The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Alexander Pollard

    British actor Alexander Pollard emigrated to the United States during the 1920s, and made his first film in 1928. He went on to make close to 200 screen appearances, all of them uncredited. He was a utility character actor, invariably cast as some kind of domestic or public functionary: over two thirds of his roles were as butlers or waiters.

    Pollard ran the luncheon counter where Fay Wray got her much-needed meal in King Kong (1933). He was a waiter hired by Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934). He was a guest at the sinister party in Saboteur (1942). And in The Woman in the Window (1944) he played the club waiter who wakes up Edward G Robinson (twice).

    Pollard was in eight MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, A Night at the Opera, Nobody’s Baby, Lady Be Good, Ship Ahoy, Thrill of a Romance, Easy to Wed and Words and Music.

  • Miriam Marlin

    Not a lot of information is available about Miriam Marlin (1905-89), whose brief Hollywood career (1933-37) mostly involved playing chorus girls. It seems reasonable to assume that she had some experience in that area before appearing in pictures.

    Marlin was a chorus girl in all three of her uncredited appearances in MGM musicals, Broadway to Hollywood, Stage Mother and Dancing Lady.

  • Louis Mann

    Louis Mann (1865-1931) was a theatre actor and director, and occasional film actor, who made his first appearance on a stage aged three.

    Mann was a popular Broadway star from the mid-1990s, specializing in comedy and musicals. He also toured widely. In 1914, Variety reported that he had been signed by Jesse Lasky to film two of his stage hits, All on Account of Eliza and Elevating a Husband, but there seems no evidence that these were ever made. Both plays were written by Mann’s wife, Clara Lipman, who was also a prominent supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. It was probably this that led to Mann’s involvement with Your Girl and Mine: A Woman Suffrage Play (1914, a propaganda work made by the movement.

    Mann’s one full-fledged film appearance was in MGM’s The Sins of the Children (1930), on which his wife was a contributing writer.

    In the same year, Mann contributed to the Old Timer sequence of The March of Time. After the film was abandoned, some of his footage was used in Broadway to Hollywood, which was made after Mann’s death 

  • Isabelle Keith

    Isabelle Keep (1898-1975) was a small-part player who made almost sixty films between 1919 and 1937. She is probably best-known today for playing Mrs Laurel in Perfect Day (1929) and Mrs Hardy in Be Big! (1931).

    Keith appeared briefly in a few major pictures–John Ford’s Riley the Cop (1928), Mata Hari (1931), Anna Karenina (1935)–but can mostly be seen in programmers.

    She was uncredited in three Metro musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Dancing Lady and Reckless.

  • Muriel Evans

    Muriel Adele Evanson (1910-2000) was spotted in Hollywood aged 16 and given her first part in Mademoiselle Modiste (2926). While still at school, she worked for years in bit parts and did some acting for stock companies. 

    In 1929, Evans played the female lead in Joyland, a Lupino Lane comedy short. After a short break from acting to get married and divorced, she worked for MGM and Hal Roach, including a role in Laurel and Hardy’s Pack Up Your Troubles (1932).

    From then on, Evans’s career was a combination of small, often uncredited, appearances in ‘A’ pictures such as Queen Christina (1933) and Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and, much more frequently, leading roles in’B’ westerns. She was a regular leading lady for Buck Jones and for John Wayne during his wilderness years.

    By 1940, Evans had more or less retired from screen acting, though she did continue to do radio work. Much later, she worked as a nurse at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, where she also lived out her final years.

    Muriel Evans was in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Dancing Lady and Hollywood Party.

  • Jean Howard

    Ernestine Hill (1910-2000), like many others, was a model and beauty contest competitor who ended up becoming a Goldwyn Girl. She made her first screen appearance in Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee! (1930).

    After a few uncredited roles, including in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood and Dancing Lady in 1933, Howard achieved a handful of credits, notably in Edmund Goulding’s 1943 comedy, Claudia. But she does not seem to have taken her career very seriously, and spent much of her time taking photographs.

    Howard only made about a dozen pictures, but also published two volumes of photographs, including one which captured a world tour she undertook with her close friend Cole Porter. 

  • DeWolf Hopper

    William D’Wolf Hopper (1858-1935) was a vaudeville and musical theatre performer who found fame through the recitation of Ernest Thayer’s mock-heroic poem ‘Casey at the Bat’.

    Hopper, who made his professional debut in 1878, aspired to be a leading man in serious drama, but his height and bulk (6 feet 5 inches and around 230 pounds) ruled that out. But he had a deep bass voice, and found success in musicals. He starred on Broadway in more than thirty shows. 

    It is estimated that Hopper recited ‘Casey at the Bat’ around ten thousand times. A recording exists, as well as a short sound film made in the Phonofilm process in 1923.

    Hopper starred in a number of silent films, including an unlikely-looking Don Quixote in a 1915 adaptation of Cervantes’s novel.

    In 1930, Hopper took part with other vaudeville veterans in filming a section of The March of Time. The film was never completed, but Hopper’s performance can be seen in Broadway to Hollywood. 

    Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper numbered among DeWolf Hopper’s six wives.

  • Tenen Holtz

    Alex Elihu Tenenholtz (1887-1971) was a stalwart of Yiddish theatre, both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in his adopted home in the United States. In 1925 he established a Yiddish theatre company with Cecilia Adler, the half-sister of Luther and Stella, and in 1926 was offered a contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

    In one of his early films, The Mask of Comedy (1926), he appeared with Norma Shearer, and over the next few years he acted with most of Hollywood’s top women actors: Marion Davies (The Cardboard Lover [1928]), Marie Dressler (Bringing Up Father [1928]), Joan Crawford (The Duke Steps Out [1929]), Blanche Sweet (The Woman Racket [1930]), Loretta Young (Three Girls Lost [1931]), Kay Francis (British Agent [1934]) and Carole Lombard (Nothing Sacred [1937]).

    Holtz also appeared uncredited in three MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Hollywood Party and Let Freedom Ring. 

    When Hotz’s career was reduced to Poverty Row productions in the late 30s, he took up chicken farming instead. He returned to acting, predominantly on television, in 1959.

  • Robert Greig

    Australian Robert Greig (1879-1958) played a film butler on at least twenty-three occasions, which is as close as you can get to being a butler without actually butling. He also played valets, doormen and at least two major domos. 

    More importantly, Greig was a key member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, appearing in six of the director’s films, including The Lady Eve (1941, as Burrows, the butler). In Sullivan’s Travels (1941, again playing a butler named Burrows), he was given a key speech, commenting on his employer’s plan to disguise himself as a poor man: “Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned”.

    After a successful career in Australia, Greig had emigrated to the United States and acted on Broadway. He repeated his role as Hives the butler, with the Marx Brothers, in Animal Crackers when the play was filmed in 1930. He worked with them again in Horse Feathers (1932).

    Greig worked with Lubitsch on Love Me Tonight and Trouble in Paradise (both 1932) and in top-class screwball comedies such as Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Easy Living (1937). He stepped back to the Revolutionary War with John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and to the ancient Middle East in The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

    Robert Greig appeared in four MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Rose-Marie (the only credited role), The Great Ziegfeld (as the protagonist’s butler) and I Married an Angel.

  • 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.  

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