Leonard Charles Shumway (1884-1954) appeared in over 450 films in his forty-year career, with the earliest-known title being 1913’s The Snake, where he was Leon C Shumway. In his final film he played a bartender in Calamity Jane (1953). He had previous stage experience.
Shumway’s roles fluctuated between credited and uncredited, with one of the former being as the Coach in So This Is College.
The University of Southern California’s Trojan Marching Band (1918- ) has made many media appearances since its formation at the end of the First World War., including two musicals. In 1969, it featured prominently in Twentieth Century-Fox’s Hello Dolly and, forty years earlier, marched in the big football game at the end of So This Is College.
Eugene Meszaros (1892-1947) was a Hungarian actor who, it may be assumed, moved to the United States at a young age, since he acted with an American accent.
Stone made his first film in 1927, at a relatively advanced age (around 35), suggesting he may have come from the stage. He started out with featured roles, but his role in So This Is College seems to have done little for his career, as he was uncredited thereafter.
Ann Brody Goldstein (1884-1944) made her theatrical debut aged nine and spent years working with Stock companies. The date of her first screen appearance is disputed, but her earliest indisputable performance was in the wonderfully-titled Cupid Puts One Over on the Shatchen, made for the Vitagraph Company in 1915. (A shatchen is a Jewish marriage broker.)
Brody was commended for her combining of comedy with pathos, which inevitably led to Yiddisher Momma roles. She notched up fifty years in the show business, but was still working on Broadway in 1940.
Ann Brody played Moe’s wife in So This Is College.
Leslie F Wilder (1895-1989) worked as an editor at various studios during the 1930s, including uncredited work for Metro on So This Is College and Montana Moon.
Francis Starbuck Sullivan (1896-1972) worked in silent cinema as both cinematographer and editor, but restricted himself to the latter after 1928. Before retiring in 1962, he worked at various times with Fritz Lang, Josef Von Sternberg, Frank Borzage, George Cukor (Oscar nominated for The Philadelphia Story in 1940), George Stevens and Joseph H Lewis.
Sullivan’s MGM musical assignments were So This is College, It’s a Great Life, Going Hollywood and Babes in Arms.
Some sources also assert he contributed as a writer to Ziegfeld Follies, but this may have been the New Yorker humourist of the same name.
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.
Ray Cooke (1905-63) was a go-to player in the 1930s if you needed a bellhop, or a messenger, or a cabbie. His career peaked when he starred in a series of comedy shorts from Poverty Row as a character named Torchy (not to be confused with the Glenda Farrell character of the same name).
Cooke was a bellhop in The Broadway Melody, a messenger in The Hollywood Revue of 1929,a student (like pretty much everyone else) in So This Is College, another bellhop in Love in the Rough and a cinema-goer in Hollywood Party.
Grady Harwell Sutton (1906-95) was a hard-working supporting player for 60 years, often in codified gay roles. He is probably best-known today for his four films with W C Fields.
Sutton’s first uncredited appearance in a Metro musical was as a football spectator in So This Is College. He then waited sixteen years for his most substantial part, as Kathryn Grayson’s would-be suitor in Anchors Aweigh.
This was followed by uncredited appearances in Ziegfeld Follies, Two Sisters from Boston, Holiday in Mexico, No Leave, No Love and, after another sixteen years, Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
