The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Frank O’ Connor

    It was quite an achievement for character actor Frank O’Connor (1881-1959) to cram well over 650 film appearances into even a forty-year career. Add in a couple of dozen pictures he directed and seven contributions to screenplays, and you have a very busy man.

    O’Connot starred in his earliest pictures, starting in 1915, but by 1921 he was pursuing a career as a director. Apparently it was an attempt to set up as a producer that ruined him financially, leading to over twenty years playing bits in hundreds of films. 

    But, amidst much dross, O’Connor showed up in some of Hollywood’s greatest pictures: King Kong (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Force of Evil (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Blue Gardenia (1953). Hawks, Capra, Welles, Curtiz, Wilder, Stevens, Ford, Lang: O’Connor kept good company.

    Frank O’Connor made appearances in six MGM musicals: Stage Mother, The Merry Widow, Maytime, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West and Little Nellie Kelly.

  • Billy O’Brien

    Like many other child actors, William Stephens O’Brien (1921-44) died young, but in his case heroically, when he was shot down during a mission in the South Pacific.

    O’Brien made his debut aged 5, in a Hal Roach short. A few years later he played in Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929). His first featured role was in The Lone Trail (1932), a Poverty Row western, and he continued to act, usually without credit, until he joined up following the attack on Pearl Harbour.

    In 1933, O’Brien made a brief appearance in Stage Mother.

  • Bert Moorhouse

    In a career lasting over a quarter of a century, character actor Herbert Green Moorhouse (1894-1954) made around 380 screen appearances. Some of these were in featured supporting roles, but later on he was predominantly an uncredited extra.

    Moorhouse made his debut, without credit, in The Cameraman (1928), the last really good film made by Buster Keaton before MGM crushed his spirit. In the same year, Moorhouse was a featured player in two Poverty Row pictures.

    Over the years, Moorhouse played a reporter in Mrs Deeds Goes to Town (1936); a nightclub patron in The Awful Truth (1937); Mary Astor’s dance partner in Midnight (1939); one of Hynkel’s officers in The Great Dictator (1940); another reporter in Sullivan’s Travels (1941); a party guest in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946); a pilot in A Foreign Affair (1948); the nitwit at Paramount who makes Nora Desmond think she is wanted for a fil in Sunset Boulevard (1950); and a newspaper editor in Ace in the Hole (1951).

    Moorhouse acted in fifteen Metro musicals in seventeen years, always uncredited, and starting with Stage Mother. He then played spectators at racetracks in Reckless, A Day at the Races and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. After that came Broadway Serenade, Broadway Melody of 1940, Two Girls on Broadway, Ziegfeld Girl, Thrill of a Romance, Easy to Wed, Till the Clouds Roll By, Living in a Big Way, Words and Music, Nancy Goes to Rio and Duchess of Idaho.

    Moorhouse became very ill in 1954 and took his own life.

  • Buddy Messinger

    Melvin Joseph Messinger (1907-65) had a successful career in silent shorts, initially as a child actor, and thereafter played uncredited supporting parts.

    Messinger made his debut in When Little Lindy Sang (1916), a rare film for its time in that it starred Ernestine Jones, a talented African-American child actor. The following year he was Captain Smollett in Treasure Island, a film in which the lead parts were all played by children and teenagers, and which also features his sister, Gertrude. He was in several of these ‘Sunset Kiddies’ productions of classic stories and fairy tales made by Fox.

    In 1920-21, Messinger had a recurring role in Goldwyn’s Edgar series, written by Booth Tarkington of Magnificent Amberson’s fame. In 1923-24, he starred as Buddy in his own series of shorts.

    From 1926, Messinger, no longer a child, starred in a series of comedy shorts with the Sunkist Bathing Beauties and a monkey. But after pictures started to talk, he was relegated to uncredited bit parts. Some of the better films of this period included Wild Boys of the Road(1933) and Modern Times (1936). He also appeared briefly in Citizen Kane (1941).

    Buddy Messinger was in three MGM musicals: Stage Mother, Hullabaloo and The Big Store.

    Later in life, he worked as ab assistant director in films and on television.

  • Alice Lake

    Alice Lake (1895-1967) is a textbook example of an actor who scaled the heights during the silent era, but ended in poverty, all but forgotten.

    Lake started out as a dancer while still in her teens, before making her first films in the mid-1910s. She did a lot of work for Mack Sennett, and often performed with Roscoe Arbuckle. In The Cook (1918) she was the waitress who had to be repeatedly rescued by Arbuckle and Buster Keaton from the attentions of Al St John.

    She also played straight roles in dramas, such as Jack Conway’s Lombardi, Ltd (1919). In 1921, she played Jean Oliver in the original version of The Hole in the Wall.

    Lake had leading roles in over eighty silent pictures, but the quality of her parts declined with the introduction of sound, and after 1933 she made only ten or so uncredited appearances. Two of these were in Metro musicals, Stage Mother and Babes in Toyland. 

  • Tiny Jones

    It is quite unusual that Elizabeth Jones (1875-1952) did not acquire her nickname ironically; she actually was diminutive.

    Jones was a Welsh actor who travelled to the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. She made her first screen appearance for John Ford, in The Iron Horse (1924), and he also directed her last film, The Quiet Man (1952). In between, she was in six other Ford pictures, including as one of the few genuine Welsh performers in How Green Was My Valley (1942).

    Jones worked regularly, always without credit, for some of Hollywood’s other great directors: Erich von Stroheim, including in Greed (1924); Frank Capra in Lady for a Day (1934); William A Wellman, as a resident of Warsaw, Vermont who sneers at Frederic March in Nothing Sacred (1937).

    She was in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942), and worked twice for Orson Welles, in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Macbeth (1948). She was also in two of Joseph Losey’s early pictures, M and The Prowler (both 1951).

    Tiny Jones made around 140 appearances, but only one in an MGM musical, as one of the stage mothers in Stage Mother.

  • Gladden James

    Gladden James (1888-1948) was starring in films as early as 1911, when he made several that were directed by the pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché when she was working in New Jersey.

    James continued to take leading or prominent supporting roles throughout the 1910s and 20s, in well over eighty pictures. But after 1929, he was almost wholly restricted to uncredited bit parts. He was one of the reporters greeting Nobel prizewinner Robert Taylor off the plane in Magnificent Obsession (1934) and the court clerk in Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936).

    Gladden James acted in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and For Me and My Gal, playing the doctor who declares Gene Kelly unfit for active duty.

  • June Gittelson

    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,

  • Lew Kelly

    Louis Kelly (1879-1944) was one of those experienced theatre actors who found work in Hollywood after the introduction of sound.

    Kelly’s first appearance was actually in one of the last of the silents, a Buck Jones western called The Branded Sombrero (1928). He followed this with Barnum Was Right (1929), a comedy made in both sound and silent versions. His first full-fledged talking picture was The Woman Racket (1930), a crime drama. 

    By 1944, Kelly had made around 230 films. They were mostly programmers and he was usually uncredited. The most prestigious pictures he appeared in were I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), as the cook in a diner, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

    Kelly played Jake, a stagehand, in Metro’s Stage Mother.

  • John Elliott

    John Hugh Elliott (1876-1956) worked his way through the acting ranks to make his debut on Broadway in 1917, at the relatively advanced age of 40. He made his first film two years later, in When a Man Loves (1919). 

    Elliott eventually acted in over 300 films, but only eighteen were made during the silent era, when he maintained his stage career. He came into his own with the introduction of sound, when stage experience became a valuable commodity in Hollywood. In 1930 he took a supporting role in The Rampant Age, and was also credited as dialogue director, a function that became common in the early years of talking pictures.

    Elliott was uncredited in well over half of his films, and only rarely in high-status productions. He played a bank director in the infamous Baby Face (1933) and was the Exalted Exhausted Ruler in Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert (1933).

    In Jesse James (1939), Elliott played a judge, while he was a party guest in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He also appeared in the film noir The Dark Corner (1946) and was directed by Jean Renoir in The Woman on the Beach (1947).

    Elliott’s lone performance in an MGM musical was in Stage Mother.

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