John Conrad Nagel (1897-1970) was a popular matinee idol of the 1920s who was as out of place in a musical as he looked in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
Nagel’s only appearance in an MGM musical came as part of his successful and hectic transition to sound: he featured in 19 films released during 1929-31, though Hollywood Revue was perhaps not his greatest moment. It did him no harm, though: Nagel was still working in the late 60s.
Joel Albert McCrea (1905-90) worked with many of Hollywood’s greatest directors during his career, including Hitchcock, Hawks, Vidor, Wyler, George Steven and Preston Sturges.
Before all that, he was the guy who got the girl in Sam Wood’s So This Is College.
Charles Nicholas Carleton (1871-41) was a successful stage actor and director who did not start his film career-proper (he made one picture in 1915) until he was in his mid-fifties, where he became a successful, if fairly anonymous, supporting player.
Carle was the entomology professor in So This Is College, a eunuch in Elmer’s movie in Free and Easy, Knapp in Hollywood Party (credited), Maurice Chevalier’s attorney in The Merry Widow and a member of the Founders’ Club in San Francisco.
Few actors appeared in more of Hollywood’s greatest films than Wardell Edwin Bond (1903-60), outstanding supporting player and notorious conservative antisemite. This was, in great part, owing to his membership of the John Ford Stock Company.
Ford met Bond when he was still a member of the University of Southern California football team, casting him in Salute (1929). In the same year, Bond featured in So This Is College as…a USC footballer. It was his only Metro musical appearance.
Nellie Crawford (1873-1959) was enrolled into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame under the much more exotic stage name she began using at some point in the late 20s or early 30s. Donald Bogle has suggested that she chose the unusual name because it enabled her to seek work as Asian as well as Black characters. Sul-Te-Wan was the first Black actor to secure a Hollywood contract when D W Griffith hired her at $25 a week for The Birth of a Nation (1916).
Like Clarence Muse and others, Sul-Te-Wan was a talented actor restricted by Hollywood racism, but she achieved significant praise for her appearance as Tituba in Maid of Salem, Paramount’s story of the Salem witch trials.
Sul-Te-Wan’s MGM musicals were Hallelujah, San Francisco and Broadway Rhythm, all in uncredited parts.
Samuel Rufus McDaniel (1886-1962) started his show business career singing with his three sisters, including the subsequently renowned Hattie. Like most Black actors, his Hollywood career was largely limited to servants and railway porters, though he was notable as Doc (a cook) in Captains Courageous (1937), even if his name was misspelt in the credits.
McDaniel’s MGM musical appearances were Hallelujah, Going Hollywood, Music for Millions and Living in a Big Way.
Clarence Muse (1879-1969) was limited in his roles by Hollywood’s institutional racism, but was an actor of great ability. He is a member of the Black Filmmakers’ Hall of Fame.
In the 1920s Muse acted on the New York stage as part of the Harlem Renaissance. In Hollywood, he appeared in the first all-Black musical, Fox Hearts of Dixie (1929), followed immediately by an uncredited appearance in the second all-Black musical, Hallelujah.
Muse’s was not a musical career, although he was a talented singer and composer.
Eva Jessye (1895-1992) was an internationally-renowned choral conductor and composer and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Later in life, she was part of the civil rights movement.
Cinema played a very small part in Jessye’s prestigious life and career. She made only three films, but one was an MGM musical, she was the choral director and sang in Hallelujah.
In the 1960s Jessye acted in Black Like Me (1964) and Slaves (1969), two well-intentioned anti-racist films.
Not every child actor goes on to a career of well over sixty years as a successful character actor and band leader, but Richard Winslow Johnson (1915-91) managed it. Along the way he made appearances in five MGM musicals and may be the only actor to have worked with both Marion Davies and Roy Orbison.
The films were Marianne (playing the accordion),Thousands Cheer,On an Island With You,Torch Song and The Fastest Guitar Alive.
Norwegian-born Henry Olaf Hansen (1887-1960) made his first film appearance in 1911 and worked regularly for almost fifty years, most notably as a long-serving member of the John Ford Stock Company.
Tenbrook was one of the many doughboys in Marianne and subsequently made appearances in Naughty Marietta, Let Freedom Ring, Easter Parade, The Belle of New York and Singin’ in the Rain.
