The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Donald Novis

    The family of Donald George Novis (1906-66) emigrated from the UK to the USA when he was a very small child. Aged 22, Novis won a national singing competition, after which he pursued a career in singing and acting.

    After securing a small role in Bulldog Drummond (1929), Novis appeared in around 30 pictures, frequently as a singer. Two such appearances were in Love in the Rough and Flying High. He later sang ‘Love is a Song’ in Bambi. (1941).

    Novis also worked on Broadway, but was probably most active as a singer with big bands, both in live performances and on radio. From 1932-34 he led his own orchestra.

  • Wilbur Mack

    George Frear Runyon (1873-1964) made his stage debut aged 16 and achieved success in vaudeville doing comedy double acts with both his first and second wives. The act can be seen in a Vitaphone short called An Everyday Occurrence (1929).

    Mack made his first film in 1925 and racked up well over 400 appearances. He started out in featured supporting roles, but the quality of his parts declined in the talking era. 

    Nonetheless, Mack made uncredited appearances in no fewer than twenty-two MGM musicals between 1930 and 1956: Love in the Rough, Going Hollywood, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Broadway Rhythm, Two Girls and a Sailor, Thrill of a Romance, Ziegfeld Follies, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Nancy Goes to Rio, The Great Caruso, The Band Wagon, Kiss Me Kate, Easy to Love, Athena, The Glass Slipper and The Opposite Sex. 

  • Clarence Wilson

    Clarence Hummel Wilson (1876-1941) had been acting on the stage for a quarter of a century when he made his film debut in 1920. He spent the next twenty years playing a variety of bailiffs, landlords and old grumps, often in featured roles, at other times without credit, totalling around 200 appearances.

    Notable films featuring Wilson include: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), as the money lender; The Front Page (1931), as the sheriff; and You Can’t Take It with You (1938), as the property developer.

    Wilson appeared in four MGM musicals: Love in the Rough and, uncredited, Flying High, Hollywood Party and Maytime.

  • Roscoe Ates

    Roscoe Blevel Ates (1895-1962) was working in vaudeville as a comedian when he made his screen debut in 1929’s South Sea Rose.

    The following year, after an uncredited appearance in Marianne and a small part in Love in the Rough, Ates had a strong supporting role in King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930). He appeared in many further westerns, including a run as a character named Soapy Jones for PRC.

    Ates had a speech impediment as a child, which he revived to good effect in a number of pictures playing stuttering characters.

    Roscoe Ates’s other Metro musicals were Ziegfeld Girl and Meet Me in Las Vegas.

  • Adolph Milar

    Adolph Milar (1895-1950) was born in Switzerland, but had a career in American films that lasted over 25 years.

    From 1919, Milar played featured supporting roles in many silent films, but tended to be restricted to ethnic roles with the coming of sound, owing to his accent. He made an auspicious start with his first talking picture, Bulldog Drummond (1929). Later, he came to specialize in nazis, notably in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and in The Hitler Gang (1944), by which time he was usually uncredited.

    Milar appeared as a police officer in Call of the Flesh.

  • Lillian Leighton

    Lillian Brown (1874-1956) appeared in more than 250 films in a career that began in 1910 in Chicago, working with the Selig Polyscope Company. She made her final film in 1937.

    Most of Leighton’s pictures were silent (she even provided the stories for some of them in the early years). In the sound era, she tended to be credited in low-budget films, but uncredited in those with bigger budgets.

    One such was Call of the Flesh, in which she played the shawl seller.

  • Lillian Lawrence

    Lillian Lawrence (dates unknown) is frequently mistaken for Lillian Lawrence (1882-1926), who was a well-known stage actor.

    The screen Lawrence was a bit-part character actor between 1924 and 1953, rarely credited in over fifty appearances. The stage Lawrence made occasional screen appearances, with credit, and mostly in the last two years of her life: she played the Mother in Buster Keaton’s Three Ages (1923). 

    It was the little-known screen Lawrence, of course, who played a nun in Call of the Flesh, her namesake having died four years earlier. 

    She was in some very good pictures–Footlight Parade (1933), Judge Priest (1934), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Easy Living (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1940)–but always in a very minor role.

  • Ethel Sykes

    IMDb wrongly claims that Ethel Sykes (1906-61) made her screen debut in Into Society and Out (1914). She would have been eight years old at the time, making this unlikely.

    Sykes’s actual first film was The Complete Life (1926), a Fox short based on an O Henry story. The busiest period in her career was 1934-35, when she was in seventeen pictures, including the two John M Stahl classics Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935). Most of her appearances were without credit.

    Sykes played a chorus girl alongside Marion Davies in The Florodora Girl.

  • Patricia Caron

    Mary Marie Sittlow (1904-88) appeared in a couple of dozen pictures between 1927 and 1936. She played a couple of leads for minor studios in 1929, but was generally uncredited.

    In 1930, Caron played one of the Florodora Girls in The Florodora Girl.

  • Lenore Bushman

    Lenore Konti Teresa Bushman (1913-88) was the daughter of silent star Francis X Bushman, and made her first screen appearance aged 12 in one of her father’s pictures, The Masked Bride (1925).

    Aged 17, Bushman played one of Marion Davies’s fellow chorines inThe Florodora Girl. 

    Her screen career was short and sporadic, and Lenore Bushman made her final film in 1938.

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