Doris McMahon (1910-61) was a performer whose short, mostly precode, career could largely be described as scantily clad.
She was in three MGM musicals, Free and Easy, Children of Pleasure and Madam Satan.
Category: Bit Players
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Theodore Lorch
Theodore Andrew Lorch (1873-1947) was a busy supporting player who notched up over 170 screen appearances, most of those in the sound era being uncredited. His adaptability is indicated by a sample of his work in 1934: an abortionist (The Road to Ruin), a ringmaster (A Modern Hero), an executioner (The Affairs of Cellini), a jury member (Two Heads on a Pillow) and a native fakir (Kid Millions).
Lorch found time to be in three Metro musicals: Free and Easy, A Lady’s Morals and Reckless.
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Louise Carver
Mary Louise Stieger (1869-1956) began her performing career singing grand opera, and made her first screen appearance in 1908, in a very abbreviated version of Macbeth (she played Lady Macbeth).
She worked more steadily in films from 1916 on, usually in minor roles in comedies, frequently uncredited. One of her credited appearances was as El Brendel’s mother-in-law in The Big Trail (1930).
In the same year she appeared in Free and Easy, without credit. Her one other musical at MGM was The Devil’s Brother.
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Jack Baxley
Andrew Jackson Baxley (1884-1950) appeared in a handful of excellent films during his career as a character actor, including two with Orson Welles (The Magnificent Amberson in 1942 and The Lady from Shanghai in 1947). But there, as in most of his other pictures, he was uncredited.
Baxley was in eight Metro musicals: Free and Easy, The Florodora Girl, Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Strike Up the Band, Thrill of a Romance and Summer Holiday.
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William Collier Sr
William Morenus (1864-1944) ran away from home, aged 11, to join the theatre. He interrupted his successful stage career forty years later, in 1915, to make a few silent shorts (his first role was playing himself in Fatty and the Broadway Stars), but his film career really started in 1929 with the introduction of sound.
Collier played himself again in Free and Easy, as the MC at the premiere. For a hattrick, he was seen as William Collier Sr once again in Broadway to Hollywood. His non-musical roles offered more variety.
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Edgard Dearing
Edgar Dearing (1893-1974) is a familiar face from supporting roles in well over 300 films. He usually portrayed figures of authority, including literally dozens of police officers, a large number of whom were on motorcycles.
His most famous motorcycle cop was in Laurel and Hardy’s Two Tars (1928), in which his vehicle is crushed by a steamroller.
Dearing featured in eleven Metro musicals, with his most notable (and credited) appearance being in the first, Free and Easy. He plays the studio gate guard who pursues Buster Keaton across the soundstages of Culver City.
The other musicals were Here Comes the Band (though Dearing’s scenes were deleted), Rose-Marie, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Everybody Sing, Listen Darling, Honolulu, Broadway Melody of 1940, Go West, The Big Store and Grounds for Marriage
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Fred Niblo
Frederick Liedtke (1874-1948) was a vaudeville performer and actor, and worked in theatrical management before directing his first film in 1916. A successful collaboration with Douglas Fairbanks, combined with directing Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand (1922), gave MGM the confidence to choose Niblo as a safe, if uninspired, replacement for Charles Brabin, who had allowed Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ to spend its $1.25 million budget in two months on unusable footage.
Fred Niblo never directed a musical, but he did act in one. In Hollywood-set Free and Easy he played himself, a director struggling to get Buster Keaton’s character to memorize, and say correctly, his one line of dialogue.
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Phil Dunham
British-born Phil Dunham (1885-1972) made his first screen appearance in 1914 and was in over 260 films. He had a parallel career as a screenwriter and worked on some of the ‘race’ pictures that featured all-Black casts. These included The Duke is Tops (1938), in which Lena Horne made her debut, and Gang Smashers (1938), which featured MGM alumna Nina Mae McKinney.
Dunham had uncredited roles in six Metro musicals, beginning with Montana Moon. The others were It Happened in Brooklyn, The Unfinished Dance, Annie Get Your Gun, Singin’ in the Rain and Easy to Love.
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Mary Carlisle
Gwendolyn Witter (1914-2018) played bits in three MGM musicals (Montana Moon, Children of Pleasure and Madam Satan) before moving on to more substantial roles at Paramount, often paired with Bing Crosby,
Carlisle retired in 1943 and lived for another 75 years.
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Larry Steers
Lawrence Wells Steers (1888-1951) appeared in around 550 films during his thirty-year career, sometimes credited, more often not.
Twenty-seven of those uncredited roles were in Metro musicals, starting in 1930 with Lord Byron of Broadway. Steers was subsequently in Stage Mother, Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Reckless, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, Nobody’s Baby, The Great Waltz, At the Circus, Broadway Melody of 1940, Ziegfeld Girl, Lady Be Good, Two Girls and a Sailor, Meet the People, Ziegfeld Follies (giving the hattrick of MGM Ziegfeld titles), Yolanda and the Thief, Holiday in Mexico, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, A Date with Judy, The Barkeleys of Broadway, That Midnight Kiss, Annie Get Your Gun, Duchess of Idaho, The Toast of New Orleans and The Great Caruso.
