The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Charles R Moore

    Hattie McDaniel famously said “I’d rather play a maid than be one”. The actor Charles Randolph Moore could have said much the same about being a railway porter. He played the role at least 38 times, in well over one-third of his total appearances. He also played more than his fair share of lift operators. 

    Moore worked for some of Hollywood’s top directors, including William A Wellman, Josef von Sternberg, Victor Fleming, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and William Wyler. He was a member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, and acted in six of his pictures. In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), he was the cook who was shaken to pieces in the speeding land yacht.

    In all three of Moore’s MGM musicals–The Prodigal, Reckless and Two Girls on Broadway–Moore played a porter.

  • Jules Cowles

    Julius D Cowles (1877-1943) was aYale-educated, experienced Shakespearean actor who made his film debut in 1914. He was also an accomplished writer.

    Cowles played supporting roles throughout the 1920s, including Zambo (in blackface) in The Lost World and Yankee Joe in Lord Jim (both 1925). He was predominantly associated with ‘heavy’ roles; one newspaper headline ran “A Mean Looker But Really He’s A Perfect Gent”.

    In the 1930s, the importance of Cowles’s parts diminished and he was more frequently uncredited. He turned up, without credit, in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Hullabaloo and I Dood It.

  • Hedwiga Reicher

    Hedwig [sic] Reicher (1884-1971) was a German actor who made her Broadway debut in 1909. Two years later she played Ellida in the American premiere of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888).

    Reicher did not make her first screen appearance until 1925, and only ever had small roles in about twenty films. Her most prominent part was playing Janet Gaynor’s mother in Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929).

    The following year, she had a bit part in New Moon.

    In 1913, Reicher played Columbia, the personification of the United States, in the allegorical tableau featured in the Woman Suffrage Procession held in Washington DC.

  • Nina Quartero

    Gladys Quartaro (1908-85) was a New York-born Italian whose Mediterranean looks led to a career playing characters named Consuelo, Maria, Lola, Anita, Chiquita and Rosita.

    Quartero made her debut aged 18 with a bit part in D W Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan (1926). One of her more prominent roles was with John Wayne in Arizona (1931), playing Conchita. She acted for about seventeen years, making her final appearance (again with Wayne, but this time as Carmencita) in The Lady Takes a Chance (1943). She retired after marrying her third husband.

    Nina Quartero made a brief appearance in the first New Moon. 

  • David Mir

    A 1931 newspaper article described Vladimir Lasareff (1886-1962) as a “former prince of royal Russian Blood [who] today earns a livelihood in slapstick comedy roles”.

    Mir, who was cousin to the prince who murdered Rasputin, had fled Russia during the October Revolution. Finding himself in Hollywood, he renewed a pre-Revolution acquaintance with the writer Elinor Glyn and was given a part in His Hour (1924), which she wrote and directed with King Vidor. This meant John Gilbert had to play a Russian nobleman alongside the real thing. 

    Mir worked on a number of other Glyn pictures, even designing costumes for The Only Thing (1925).

    Mir worked steadily as a supporting player during the last years of silent cinema, but the parts began to dry up after the introduction of sound. His last appearance was a bit in Artists and Models Abroad (1938).

    In 1930, Mir was probably the only genuine Russian aboard the New Moon.

  • Lew Meehan

    James Llewellyn Meehan (1890-1951) began his film career in 1919 and was in nearly 250 pictures, mostly without credit. The majority of these were westerns, though generally of the ‘B’ kind; the rare exceptions included Cimarron (1931), Annie Oakley (one of eight westerns he made in 1935) and Fritz Lang’s The Return of Frank James (1940).

    The 1930 version of New Moon was Meehan’s sole appearance in an MGM musical.

  • Babe London

    Anyone who grew up watching Laurel and Hardy shorts on television would recognize Jean Glover (1901-80) as Dulcy, who struggles against all the odds (plus Stan) to elope with Ollie in Our Wife (1931).

    London had made her screen debut aged 18, and made over fifty silent pictures, working with Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Fields. Most of her roles focussed on her size. When health issues in the 1940s forced her to lose a lot of weight, the quality of the parts offered declined.  

    She continued acting in small roles until Sex Kittens Go to College in 1960. Then, in the 1960s, she developed a second career as an artist. Her paintings of silent stars became very popular, and she put on a solo exhibition called ‘From Pratfalls to Portraits’.

    Babe London appeared in two Metro musicals, the first New Moon and No Leave, No Love.

  • Tex Driscoll

    The Hollywood career of John W Morris (1889-1970) ran parallel to the development of Hollywood itself. He made his debut in Cecil B DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914), generally considered to be the first feature film to be made in Los Angeles, shot in a converted barn on the corner of Selma and Vine.

    Driscoll acted in around 200 films, and was in scores of westerns, including Stagecoach (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939), The Return of Frank James (1940), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Canyon Passage (1946), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wichita (1955). He worked under many of the great directors of classical Hollywood: Ford and Hawks (in the same year), Lang, Wellman, Daves, Mann, Tourneur and Fuller. He also made a number of other pictures with DeMille, including the 1931 remake of The Squaw Man..

    Tex Driscoll was in five MGM musicals: New Moon, Naughty Marietta, The Girl of the Golden West, Swiss Miss and Bitter Sweet.

  • Harry Cording

    Hector William Cording (1891-1954) was British and educated at a top public school. After serving in the First World War, he worked on a transatlantic steamship and eventually decided to stay in America. He made the first of his 280-plus films in 1925.

    Cording was a big man and so was frequently cast as henchmen and thugs, most stylishly when he played Dickon Malbete, would-be slayer of Richard the Lionheart, in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

    Cording made two uncredited appearances in 30s’ Metro musicals: New Moon and, playing a pirate, Naughty Marietta.

  • Harry Wilson

    The figures of 350+ film and TV appearances by Harry Wilson (1897-1978) is made more impressive by the fact that Wilson worked almost entirely in the sound era, when the turnover of pictures was not so great as in the silent days.

    British-born Wilson dubbed himself ‘the ugliest man in movies’ (though there was competition), and he was many studios’ go-to actor for convicts and criminal henchmen. He features with Mike Mazurki in Some Like it Hot (1959) as one of George Raft’s goons.

    Wilson appeared uncredited in no fewer than fifteen MGM musicals, across more than thirty years and four decades. In the 1930s he made A Lady’s Morals, The Bohemian Girl, A Day at the Races, Let Freedom Ring and The Wizard of Oz (as a Winkie Guard). In the 40s, Wilson was in Go West, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Luxury Liner and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

    His 1950s appearances were in Million Dollar Mermaid, It’s Always Fair Weather, Guys and Dolls and Merry Andrew. And finally, in 1963, Wilson played a roustabout in Billy Rose’s Jumbo. 

    As if Wilson was not busy enough making his own films, he worked for fifteen years as Wallace Beery’s stand-in.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial
RSS
Facebook
X (Twitter)
WhatsApp
Copy link
URL has been copied successfully!