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.
Merrill Manley Pye (1902-75) was an important member of Cedric Gibbons’s unit at MGM from 1925 until 1968, and one who had a significant impact on the look of the studio’s musicals across most of that period.
Pye had studied architecture, which made him a desirable addition to Gibbon’s team. The respect in which he was held is suggested by his first picture, Edmund Goulding’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), where he shares equal credit with Gibbons for Settings.
He was art director, uncredited, on Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and given associate art director credit for David Copperfield (1935). In 1959, Pye was Oscar-nominated for his art direction on Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest, responsible for recreating the Mount Rushmore monument on a sound stage.
But it was in musicals that Pye made his real mark. He started out with the art direction of Dancing Lady, where he has been credited with introducing the Moderne style to MGM’s musical pictures: what has been described as “flat mise-en-scenes surfaces, horizontal accents, tonal values distinction, and smooth and curved lines with glossy surfaces”.
Pye went on to be art director (or associate) on Going Hollywood, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Ice Follies of 1939, Babes in Arms, Swing Fever, Bathing Beauty, Ziegfeld Follies, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
But Pye also received another type of credit on some pictures: Musical Presentation. IMDb erroneously interprets this as him having a role in the music department, but it was actually a special credit for a role that involved the overall visual design of a musical number. This involved not only the structural design of sets, but also camera movement through the set, incorporating an element of direction.
Pye carried out this function on musical numbers in Born to Dance, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Honolulu, Strike Up the Band, Bitter Sweet, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, The Chocolate Soldier, Babes on Broadway, Ship Ahoy!, Panama Hattie, For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Mars, Du Barry Was a Lady, Girl Crazy, Broadway Rhythm and Meet the People.
It is notable that Pye’s services in musical presentation were not required on the Freed Unit musicals of the later 1940s and 1950s, where directors like Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli would retain that creative control.
Slavoljub Vorkapić (1894-1976) is one of the more fa
scinating and unexpected figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Born in Serbia, Vorapich studied to be a painter, and was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris in the late 1910s. He travelled to the United States in 1920, and found work as an actor, predominantly for the director Rex Ingram (he played Napoleon in Scaramouche [1923]).
In 1928, Vorkapich directed, with the collaboration of Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, a short and influential experimental film called The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, allegedly with a budget of $98. The prowess in editing demonstrated in the film led to employment in Hollywood, initially by Paramount, and then RKO and MGM. He came to specialize in montage sequences, in which action over a lengthy period of narrative time is compressed into a few minutes of screen time in what he called “symphonies of visual movement”. Vorkapich would be brought in specifically to shoot and edit these, often expressionistic, sequences. He developed and utilized techniques in pacing action for maximum psychological impact on the viewer.
Vorkapic was also adept at in-camera special effects, such as the collapse of Wall Street at the end of The Conquerors (1932) and the locust attack in The Good Earth (1937).
He made propaganda shorts during the Second World War, and then took up academic posts in California, and later in Yugoslavia. This was also where he directed his only feature film, Hanka (1955). He lectured on what he saw as the autonomous visual language of cinema, and never hesitated to criticize directors of high reputation, including Eisenstein and Ford, for what he considered incompetence.
Vorkapich’s work at MGM can be seen in the musicals Dancing Lady, San Francisco, Maytime, Rosalie, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts.
Quite why he was seen as simpatico with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is unclear.
Charles Cahill Wilson (1894-1948) was the type of stage actor with Broadway experience who was welcomed by Hollywood in 1929.
He started out as dialogue director on Lucky Boy (1929), a George Jessel musical in which he also took a small role. He worked in that capacity on one further picture, in 1933, but otherwise restricted himself to acting., appearing in around 250 films in just seventeen years.
Wilson was usually uncredited, but he did feature prominently in It Happened One Night (1934), playing Clark Gable’s irascible editor. This was one of several times he worked with Frank Capra; he played Charlie Dawson in Meet John Doe (1941).
Wilson also played the DA in the first version of The Glass Key (1935) and was Jim Green in James Whale’s Show Boat (1936). In 1945 he made an appearance in the Fritz Lang masterpiece Scarlet Street, and the following year was uncredited in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
Wilson acted without credit in four MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
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.
Humourist Robert Charles Bentley (1889-1945) made his name writing for Vanity Fair and TheNew Yorker, and carousing with the other intellectuals (and Harpo Marx) at the Algonquin Round Table. He was also well known as a drama critic and reluctant stage performer.
Benchley appeared in films from 1928 (having earlier written titles, in two distinctly different ways. His first appearances were in very early Movietone sound shorts, in which he recreated revue monologues such as The Treasurer’s Report and The Sex Life of the Polyp (both 1928). Later on, he wrote and starred in a series of ‘instructional’ comedy shorts for MGM, starting with How to Sleep (1935), which won the Best Short Film Oscar. Other titles, in many of which he took the name Joe Doakes, included How to Be a Detective (1936), How to Figure Income Tax (1938) and Seeing Your Doctor (1939). After leaving MGM, who did not treat him well, Benchley made further shorts at Paramount. Many of these lecture films were based on his own earlier written material.
Alongside this, Benchley had a peculiar career as a character actor in around 50 feature films. Frequently cast as a drunk (reflecting his personal proclivity), Benchley was often permitted to write his own dialogue. Notable appearances included Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), The Major and the Minor (very much restricted to speaking Wilder-Brackett lines and I Married a Witch (both 1942).
Benchley’s two forays into MGM musicals were supporting roles in Dancing Lady and Broadway Melody of 1938.
Benchley’s early death was the result of cirrhosis of the liver.
Vaudeville performer Harrison Greene (1884-1945) crammed around 150 features and 100 shorts into his fifteen-year screen career. Rarely credited in ‘A’ pictures, he at least earned a medium closeup in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), one of his first appearances.
Greene’s parts were generally small, but more than simple walk-ons. He danced with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and was one of the (many) people looking for an apartment in The More the Merrier (1943).
Greene was in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Broadway Melody of 1938 and The Ice Follies of 1939. The AFI also asserts that Greene was brought in to direct the Virginia Reel performed during the dream sequence in Going Hollywood, presumably because it was not in Albertina Rasch’s wheelhouse.
Harry James Holman (1862-1947) was a veteran vaudeville star, nationally known, according to his New York Times obituary, for his ‘hard-boiled Hampton’ skit. The sketch was preserved in Holman’s first short, Hard Boiled Hampton (1929), which was shot in New York City. (Some sources claim that he played a ‘fat man’ in The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923.)
Holman retired from vaudeville and spent the last seventeen years of his life working as a character actor in Hollywood, averaging eight appearances a year. He worked with some of the major directors of the time, including parts in six Frank Capra pictures (he is the school principal who dives into the swimming pool in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). He was usually uncredited.
Harry Holman appeared in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and Broadway Melody of 1938. In the latter he was, quite fittingly, a resident of the theatrical boarding house.
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:
Matthew O’Grady McHugh (1894-1971) never achieved the level of fame of his brother Frank, but appeared in more films (well over 200) than his sister Kitty.
From a theatrical family, the three siblings performed a stage act together as teenagers. Afterwards, Matt worked in stock companies before making his Broadway debut in Street Scene in 1929, and recreated his role in the 1931 film version.
The following year, McHugh and Edward Brophy played the Rollo brothers, owners of the carnival in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). Here, as in most of his other roles, he acted with a Brooklyn accent, despite having no connection with the area.
McHugh’s later appearances, mostly uncredited, included parts in Barbary Coast (1935), Holiday (1938), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Devil and Miss Jones (1942), Phantom Lady (1944) and The Dark Corner (1945).
Matt McHugh was in four MGM musicals: The Devil’s Brother, and uncredited in Dancing Lady, Broadway Melody of 1938 and At the Circus.
