Burly character actor Dewey Robinson (1898-1950) appeared in well over 200 feature films in a Hollywood career lasting less than twenty years.
Robinson started out as a stage actor, and was in a couple of Broadway productions during the 1920s. In 1931, he was cast as Big Tony Catello in Enemies of the Law, the first of many roles as criminals, and the next year had a small part in I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
Notable films featuring Robinson include Blonde Venus (1932), She Done Him Wrong (1933), Roman Scandals (1933, as the slave auctioneer), Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935, as Snug the joiner), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Ghost Ship (1943), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) and The Bells of St Mary’s (1945).
Robinson was a member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, and appeared in eight of the director’s pictures, including playing the sheriff in Sullivan’s Travels (1941).
Dewey Robinson can be seen in uncredited roles in nine MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Big Store, Two Sisters from Boston, Fiesta, Neptune’s Daughter and That Midnight Kiss.
Harry William Depp (1883-1957) started out as a comedian in vaudeville and travelling theatre companies. By 1907, he was appearing on Broadway, in the first of many productions.
Depp made his film debut in Between Midnight (1916), a Carter DeHaven short, but then travelled to Hollywood for the first of around 140 feature films. Early on, he worked for a number of small studios, always in comedic roles and with a penchant for cross-dressing. He also made appearances for Mack Sennett.
He had many featured roles in the 1920s, but after 1930 tended to have smaller, uncredited parts. He cropped up in Howard Hawks’s Barbary Coast (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). In 1945, Depp played the pharmacist who supplies Gene Tierney with the arsenic needed for suicide.
Harry Depp made uncredited appearances in six Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, The Big Store, Ship Ahoy!, I Dood It and Girl Crazy.
The screen immortality of Clara Blanchard Dickey (1876-1962) rests on her role as Dorothy’s Auntie Em in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. Playing aunts was something of a speciality: she was Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly in three different pictures, and Esther Blodgett’s Aunt Mattie in A Star is Born (1937), amongst many others.
Blandick made her stage debut in Boston at the age of 21, and made her first Broadway appearance in 1903, in Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. She continued to work on Broadway and in touring productions.
Some sources claim she made her first film in 1908, but the earliest appearance identified by the AFI is Mrs Black is Back (19140, an adaptation of a Broadway hit made by Famous Players.
Blandick was part of the 1929 exodus to Hollywood, where she worked as a character actor until the early fifties, sometimes credited, sometimes not, and well over 100 pictures in total. She played the snooty mother in Shopworn (1932) and was uncredited in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). Blandick was credited again in Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and DeMille’s North West Mounted Police (1940), and uncredited in Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943).
As well as The Wizard of Oz, Blandick appeared without credit in three other MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, The Big Store and Du Barry was a Lady.
Harold Campbell Adamson (1906-80) co-wrote a musical while at Harvard, where he was spotted by composer Vincent Youmans and invited to write the lyrics for a 1930 Broadway musical called Smiles.
Adamson then partnered with composer Burton Lane, while continuing to write with other composers. He and Lane then went to Hollywood, planning a short visit, but both stayed many years and worked on dozens of films.
As well as Lane, Adamson wrote with many others, including Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Fain and Jimmy McHugh. He made a return to Broadway in the 1940s, writing lyrics for several shows.
Harold Adamson songs were used in thirteen Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl, The Big Store, Thousands Cheer, Two Girls and a Sailor, Bathing Beauty, A Date with Judy, Everything I Have is Yours, Jupiter’s Darling and Seven Hills of Rome.
Victor Potel (1889-1947) appeared in around 450 films, most of them made in the 1910s, when they were churned out. He was in 19 releases in 1910, and that was by no means his busiest year.
Potel made around eighty appearances for Essanay as a character named Slippery Slim (including one with the bizarre title Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage [1915]). In another long-running series, he played Slim Hoover, and was a regular in ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s westerns. He also occasionally turned his hand to writing and directing.
The pace of work slowed down over the years, but Potel was always a hard-working character actor in silent and sound features, usually in comic roles. During the 1930s, he was credited and uncredited in equal proportions. His films were mostly programmers, though he appeared in Fury (1936) as the customer who listens trepidatiously while his barber talks about the urge to cut someone’s throat.
In the 1940s, Potel was one of Preston Sturges’s stock company, in nine pictures and credited as the newspaper editor in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943).
Victor Potel showed up in six MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.
Harry Charles Bradley Cockrill (1869-1947) was 60 when he made his first film, but still managed to accumulate well over 200 appearances in the next seventeen years.
Bradley started out as a legitimate actor on the stage, performing regularly on Broadway from the late 1900s. From 1922 to 1927 he performed more than 2,300 times in the original production of Abie’s Irish Rose.
In 1929, Bradley was part of the exodus from New York to Hollywood, making his screen debut in a Paramount short called The Home Edition (1929). Thereafter, he was mostly uncredited, but with the occasional featured role, for example in Warner’s Convention City (1933). He had a prominent role in Heat Lightning (1934) for the same studio. He worked for Capra in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hawks in His Girl Friday (1940).
Bradley was uncredited in four MGM musicals:Dancing Lady, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.
Bradley Page (1901-85) had worked on Broadway before making his first film, Sporting Blood, in 1931. He eventually made over 100 pictures, split between credited feature parts and uncredited appearances.
Page made few films of note. In fact, the two MGM musicals he appeared in–Stage Mother and The Big Store (credited as one of Douglass Dumbrille’s henchmen)–may be the most prestigious projects with which he was associated in a career that lasted just over ten years.
There seems to be no information about what Page did during the last forty years of his life.
Melvin Joseph Messinger (1907-65) had a successful career in silent shorts, initially as a child actor, and thereafter played uncredited supporting parts.
Messinger made his debut in When Little Lindy Sang (1916), a rare film for its time in that it starred Ernestine Jones, a talented African-American child actor. The following year he was Captain Smollett in Treasure Island, a film in which the lead parts were all played by children and teenagers, and which also features his sister, Gertrude. He was in several of these ‘Sunset Kiddies’ productions of classic stories and fairy tales made by Fox.
In 1920-21, Messinger had a recurring role in Goldwyn’s Edgar series, written by Booth Tarkington of Magnificent Amberson’s fame. In 1923-24, he starred as Buddy in his own series of shorts.
From 1926, Messinger, no longer a child, starred in a series of comedy shorts with the Sunkist Bathing Beauties and a monkey. But after pictures started to talk, he was relegated to uncredited bit parts. Some of the better films of this period included Wild Boys of the Road(1933) and Modern Times (1936). He also appeared briefly in Citizen Kane (1941).
Buddy Messinger was in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Hullabaloo and The Big Store.
Later in life, he worked as ab assistant director in films and on television.
Edwin Booth Willis (1893-1963) worked on the design of over 800 MGM pictures, in a career lasting a little over thirty years. He was nominated for Academy Awards 32 times, and won on eight occasions. In broad terms, Willis was an art director, but his specialism was set decoration and the bulk of his credits were in this capacity.
After working as an art director for Tiffany Pictures in the 1920s, Willis worked exclusively for Metro, obtaining three types of credit: Associate Art Director (AAD), Interior Decorations (ID) and Set Decorator (SD). He did early work as SD on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925).
Willis worked on some of the studio’s major critical and commercial successes, including Queen Christina (1933, for ID), The Thin Man (1934, as AAD), Anna Karenina (1935, as AAD, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936, as AAD), Camille (1936, as AAD), The Good Earth (1937, as AAD), Captains Courageous (1937, as AAD), Boys’ Town (1938, as AAD), The Women (1939), Ninotchka (1939, as SD), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, winning an Oscar), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Mrs Miniver (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Madame Curie (1943), Gaslight (1944, winning an Oscar), John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1944), The Yearling (1946, winning an Oscar), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), State of the Union (1948), Act of Violence (1948), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Little Women (1949, winning an Oscar), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful 1952, winning an Oscar), Julius Caesar (1953, winning an Oscar), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, winning an Oscar), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Lust for Life (1956).
Willis had a particularly extensive collaboration with Vincente Minnelli, decorating most of his musical and non-musical pictures
Edwin B Willis contributed to 153 musicals, around 70 per cent of MGM’s total output. It could be argued that this makes him the single most influential figure on the look of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The pictures were:
Stanwood Rogers (1898-1963) was an art director who did most of his work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As a consequence, he rarely received full credit for the films he designed. He was cited as associate art director under Cedric Gibbons, even where he was himself responsible for the look of the film.
There is little information available about Rogers prior to his first MGM picture, Midnight Mary (1933). He was rarely assigned to the studio’s big pictures, making it all the more likely that he was the creator of most of the art design for those he did work on.
Rogers worked on four of the Marx Brothers’ MGM musicals, A Day at the Races, Go West, At the Circus and The Big Store, in addition to five others: Broadway to Hollywood, Stage Mother (on both of which he did receive full credit), Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy and Free and Easy.
