Discrepancies between IMDb and the AFI Catalogue are normal when it comes to actors’ work. It is usually claimed that this is because, while the former is crowd sourced and includes short films and television appearances, the former is restricted to feature films and based on scholarly research.
However true this may be (and the AFI listings are full of very unscholarly errors), it cannot account for the fact that French-born Achille Nardelli (1895-1973) was in 194 feature films in forty years, while the AFI lists only twenty-one titles in 27 years. One of them is wrong, and on this occasion I suspect it is the AFI. Its list just does not look like anyone’s career, not least because of the ten-year gap from 1939 to 1949.
Both sources agree that Nardelli was in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and The Toast of New Orleans. IMDb maintains that he was also uncredited in The Merry Widow, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, The Great Caruso, Lili, Deep in my Heart, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, Silk Stockings and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
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:
Bit player Kenneth Koch Gibson (1898-1972) spent a lot of time being paid to party. He was in fourteen MGM musicals, and in at least eight of them was a party guest or nightclub patron.
In a career stretching from 1921 to 1969, Gibson notched up approaching 300 screen appearances. He was actually the male lead in his first film, Big Town Ideas (1921), but by 1929 was generally uncredited. He became a regular bit player for Cecil B DeMille and Preston Sturges, and can be found in some excellent pictures, including This Gun for Hire (1942), The Big Sleep (1946), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Star is Born (1954).
Gibson’s musicals at Metro were: Madam Satan, New Moon (1940), Yolanda and the Thief, Luxury Liner, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Duchess of Idaho, The Toast of New Orleans, Rich, Young and Pretty, Singin’ in the Rain, Small Town Girl, Interrupted Melody, It’s Always Fair Weather, I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Ten Thousand Bedrooms.
Carleton Mortimer LeViness (1884-1964) first appeared as the Tragedian in a silent version of Nicholas Nickleby in 1912 and his last appearance was an uncredited bit as a man in the hallway of a newspaper office in The Great Race in 1963. He was in hundreds of films, mostly uncredited, and even spent the period 1914-16 as a director. It was an unobtrusively spectacular career.
Leviness’s MGM musical appearances were The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, Reckless (in all three he played a guest at a party), Nobody’s Baby (for a change of pace, he played an elevator passenger), A Day at the Races (another party guest), Ship Ahoy (as a passenger), Presenting Lily Mars (as a tired man–must have been all the partying), Two Girls and a Sailor (nightclub patron), Music for Millions (theatregoer), Thrill of a Romance (hotel guest), Yolanda and the Thief (as a man who says tally-ho), On an Island With You (desk clerk), The Barkeleys of Broadway (guest at a country house), In the Good Old Summertime (patronizing a supper club), The Toast of New Orleans (eating in a restaurant this time), The Great Caruso (opera-goer, naturally), Small Town Girl (back to being a party guest), The Band Wagon (an investor), Easy to Love (maiitre d’), The Student Prince (churchgoer), Athena (another party guest) and Ten Thousand Bedrooms (another nightclub patron).
Twenty-two films: Carl M Leviness definitely did his bit for the MGM musical.
Benny Rubin (1899-1986), like Cliff Edwards, was a recurring presence in Metro’s earliest musicals. A talented dialect comedian, he was limited in most of his musical appearances to a Jewish characterization; it has been suggested that his career was hampered by the idea that he looked “too Jewish”.
Rubin’s first appearance was alongside Edwards in Marianne, and he followed this up as vaudeville booker Benny Friedman in It’s a Great Life. He is the Jewish half of a double act with Irish Tom Dugan in They Learned About Women, and an agent in Lord Byron of Broadway.
Rubin plays a doctor from the Bronx who finds himself amongst the cowboys in Montana Moon, while he is back in New York’s show biz as a pianist in Children of Pleasure. In Love in the Rough he is a fish-out-of-water Russian immigrant masquerading as Robert Montgomery’s valet.
The 1932 moratorium followed and Rubin was absent from MGM’s musicals until 1953’s Torch Song. He then had, mostly uncredited, roles in Easy to Love, Meet Me in Las Vegas, Ten Thousand Bedrooms and Looking for Love.
Benny Rubin’s final appearance was as another Jewish agent in Orson Welles’s film maudit The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the 70s, released 2018).
