Arthur Leonard Jarrett Jr (1907-87) was a singer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader of note during the 1930s and 40s.
Jarrett had a distinctive high tenor voice and, from the late 1920s, he sang with a variety of bands and also developed a recording career. He also made occasional appearances on the vaudeville stage, and appeared in a Betty Boop animation in 1932.
Jarrett founded his own orchestra in 1936, and appeared in a handful of films during the 1930s, including a Poverty Row western.
Jarrett’s first involvement with MGM musicals was offscreen, when he dubbed for Sam Ash in Stage Mother, singing ‘Beautiful Girl’. In the same year, he appeared as himself in Dancing Lady, followed by Hollywood Party in 1934.
Later in life, Jarrett worked extensively on television.
Henry Roquemore (1886-1943) acted extensively on the stage before making his screen debut in 1927, after which he performed in almost three hundred films in just sixteen years.
The variety in his career is typified by his taking a small, uncredited bit in MGM’s 1930 hit Min and Bill, and following it up with a featured role in The Apache Kid’s Escape, a Poverty Row western.
Roquemore appeared uncredited in the Academy-Award-winning Cimarron (1931, as he did in The Devil is a Woman (1935), Leo McCarey’s The Milky Way (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Great Dictator (1940). He deposited money in the bank featured in The Little Foxes (1941) and in the same year tied the knot for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year. Roquemore was quite short, and made himself much in demand for ‘fat man’ roles.
Roquemore appeared in eight Metro musicals, though only once with a credit. He was in Stage Mother, Hollywood Party, Naughty Marietta, San Francisco and Maytime. Then he achieved his onscreen credit in Babes in Arms, then returned to no credit in Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy.
Louis Feinberg (1902-75) was the non-Howard Stooge: the member of the Three Stooges who positioned himself between Moe’s violence and Curly’s lunacy, and got poked in the eye a lot for his trouble.
Fine had been working in vaudeville for a few years when he first became one of Ted Healy’s stooges in 1928. When he, Moe and Curly split up with the erratic Healy, they signed with Columbia and went on to make over 200 shorts and several feature films (latterly with Shemp Howard and other performers after Curly’s death).
Fine appeared in three MGM musicals in the mid-thirties. He was by himself in Stage Mother (which also featured Healy); with Healy, Moe and Curly in Dancing Lady; and with just Moe and Curly in Hollywood Party.
Fine was central to an important, though censored, gag in Dancing Lady. Throughout the film he is seen working on a jigsaw puzzle. The excised payoff was that, after adding the final piece, he sees that it is a picture of Adolf Hitler and overturns the table in disgust. If left in, this would have been a very early (1933) anti-Nazi protest by a Jewish actor. The footage has now been restored to some prints of the picture.
British actor Nora Cecil (1878-1951) began her acting career on the London stage before moving to the United States and Broadway in her early twenties.
She made her screen debut in Maurice Tourneur’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), and went on to appear in over 200 pictures. She worked for Tourneur again as one of Mary Pickford’s teachers in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).
Cecil came into her own when she grew old enough to play prim or sour-faced ‘spinster types’, like the missionary in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Aunt Emily in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933) and the teacher in Nothing Sacred (1937). She was memorable in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as the landlady who throws out Doc Boone.
In I Married a Witch (1942) she played Harriet Wooley, one of the nagging women who make miserable the lives of the cursed Wooley men.
In Cecil’s final film, Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), she played Louisa Ames, the malicious town gossip.
Nora Cecil was uncredited in six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Two Sisters from Boston and No Leave, No Love.
Ernest Lea Nash (1896-1937) is best-known today as the co-founder of the act ‘Ted Healy and his Three Stooges’, but he also had a successful acting career in both comic and dramatic roles.
After working for some years in vaudeville, Healy teamed with schoolfriend Moe Howard, Moe’s brother Shemp (subsequently replaced by Curly) and comic Larry Fine. There were tensions in the act, largely owing to Healy’s heavy drinking, and the three stooges eventually signed with Columbia to make a series of shorts.
Healy signed a contract with MGM, who occasionally loaned him to other studios. He played Jean Harlow’s freeloading brother in Blonde Bombshell (1933) and Reagan the reporter in Mad Love (1935).
Ted Healy acted in six MGM musicals. Probably his best role was as the vaudeville performer Ralph Martin in Stage Mother. He appeared with the Stooges in Dancing Lady and did an uncredited bit in the all-star Hollywood Party. He was also in Reckless, Here Comes the Band and San Francisco.
Healy died from symptoms related to his drinking that were triggered by a serious and mysterious beating sustained outside a nightclub.
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:
Edgar Allan Woolf (1881-1943) was a successful screenwriter, dramatist and songwriter whose fame now rests firmly on being co-writer of the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. He and regular collaborator Florence Ryerson developed a draft produced by Noel Langley, introducing the character of Professor Marvel into the Kansas scenes.
After graduating from university, Woolf was briefly an actor before turning to writing material for vaudeville performers. He also wrote the book for the 1906 musical comedy Mam’zelle Champagne, which became infamous when a performance was interrupted by the murder of Stanford White, as depicted in The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing (1955).
After a quarter of a century writing for Broadway, Woolf, who had previously dabbled in screenwriting for silent films in New York,signed a contract to join MGM. Pictures he worked on included Freaks, Grand Hotel and John Ford’s Flesh (all 1932).
In addition to The Wizard of Oz, Woolf worked on seven other MGM musicals, beginning with Broadway to Hollywood, for which he also wrote a song. Subsequent pictures were Hollywood Party, The Night is Young, Everybody Sing and Ice Follies of 1939. After Oz came Babes in Arms and the posthumously-released Ziegfeld Follies.
Irish-born Edwin Maxwell (1886-1948) emigrated to America as a child and made his first stage appearance aged seven. This led to a long career in the theatre and on screen. He made one silent film, but began to concentrate on films in 1929. He never abandoned the stage, however, and toured the country in the 1940s in the road show version of Life With Father.
Maxwell was a character actor, often credited, sometimes not. Some of his most notable roles included: the Chief of Detectives in Scarface (1932), the chief villain in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the first Secretary of War in Duck Soup (1933), corrupt Will Vickery in Fury (1936), John T Stuart in Young Mr Lincoln (1939), the jeweller in Ninotchka (1939) and the inept state psychiatrist in His Girl Friday (1940).
Edwin Maxwell appeared in four Metro musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Great Ziegfeld and the 1940 version of New Moon, his only credited role.
Muriel Adele Evanson (1910-2000) was spotted in Hollywood aged 16 and given her first part in Mademoiselle Modiste (2926). While still at school, she worked for years in bit parts and did some acting for stock companies.
In 1929, Evans played the female lead in Joyland, a Lupino Lane comedy short. After a short break from acting to get married and divorced, she worked for MGM and Hal Roach, including a role in Laurel and Hardy’s Pack Up Your Troubles (1932).
From then on, Evans’s career was a combination of small, often uncredited, appearances in ‘A’ pictures such as Queen Christina (1933) and Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and, much more frequently, leading roles in’B’ westerns. She was a regular leading lady for Buck Jones and for John Wayne during his wilderness years.
By 1940, Evans had more or less retired from screen acting, though she did continue to do radio work. Much later, she worked as a nurse at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, where she also lived out her final years.
Muriel Evans was in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Dancing Lady and Hollywood Party.
Moses Harry Horwitz (1897-1975) was the senior stooge in the Three Stooges, at least after the split with Ted Healy, with whom they had performed as, well, Ted Healy and his Stooges. Moe was always a little less stupid than his two comrades, and meted out punishment when it was (and also when it was not) needed.
Moe made his earliest films, for Vitagraph, as a teenager in the 1900s, but these were apparently destroyed in a fire. He and his brother Shemp then undertook a variety of show business jobs, until they teamed up with Healy in the early 1920s. This partnership was on and off over the years, and eventually Shemp was replaced by brother Curly.
Healy and the stooges appeared in several MGM pictures before Healy struck out on his own again and Larry, Moe and Curly became the Three Stooges. Moe Howard, along with Larry Fine, appeared in all 190 of the Three Stooges’ shorts and all twelve features.
Moe was in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Dancing Lady and Hollywood Party.
