The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Arthur Hoyt

    Arthur Thomas Hoyt (1874-1953) was a prolific character actor, acting in almost 250 feature films and well over 100 shorts.

    Hoyt made the first of several appearances on Broadway in 1905, and by 1914 was making short films for companies based in New York. He made his feature debut for Bluebird Photoplays in 1916.

    Hoyt had credited supporting roles in Rex Ingam’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and in The Lost World (1925), which was directed by his brother Harry. 

    In the sound era, Hoyt features in two iconic prison pictures, The Criminal Code (1931) and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932). He was the motor court manager in It Happened One Night (1934), and appeared in Magnificent Obsession (1936).

    In the 1940s, Hoyt was a central member of the Preston Sturges stock company, appearing in all nine of the director’s films from The Great McGinty (1940) to The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947). The latter was his final film.

    Arthur Hoyt acted for MGM in four musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, Hullabaloo and Babes on Broadway. All four appearances were uncredited.

  • Grace Hayle

    Grace Flora Heller (1888-1963) was a prominent actor in provincial theatre, notably Philadelphia, and also worked on Broadway in 1918 and 1946.

    Hayle started working in films while in her mid-forties, developing a niche as dignified ladies in more than 120 pictures. Early appearances, usually uncredited, included Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Baby Face (1933), Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Topper (1937).

    She was a customer at The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and, in the same year, played her most well-remembered role, as Madame Napaloni in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). Hayle’s final screen appearance was in the Elvis Presley vehicle Loving You (1957).

    Grace Hayle was in seven MGM musicals, starting with The Cat and the Fiddle. Online resources always claim she played a character named Lettuce, but I find it difficult to believe she was not actually Lettice. Her subsequent appearances were in The Great Ziegfeld, Maytime, Sweethearts, Ship Ahoy, I Married and Angel and Athena.

  • Billy Dooley

    William Dooley (1893-1938) was working in vaudeville, latterly with his wife, Frances Lee, when producer hired him in 1925 to star in comedy shorts. It has been pointed out that Dooley’s onscreen persona owed a lot to the physical appearances of Larry Semon and Harry Langdon: child-like verging on mentally impaired. Dooley’s USP was that he was invariably playing a sailor.

    After 1932, Dooley played generally uncredited supporting roles in around thirty features, including The Cat’s-Paw (1933), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and Anything Goes (1936).

    Dooley appeared without credit in four MGM musicals, starting with The Cat and the Fiddle. He had a showy few seconds as Jeanette MacDonald’s drunken ‘brother’ in Naughty Marietta, and followed this with Here Comes the Band and A Day at the Races, 

  • Armand Kaliz

    The confusion surrounding the birth year of Armand David Kalisz (1887?-1941)–1882 and 1883 are often cited– was in all likelihood created by Kaliz himself. Press reports of his death stated he was only 49, suggesting he maintained secrecy and subterfuge around his age. The most likely year seems to be 1887, which would have made him 53.

    Armand Kaliz was Polish, but emigrated to the United States in 1907. He became a vaudeville performer and, from 1910, worked with his wife, the singer Amelia Stone, in both dramatic and comic sketches. They both also had Broadway experience.

    Kaliz appeared in at least eighty feature films from 1918 onwards, generally in credited roles, though this tailed off later in his career. Pictures of note included: The Temptress (1926), Greta Garbo’s second American film; Michael Curtiz’s epic Noah’s Ark (1928); Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929); Little Caesar (1932); Flying Down to Rio (1933); A Star is Born (1937); Ninotchka (1939); and Down Argentine Way (1940).

    Kaliz played the King in the show-within-a-show in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle, and followed this with uncredited appearances in Ice Follies of 1939, Bitter Sweet and Ziegfeld Girl. 

  • Otto Fries

    Otto Hugo Fries (1887-1938) had a background in travelling medicine shows and vaudeville when he started making comedy shorts for Hal Roach in 1916.

    His first feature, Free and Easy, came in 1921. This was the first of over seventy appearances in features, though he made more than 100 shorts across his career, including many filmed in German. 

    Notable pictures featuring Fries include Mauritz Stiller’s Hotel Imperial (1927), John Ford’s Riley the Cop (1928), the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (1932), Anna Karenina (1935), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and The Mad Miss Manton (1938).

    Fries appeared uncredited in five MGM musicals, beginning with The Cat and the Fiddle, followed by The Merry Widow, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera and Born to Dance. 

  • Frank Adams

    Frank Adams (dates unknown) is another of those actors who passed briefly through Hollywood, made a few films on the way, and then disappeared, leaving no trace to follow.

    IMDb claims he appeared uncredited in ten features, of which the AFI confirms only three, one of which is MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle. They agree that he plays a musician.

  • Sumner Getchell

    Sumner Winfield Getchell (1906-90) started out as a child actor in San Francisco before relocating to Hollywood as a young man to work in moving pictures.

    Getchell played Fat in Wesley Ruggles’s short The Collegians (1926) and several of its sequels. His first feature was The College Widow (1927) at Warner Bros. He went on to play, usually without a credit, in over forty feature films and as many shorts. These included Magnificent Obsession (1935) and Union Station (1950). 

    Getchell appeared in two MGM musicals, The Cat and the Fiddle and, as Little Jack Horner, Babes in Toyland.

  • E Alyn Warren

    Edward Alyn Warren (1974-1940) made his first film appearances while in his forties, which suggests some previous stage experience. 

    Warren was a character actor, never averse to donning a wig and beard. He was frequently cast in ‘ethnic’ roles; he played Wong Li in The Forbidden City (1918), the first of more than a dozen appearances in yellowface, where he was often credited as Fred Warren. He also portrayed Ulysses S Grant three times, starting with D W Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930).

    Tod Browning used Warren in four of his pictures, including The Unholy Three (1925) and The Devil Doll (1936). Other pictures included A Free Soul (1931), The Cat’s Paw (1934), Annie Oakley (1935), You Only Live Once (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939).

    Warren appeared in five Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, The Girl of the Golden West, Broadway Serenade and, his final film, Broadway Melody of 1940.

  • Germaine De Néel

    Canadian Germaine De Nelin (1904-83) had a brief career in Hollywood, from 1931 to 1935.

    As Germaine De Néel, she was fourth-billed as French Sadie in a Poverty Row western, The Sunset Trail (1931), photographed by Archie Stout. She had a few other credits, along with uncredited roles, habitually playing a French character.

    One of De Néel’s uncredited appearances was as a maid in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle.

    De Néel appears to have returned to Canada at some point, but there is no information about her post-Hollywood life.

  • Yola D’Avril

    American sources claim Yvonne Gabrielle Julienne Vermeiren (1906-84) was born in France, while those in French say it was Belgium. All agree that she and her family relocated to the United States in 1921, where she found work as a dancer.

    IMDb claims that D’Avril made screen appearances in 1926/26, including in the feature film The Dressmaker of Paris (1925). According to the AFI, her first feature was Orchids and Ermine (1927), and this was followed by 54 more, a mixture of small supporting roles, both with and without credits.

    D’Avril played the first of many maids in Fox Movietone Follies of 1930 (1930), and was one of the French girls Paul meets in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Later appearances included Tarzan and His Mate (1934), Now Voyager (1942) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948, her final maid).

    She also played a maid in her one MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle.

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