The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Barney Fagan

    Bernard J Fagan (1850-1937) acted, sang, composed, choreographed and directed throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

    As a performer, Fagan was particularly noted for his clog dancing and for minstrelsy, including blackface. As a composer, his songs are noted by historians of music as important contributions to the development of ragtime. In later life, Fagan performed in and directed musical theatre, including an appearance in the first production of Samson Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer in 1925.

    Fagan’s only film appearance was when he performed a soft-shoe shuffle for the abandoned MGM musical The March of Time in 1930. The footage was used three years later in Broadway to Hollywood.  

  • Claire Du Brey

    Claire Violet Dubreyvich (1892-1993) had ideas of becoming a nurse before becoming an actor. One of her earliest films was Thomas Ince’s extraordinary pacifist epic Civilization (1916). By the time she retired in 1961, she had made well over 200 pictures, as well as many television appearances.

    In the silent era, Du Brey was rarely the leading player, but was cast in prominent supporting roles. The introduction of sound posed no difficulties for her and she continued to find regular work in character roles. At the same time, she established herself as a Hollywood agent, in partnership with the actor Anna Q Nilsson.

    Du Brey was not often given the opportunity to shine, though her playing of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1934) stands out. She played the wife of the coward Bob Ford in Jesse James (1939), and was in Lust for Life (1956).

    She appeared in two MGM musicals, separated by over twenty years: Broadway to Hollywood and Les Girls.

    Claire Du Brey lived another forty years after retiring, and became one of Hollywood’s first centenarians. 

  • Ruth Channing

    Eva Louise Moynahan (1904-92) only appeared in about ten films before giving up her career so she could, as was normal at the time, ‘devote herself to her family’. But she was able to look back on a career that connected her, albeit without credit, with a few memorable pictures.

    Channing had wanted to be a dancer, but an injury put paid to that, and she devoted herself to acting instead. After gaining experience on the stage, she was cast in Working Girls (1931), a minor but engaging picture directed by Dorothy Arzner. 

    In 1934, Channing appeared in two solid MGM classics, The Thin Man and the musical The Merry Widow. She had previously been in two other of the studio’s musicals: Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party.

    By 1935, her career was over.

  • Tad Alexander

    John A Alexander (1922-2012) lived to be ninety years old. For just five of those years, he was a film actor.

    Alexander made his stage debut aged 7, in a Los Angeles Theatre, in a play starring Ruth Chatterton. In 1931, he acted in Ambassador Bill, faced with the challenge of keeping up with star Will Rogers’s improvisations. By 1939, he had made eleven films, including Strange Interlude (1932), playing Robert Young as a boy. His final appearance was in a musical short called Show Kids (1935), in which he starred, and after which he retired. In later life, he was both a concert pianist and an engineer.

    In 1933, Alexander has an uncredited role in Broadway to Hollywood.

  • Brooks Benedict

    Following military service in the First World War, Harold J Mann (1896-1968) worked in various jobs in Hollywood before making his acting debut in William Wellman’s Cupid’s Fireman (1923).He chose a name that matched his lounge lizard appearance.

    Benedict went on to appear in over 350 films. Initially, he had featured roles, such as the College Cad in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925), but by the sound era he was mostly playing uncredited bit parts. 

    Benedict was credited in What Price Hollywood? (1932), and also appeared in Sons of the Desert (1933), The Thin Man (1934), In Old Chicago (1938), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Letter (1940), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Now, Voyager (1942), Phantom Lady (1944), The Killers (1946), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Out of the Past (1947) and Strangers on a Train (1951).

    Brooks Benedict acted in five Metro musicals, starting with The Devil’s Brother. He went on to appear in Sweethearts, Lady Be Good, Du Barry was a Lady and Holiday in Mexico.

  • Frank Terry

    Frank Ernest Edwards (1871-1948) had a long career touring the world as a stage actor before becoming a jack-of-all-trades in Hollywood.

    From 1917, Terry worked at the Hal Roach Studios as a gag writer, story contributor, scenarist, assistant director, director and actor. He worked regularly, and in many of these capacities, with Laurel and Hardy, appearing as Hives the butler in Me and My Pal (1933). In the same year he had a bit part in The Devil’s Brother.

    Outside the Roach studio, Terry played one of the hunters who find the Monster in the blind man’s cottage in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

    IMDb claims he played a bailiff in Old Mother Riley in Paris (1938), though it is unclear why he would have been in England.

    Frank Terry’s most notorious contribution to film history is as the man who handed Harold Lloyd the stage bomb that took off several of his fingers. Terry was also injured in the incident. 

    Frank Terry retired from show business and became a Christian missionary. 

  • George Miller

    The IMDb entry for George Miller (1903-??) raises more questions than it answers.

    It gives him seven credits, with a 1930 debut in a ‘B’ western’. It then shows four appearances with Laurel and Hardy, including in the musical The Devil’s Brother. 

    It then claims he played the Reeve in the historical sequence at the beginning of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), suggesting a relocation to the UK. 

    Finally, IMDb says he played Kasim Baba in a 1953 BBC production, Chu Chin Chow – On Ice, a version of the 1916 musical on an ice rink.

    Make of that what you will. 

  • Jack Hill

    Lawrence Young Hill (1887-1963) made his uncredited screen debut in Shiver and Shake (1922), the first of many appearances for the Hal Roach Studios, where he also worked as an occasional stunt performer.

    Hill was a regular in Laurel and Hardy pictures right from the beginning, working as an extra in their first screen pairing, Putting Pants on Philip (1927). In Two Tars (1928) he knocked Stan over with a mattress, while in Below Zero (1930) he helped throw the pair out of the restaurant. In Bonnie Scotland (1935), Hill had three different roles.

    Inevitably, Jack Hill made appearances in three of MGM’s Laurel and Hardy musicals: The Devil’s Brother, The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.

  • Arthur Stone

    Arthur Taylor Goetze (1883-1940) was only making films for about twelve years, but still managed to notch up around 80 appearances. Prior to that, he had worked in vaudeville and, most recently, as a makeup artist. He was married to Dorothy Westmore, from the famous Hollywood makeup dynasty.

    Working for Hal Roach, Stone had a passing similarity to Harry Langdon, and played a similarly child-like character. He then moved into playing character roles in First National features. By the end of the silent era, he was playing co-starring roles alongside actors such as Coleen Moore and Jean Hersholt.

    The coming of sound saw Stone move into smaller character roles, often in westerns, until he was hired by Mack Sennett to make a series of comedy shorts. In his final years, he moved between down-the-bill character roles, for example in Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935) and uncredited bits. He can be seen as one of the lynch mob in Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), providing a little comic relief.

    Stone appeared without credit in one MGM/Hal Roach musical, The Devil’s Brother.

  • Dick Gilbert

    Richard Gilbert (1889-1960), popularly known as ‘Fighting Dick’, started out as a boxer in 1907. He had some success, but was also described as a “punching bag” when facing superior opponents. Online claims that he once beat Jack Dempsey appear to have no substance. 

    After retiring from the ring, Gilbert found steady work as a heavy in silent comedies, frequently working for the Hal Roach Studios. He was usually uncredited, but did secure the occasional substantial role, for example in the western The Man from the West (1926). 

    Gilbert featured in many Laurel and Hardy shorts, and also in two of their feature-length musicals, The Devil’s Brother and The Bohemian Girl. 

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