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.
Arthur Thomas Hoyt (1874-1953) was a prolific character actor, acting in almost 250 feature films and well over 100 shorts.
Hoyt made the first of several appearances on Broadway in 1905, and by 1914 was making short films for companies based in New York. He made his feature debut for Bluebird Photoplays in 1916.
Hoyt had credited supporting roles in Rex Ingam’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and in The Lost World (1925), which was directed by his brother Harry.
In the sound era, Hoyt features in two iconic prison pictures, The Criminal Code (1931) and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932). He was the motor court manager in It Happened One Night (1934), and appeared in Magnificent Obsession (1936).
In the 1940s, Hoyt was a central member of the Preston Sturges stock company, appearing in all nine of the director’s films from The Great McGinty (1940) to The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947). The latter was his final film.
Arthur Hoyt acted for MGM in four musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Hullabaloo and Babes on Broadway. All four appearances were uncredited.
Edward Alyn Warren (1974-1940) made his first film appearances while in his forties, which suggests some previous stage experience.
Warren was a character actor, never averse to donning a wig and beard. He was frequently cast in ‘ethnic’ roles; he played Wong Li in The Forbidden City (1918), the first of more than a dozen appearances in yellowface, where he was often credited as Fred Warren. He also portrayed Ulysses S Grant three times, starting with D W Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930).
Tod Browning used Warren in four of his pictures, including The Unholy Three (1925) and The Devil Doll (1936). Other pictures included A Free Soul (1931), The Cat’s Paw (1934), Annie Oakley (1935), You Only Live Once (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939).
Warren appeared in five Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, The Girl of the Golden West, Broadway Serenade and, his final film, Broadway Melody of 1940.
Charles Edward Butterworth (1896-1946) was one of those Hollywood character actors with a very defined onscreen persona which he carried with him from picture to picture: mild-mannered, courteous and hesitant/confused.
After starting out as a journalist, Butterworth dabbled in writing humorous pieces, which ended with him performing comic monologues in vaudeville. This led, in turn, to Broadway shows.
In 1929, Butterworth performed a monologue in a Paramount short called Vital Subjects, and followed this with 47 appearances in feature films, almost always credited. He was top-billed in a handful of pictures, for example Baby Face Harrington (1935), but was usually cast in a strong supporting role.
Butterworth played the Comte de Savignac in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and was Algy Longworth in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934). He provided comic relief in Magnificent Obsession (1935) and was the Duke of Ephesus in the, not wholly successful, screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (1940). Butterworth was an adept ad libber, and often improvised better dialogue than had been written for him.
Charles Butterworth featured in five MGM musicals of the 1930s: The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party, Student Tour, The Night is Young and Let Freedom Ring.
Butterworth died aged 49, when his car ran off the road in an unexplained accident.
Charles Sullivan (1899-1972) was a ubiquitous character actor in American films between 1925 and 1966, accumulating around 550 appearances on the big screen.
Notable appearances include King Kong (1933, where he was also Robert Armstrong’s stunt double), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Glass Key (1942), State of the Union (1948) and The Last Hurrah (1958).
Sullivan can be seen, uncredited, in fourteen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Student Tour, San Francisco, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Music for Millions, Easy to Wed, Living in a Big Way, Big City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Rose Marie and It’s Always Fair Weather.
Florine McKinney (1909-75) was an actor and singer who worked in Hollywood for about ten years, making around 35 pictures.
McKinney played with the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers (1932) and was Little Em’ly in David Copperfield (1935). She was uncredited in Waterloo Bridge and The Philadelphia Story (both 1940).
Four MGM musicals featured uncredited appearances by Florine McKinney: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Student Tour and The Merry Widow.
McKinney continued to work on the stage after leaving Hollywood.
Frank Edgar Hull (1882-1968) was a film editor who spent most of his career working for MGM and, to a lesser extent, Fox. He worked on around eighty pictures in the period 1920-50.
Hull is famous to film historians for working closely with Erich von Stroheim on the editing of Greed (1924). He received no credit on the final version of the film after it had been drastically cut and re-edited by MGM. Hull also worked with von Stroheim on The Wedding March (1928), which was also subject to studio interference, this time by Paramount.
Hull’s projects were never as prestigious again, though he did work with John Ford on one of his masterpieces, They Were Expendable (1945).
Frank Hull edited six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Here Comes the Band, A Day at the Races and Panama Hattie.
For a Chinese actor, making a career in Golden Age Hollywood was no easy task, but Beal Wong (1906-62) gave it a good go.He made his debut in an uncredited walk-on in MGM’s Stage Mother, and was still working almost thirty years later, with a final appearance in a Dean Martin comedy, Who’s Got the Action? (1962).
Wong’s work could be niche, as suggested by the titles of some of the pictures he appeared in: The Mysterious Mr Wong (1934), Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935), China Passage (1937), Think Fast, Mr Moto (1937), Torchy Blane in Chinatown (1939), Escape from Hong Kong (1942), East of Chinatown (1942).
He also had to be ‘ethnically flexible’. During the Second World War, there were plenty of roles as long as he was prepared to play a Japanese.
But Wong did manage to get work in a better class of picture from time to time: Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July (1940); Across the Pacific (1942); Lady of Burlesque (1943); The Keys of the Kingdom (1944); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947); and Experiment in Terror (1962).
In addition to Stage Mother, Wong appeared in two other MGM musicals, Student Tour and Lady Be Good.
June Gittelson (1910-93) was a character actor who appeared most frequently in comedies, with humour very often derived from her physical size. A glance at her IMDb entry will find repeated use of the word “fat”.
Gittelson made her debut aged just sixteen, in a comedy short called The Glorious Fourth (1927). She was, as throughout her career, uncredited. She played a prisoner in Three on a Match (1932), and in Footlight Parade (1933) was the Myrtle who James Cagney mistakes for a Fanny.
In 1939 Gittelson was one of the 130 or so women in the cast of The Women. But her most prominent roles tended to be in Three Stooges’ shorts, of which she made half a dozen, and similar short films with other comics.
Gittelson made appearances in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Student Tour and the 1940 version of New Moon,
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:
