hollywood makeup dynasty.
Working for Hal Roach, Stone had a passing similarity to Harry Langdon, and played a similarly child-like character. He then moved into playing character roles in First National features. By the end of the silent era, he was playing co-starring roles alongside actors such as Coleen Moore and Jean Hersholt.
The coming of sound saw Stone move into smaller character roles, often in westerns, until he was hired by Mack Sennett to make a series of comedy shorts. In his final years, he moved between down-the-bill character roles, for example in Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935) and uncredited bits. He can be seen as one of the lynch mob in Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), providing a little comic relief.
Stone appeared without credit in one MGM/Hal Roach musical, The Devil’s Brother.
Richard Gilbert (1889-1960), popularly known as ‘Fighting Dick’, started out as a boxer in 1907. He had some success, but was also described as a “punching bag” when facing superior opponents. Online claims that he once beat Jack Dempsey appear to have no substance.
After retiring from the ring, Gilbert found steady work as a heavy in silent comedies, frequently working for the Hal Roach Studios. He was usually uncredited, but did secure the occasional substantial role, for example in the western The Man from the West (1926).
Gilbert featured in many Laurel and Hardy shorts, and also in two of their feature-length musicals, The Devil’s Brother and The Bohemian Girl.
Francis Joseph Feeney (1881-1953) was a Hollywood pioneer, producer and director of scores of pictures, who is now remembered only for the bit parts he played in the films of his younger brother, John Ford. Ironically, it was Francis who gave his brother his introduction to film making.
Francis left the Feeney home as a teenager and was for years unheard of by his family. After drifting around in a variety of jobs, he began working in the New York film industry, and eventually moved to Texas, and, finally, Hollywood, where he directed and appeared in westerns for Thomas Ince.
In 1913 he signed with Universal, and began making serials starring Grace Cunard. After regaining contact with his family, he invited his brother John to Hollywood and gave him a job. Later, John Ford would claim his brother was the only director he ever learned from.
Francis Ford’s career declined as John’s ascended, and by the late 1920s he was working as a character actor. He appeared , usually without credit, in many films of note, as well as those of his brother, including Frankenstein (1931), The Plainsman (1936), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Hangover Square (1945). For John Ford, he usually played old men and/or drunkards.
Ford was in two MGM musicals: The Devil’s Brother and The Girl of the Golden West.
The Cuban Love Song is the story of a selfish man who manages to both have his cake and eat it, yet manages to be enjoyable in spite of this.
Is Nenita (Lupe Velez) going to be amenable to the sweet talking of Terry (Lawrence Tibbett)? Of course she is.
This was, as well as being MGM’s last musical for a couple of years, the final film under Lawrence Tibbet’s contract with the studio. He handles himself very well in what is essentially a romance with music. Contemporaries may have smiled at well-known sex pot Lupe Velez playing a virginal peanut vendor, but she pulls it off, and her scenes with Tibbett are very believable, as is her faked bravura when she knows Tibbett has to leave her.
This is a pre-code musical with some pretty blatant out-of-wedlock sex, though the fact that Velez dies might have made Will Hays feel slightly better about it. The man, of course, ends up with a son and in a clinch with Karen Morley, who has little to do in the picture other than be a good egg, but she does it very well.
Crystal (Karen Morley) is told about Nenita, but she tells Terry she already knows
The optical printer had been in widespread use since 1927, and enabled The Cuban Love Song to achieve its most memorable sequence, when Lawrence Tibbett duets with himself, performing both baritone and tenor vocals. It was his last song in a film for four years, and it is a worthy one.
There are a couple of good Fields-McHugh numbers in the film, but these are augmented by two genuine Cuban songs, one of which is reprised by Cuban artist Ernesto Lecuono, triggering a Proustian moment for our hero. The other is well-performed by Velez and nicely staged by W S Van Dyke, directing the first of the eleven musicals he worked on. Overall, his direction is fluid, with camera movement working in support of the narrative.
Lawrence Tibbett performs with himelf years before Gene Kelly thought of it
Mention must be made, finally, of Jimmy Durante, energetic as always in his supporting role, and playing the most unlikely-looking member of the US Marine Corps.
Edith Marilyn Fellows (1923-2011) was five when she made her first film, a Charley Chase comedy short. Over the next 65 years she notched up a modest 80-odd appearances on the big screen and television. She also began working on the stage in the 1940s, appearing a number of times on Broadway.
Fellows had already made twenty films by the time she was 13, most memorably alongside W C Fields in Mrs Wiggins of the Cabbage Patch (1935). Later, she was Polly Pepper in Columbia’s Five Little Peppers series. She managed to continue working after her years as a child actor were over, but mostly for Poverty Row studios.
Financial exploitation by her family, prescription drugs and alcohol all interfered with her career, as did serious stage fright. But she soldiered on, eventually playing herself in Dreams Deferred, a play based on her life and experiences. This led to more television work, including the role of Edith Head in a biopic about Grace Kelly.
Fellows had made appearances with Hal Roach’s ‘Little Rascals’, and also used her in the musical The Devil’s Brother.
Jacklyn DeVon (or Devon) Taylor (1926-2015) appeared in five of Hal Roach’s Our Gang pictures, and the producer also used her in Laurel and Hardy’s The Devil’s Brother and Babes in Toyland.
Taylor later wrote a book about ‘the Little Rascals’ who featured in well over 200 Roach films, and in the 1970s she co-hosted a television revival series called The Little Rascals Family Theatre.
IMDb states that Taylor’s career as a screen actor more or less ended in 1936 after eleven appearances. But then, it also insists on calling her Jacqueline Taylor. Obituaries published in 2015 suggested that she had been a bit-part player in 75 pictures, as well as doing theatre work.
She was later a host for KTTV in Los Angeles and worked as a reporter for a range of local TV stations, whilst maintaining a career in the theatre. She also became an ordained minister during the 1970s.
John Keith Collum (1926-62) stumbled into acting by virtue of being the son of a casting director at the Hal Roach studios.
In 1932, aged six, Collum was given a role in one of the Our Gang pictures, playing a boy whose response to everything was a drawled “Uh-huh”. He was never a full member of the gang, but a recurring character in 22 episodes of the 200-plus series.
The year after his debut, Roach also used Collum in The Devil’s Brother.
Collum made a handful of uncredited screen appearances as an adult, but, like many other child actors, had little success and died young.
Six feet five inch, 300 pound Stanley John Sandford (1894-1961) was fated to be given the nickname ‘Tiny’. With over 150 appearances, Sandford is best known for his work in comedies, usually cast as the heavy.
Sandford made his screen debut for Metro Pictures in 1919, and in the same year played a bit part in Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands. He later worked regularly for Chaplin, including in The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and, most prominently, as Big Bill in Modern Times (1936).
Sandford was also a regular collaborator with Laurel and Hardy, including in three of their musical features, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl. He was the police officer who attempts to restore peace in the classic Big Business (1929).
Carl Lee Harbaugh (1886-1960) was an actor, writer and director who, while working on Broadway, appeared in his first film, for a New York company, in 1912. Four years later he was writing and directing pictures for the Fox Film Corporation. In 1917, Harbaugh adapted and directed an early screen version of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).
Harbaugh never directed anything of great note, and his best-remembered film in that capacity is Elysia (Valley of the Nude) (1933), an early example of one of those earnest, ‘educational’ films that allowed plentiful nudity.
In 1927, Harbaugh co-wrote the story for Buster Keaton’s College, in collaboration with Brian Foy, who also produced Elysia. Harbaugh also acted in College.
Harbaugh was a featured player in silent films, but was mostly uncredited in the sound era. But he made appearances in some outstanding pictures, especially for Warner Bros, and including The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), White Heat (1949) and The Far Country (1954).
Carl Harbaugh was in just one MGM musical, The Devil’s Brother.
