James Francis Greene (1899-1935) was a sound recording engineer at the Hal Roach Studios, responsible for the sound on some of Laurel and Hardy’s most beloved pictures, including The Music Box (1932, with location recording required on those steps), County Hospital (1932), Towed in a Hole (1932) and Busy Bodies (1935).
He was also the sound recording engineer on the duo’s first operetta, The Devil’s Brother (1935).
Greene’s career was tragically cut short when he experienced an insulin shock which the police took to be drunkenness. He was thrown in a cell and died when no treatment was given.
William Hilton Terhune (1899-1940) directed half a dozen shorts for Hal Roach in the 1930s, but was predominantly an editor, starting at the studio as a cutter in 1926.
Terhune was the editor on Topper (1937) and its first sequel, Topper Takes a Trip (1938). He also worked on the Joan Crawford picture Susan and God (1940) for MGM.
William Terhune edited the four Laurel and Hardy musicals, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss, as well as the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus.
Albert Adrian Jordan (1887-1983) worked in the British film industry in the 1910s before emigrating to America, where he found work as a cutter at Vitagraph.
Jordan moved to the Hal Roach Studios in 1921, where he stayed for the bulk of his career. Stan Laurel, who was the creative force behind the Laurel and Hardy films, admired Jordan’s work to the extent of insisting that he edit all of their pictures, if he was available.
This meant that Jordan worked on virtually all of the Laurel and Hardy features, including their four musicals, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.
Jordan also edited one of the Roach studio’s most prestigious productions, Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men (1939).
After leaving Hal Roach, Jordan worked mostly in television until he retired, aged 75.
Arthur Raymond Lloyd (1897-1954) was a journeyman cinematographer who shot all of his 200 shorts (plus a handful of features) for the Hal Roach Studios.
Lloyd was a regular on both Laurel and Hardy and the Our Gang pictures. He shot such classics as Laughing Gravy (1931), County Hospital, Towed in a Hole (both 1932) and Block-Heads (1938).
He also shot all four of Laurel and Hardy’s operettas: The Devil’s Brother (with Hap Depew), Babes in Toyland, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.
Ernest Depew (1887-1940) is believed to have started working in the film industry in the early 1910s. He made his debut as a cinematographer in 1921, and by 1925 was working for Mack Sennett, alongside a variety of minor studios.
One of Depew’s rare ‘A’ films for a top rank producer was the MGM/Roach production The Devil’s Brother, where he shared the cinematography credit with Art Lloyd.
Composer Thomas Marvin Hatley (1905-86) achieved a form of immortality when he wrote a piece called ‘Dance of the Cuckoos’ (sometimes known as ‘Ku-Ku’). In 1930, this became the theme music for Laurel and Hardy’s sound shorts after it was heard on the radio. According to Laurel, Hal Roach gave the composer “about fifty bucks’ for the rights to the music.
But Hatley did also find a job at the Roach studio as musical director, in which capacity he wrote and arranged probably hundreds of scores. Two Laurel and Hardy features, Way Out West (1937) and Block-Heads (1938) earned him nominations for the Best Original Score Oscar.
Hatley also enjoyed appearing in front of the camera whenever a musician or conductor was required. And he provided the piano sounds for The Music Box (1932).
He was musical director of The Devil’s Brother, which also utilized ‘Dance of the Cuckoos’, and he composed for The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.
Hatley was deemed surplus to requirements when Roach restructured his studio in 1939, though Laurel insisted he be brought back to work on Saps at Sea (1940). Hatley became a lounge pianist, often remarking that he was earning more than Hal Roach ever paid him.
Thomas Herbert Reynoldson (1807-83) may or may not have the right to an entry on this website.
Reynoldson was a British actor and singer of the late Regency period who began, probably in late 1939, to translate and adapt European light operas. One of the works he adapted was Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo, written in 1830 with a libretto by Eugène Scribe.
Fra Diavolo was loosely adapted by Hal Roach and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as The Devil’s Brother, with a number of the original songs retained. Most sources cite Scribe as the author of the lyrics, but this is to ignore the necessary artistry required for the translation of song lyrics. The aria ‘On yonder rock reclining’ may have the same sense as Scribe’s ‘Voyez sur cette roche’, but the former is not a literal translation of the latter.
It is not certain that Reynoldson’s translations are the ones used by the filmmakers, but it is likely.
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was a French Romantic composer and, for many years, the director of the Paris Conservatoire.
Auber established a long professional partnership with the librettist Eugène Scribe, and together they wrote France’s first Grand Opera. They are more often associated, however, with the opera-comique.
Auber’s chief association with the cinema is the 1830 operetta Fra Diavolo, which has been filmed many times for the large and small screens. In 1933, it formed the basis of MGM’s Laurel and Hardy picture The Devil’s Brother.
Charles Rogers (1887-1956) is generally known as Charley and, like his namesake Charlie Chaplin and his close friend Stan Laurel, he started out working in British music halls, before emigrating to the United States in 1912.
In the same year, Rogers played the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, one of the earliest multi-reel features, produced by a New York studio. He continued to work in the East Coast film industry for several years, before finally making his way to Hollywood.
In 1927, Rogers appeared uncredited in Love ‘em and Feed ‘em, and stayed at the Hal Roach Studios for many years, quickly moving into writing and directing.
Rogers has been described as, in creative terms, second only to Stan Laurel on the Roach lot, and he worked on a number of Laurel and Hardy’s best shorts and features. These included, as a gag writer, We Faw Down, Two Tars (both 1928), Hog Wild and Laughing Gravy (both 1930). Rogers contributed the original stories and screenplays for Block-Heads (1938), A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea (both 1940).
Rogers directed or co-directed, and also contributed to the writing of, three of Laurel and Hardy’s operettas: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland (in which he also played Simple Simon) and The Bohemian Girl. He also wrote gags for Swiss Miss.
Away from Laurel and Hardy, Rogers played Josef Goebbels in the studio’s bizarre wartime semi-feature That Nazty Nuisance (1943). One of his last jobs was an uncredited appearance in Chaplin’s Limelight (1952).
