Lodovico Tomarchio (1886-1947) was an Italian operatic tenor who made his professional debut in 1910. He made his first stage appearances in the United States in 1923, and had settled there by 1931.
Retired from the stage, Tomarchio began teaching, and became involved with the Paris Inn, a bohemian nightclub with singing waiters, all of whom were former professional singers. As well as supervising them, he also performed in the venue himself.
Tomarchio made appearances in eight films during the 1930s, including four MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, A Night at the Opera, Maytime and Swiss Miss (in which he was credited). He can also be glimpsed in archive footage in a montage sequence in Lady Be Good.
Discrepancies between IMDb and the AFI Catalogue are normal when it comes to actors’ work. It is usually claimed that this is because, while the former is crowd sourced and includes short films and television appearances, the former is restricted to feature films and based on scholarly research.
However true this may be (and the AFI listings are full of very unscholarly errors), it cannot account for the fact that French-born Achille Nardelli (1895-1973) was in 194 feature films in forty years, while the AFI lists only twenty-one titles in 27 years. One of them is wrong, and on this occasion I suspect it is the AFI. Its list just does not look like anyone’s career, not least because of the ten-year gap from 1939 to 1949.
Both sources agree that Nardelli was in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and The Toast of New Orleans. IMDb maintains that he was also uncredited in The Merry Widow, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, The Great Caruso, Lili, Deep in my Heart, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, Silk Stockings and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Otto Hugo Fries (1887-1938) had a background in travelling medicine shows and vaudeville when he started making comedy shorts for Hal Roach in 1916.
His first feature, Free and Easy, came in 1921. This was the first of over seventy appearances in features, though he made more than 100 shorts across his career, including many filmed in German.
Notable pictures featuring Fries include Mauritz Stiller’s Hotel Imperial (1927), John Ford’s Riley the Cop (1928), the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (1932), Anna Karenina (1935), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and The Mad Miss Manton (1938).
Fries appeared uncredited in five MGM musicals, beginning with The Cat and the Fiddle, followed by The Merry Widow, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera and Born to Dance.
William Stanley Blystone (1894-1956) had a proper job in the mining industry as a young man, before he switched to the cinema. During the silent era he started out working behind the camera, including as an assistant director, making his first appearance onscreen in 1924. In thirty-three years, he was in well over 500 pictures.
Blystone was usually uncredited, though he had a few featured roles, mostly in ‘B’ westerns. He was most prominent in Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), where he played Paulette Goddard’s father, shot and killed during the street protest.
He was also pitted against the Three Stooges in a number of their short films, and also appeared with Laurel and Hardy. He made a fleeting appearance in John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), but his career was generally very much in the lower half of a double bill.
Blystone made uncredited contributions to nine MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, A Night at the Opera, Swiss Miss, Born to Sing, Big City, Words and Music, That Midnight Kiss, Rich, Young and Pretty and Jupiter’s Darling.
Edmund Mortimer Olson (1874-1944) started out as a professional actor in 1904 and had extensive stage experience when he made his first film ten years later. He would eventually appear in over 380 pictures.
After serving in the First World War, Mortimer turned his hand to direction and made a couple of dozen films, two of which he also wrote. He returned to acting in 1930, but most of his many roles were without credit.
Films featuring Mortimer include Red-Headed Woman (1932), Duck Soup (1933), Imitation of Life (1934), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), The Awful Truth (1937), Holiday (1938), Midnight (1939), Wuthering Heights (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Story of Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941).
Mortimer appeared uncredited in fifteen MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Dancing Lady, Broadway Melody of 1936, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Little Nellie Kelly, Ship Ahoy, I Dood It, Thousands Cheer, Swing Fever, Two Girls and a Sailor and Bathing Beauty.
Wendell Phillips Smalley (1865-1939) was a notable, though somewhat controversial, figure in early American cinema. He was married, until 1922, to the pioneering actor-writer-director Lois Weber, and several hundred films are credited as being co-directed by the pair of them. It is now generally accepted, however, that Weber was the creative force behind the pictures, and that it was Smalley’s jealousy of her achievements, along with his alcohol problem, that led to their divorce. The shared credit seems to have been more to do with the patriarchy than with merit. It is noticeable that he directed nothing after their relationship ended.
It is indisputable that Smalley acted in around 130 films during his time with Weber, and a similar number afterwards. In the 1920s, he appeared in John Ford’s Cameo Kirby (1923) and had an uncredited role as a waiter in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.
In the 1930s he had mostly uncredited bit parts, including in Stage Mother, as the manager who fires Kitty from the shop, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
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:
British actor Alexander Pollard emigrated to the United States during the 1920s, and made his first film in 1928. He went on to make close to 200 screen appearances, all of them uncredited. He was a utility character actor, invariably cast as some kind of domestic or public functionary: over two thirds of his roles were as butlers or waiters.
Pollard ran the luncheon counter where Fay Wray got her much-needed meal in King Kong (1933). He was a waiter hired by Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934). He was a guest at the sinister party in Saboteur (1942). And in The Woman in the Window (1944) he played the club waiter who wakes up Edward G Robinson (twice).
Pollard was in eight MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, A Night at the Opera, Nobody’s Baby, Lady Be Good, Ship Ahoy, Thrill of a Romance, Easy to Wed and Words and Music.
British-born Dorothy Marian Isbell (1899-1962) was something of a Renaissance woman, successful in a variety of roles, including as an illustrator, actor and, most notably, as a costume designer.
As a teenager, Tree’s love of the theatre prompted her to start designing posters. This became a professional opportunity in 1917 when she was employed to produce posters and programmes for a well-known impresario. She also produced comic illustrations for newspapers and periodicals.
Between 1915 and 1918, Tree starred in around eight British films, including Hindle Wakes (1918), the first version of Stanley Houghton’s 1912 play.
Designing costumes for stage and screen began in the early 1920s, and she also designed for the Folies Bergère. Tree emigrated to the United States in 1926 and worked on Broadway, including designing for pre-Hollywood Mae West. By this time, her designs were having an impact on the wider fashion scene of the Jazz Age.
Tree’s Hollywood career began in 1929, first at Fox, and then eleven years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Pictures she worked on included The Thin Man (1934), David Copperfield (1935), Libeled Lady (1936) and Fury (1936) and The Good Earth (1937).
Dolly Tree designed costumes for fifteen MGM musicals: The Devil’s Brother, The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Rosalie, Listen Darling, Tce Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Let Freedom Ring, At the Circus, Strike Up the Band, Little Nellie Kelly and Go West.
Tree’s career effectively ended in 1942, when divorce led to a drink problem.Her reputation has long rested in the shadows created by Adrian and Orry-Kelly, but there is now a growing awareness of her importance as a designer.
James Carmody Lankton (1884-1942) was a character actor who made over 200 films, often playing angry authority figures, and frequently making comedy out of his baldness. He appeared often in support of the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy.
Following a period in vaudeville and burlesque shows, Morton made his first film in 1912, while also working as a stage actor in Los Angeles. But his screen career really began after the introduction of sound, when he did a lot of work at the Hal Roach studios.
As well as comedy shorts, Morton made appearances, often uncredited, in features, including Modern Times (1936)Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and The Return of Frank James (1940).
Morton was in four Metro musicals: The Devil’s Brother, Naughty Marietta, A Night at the Opera and The Bohemian Girl.
Shortly before his death, Morton went on tour with The Laurel and Hardy Revue (1940).
