The Rounders was a popular vocal act of the 1920s and 30s which featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. They can be heard performing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ immediately after Cliff Edwards.
The individual members of the group were Dudley B Chambers, Ben McLaughlin, Myron Niesley, Richard C Hartt and Armand Girard.
The Rounders made one of the many recordings of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ that appeared after the song’s success in Hollywood Revue.
Dorothy Rae Coonan (1913-2009) started dancing professionally aged 14, making her first screen appearance in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody. She worked several times on films choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
In 1933, director William Wellman gave her one of the leads in Wild Boys of the Road. She played Sally, the teenage hobo who disguises herself as a boy to ride the freight trains.
She and Wellman married in the following year, and remained together for over four decades, until his death in 1975.
Dorothy Wellman retired after her marriage, though she did make an uncredited appearance as a nurse in her husband’s The Story of GI Joe (1945). IMDb states she played a chorus girl in Sis Hopkins (1941), a low-budget Judy Canova comedy, but this seems unlikely.
Like a number of other performers, Diana Verne (19??-??) was a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody and nothing else is known about her.
Marshall Ruth (1898-1953) was an actor who worked steadily in films for twenty years, almost always uncredited. His size and shape made him a natural choice when 20th-Century-Fox were looking for someone to play Roscoe Arbuckle in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939).
In The Broadway Melody, Ruth played the impresario Zanfield’s assistant.
Alice Pitman (19??-??) appeared as a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody. Nothing else is known about her.
Charlotte Merriam (1903-72) started out as a screen actor playing in silent shorts, but graduated to features. Perhaps her most important role was the lead in The Brass Bottle (1923), which was directed by Maurice Tourneur. She also had an important part in the first screen version of Captain Blood (1923).
Merriam transitioned into sound pictures, where she memorably played the negligent mother in Night Nurse (1931). Less memorably, she made an uncredited appearance in The Broadway Melody, playing a flapper.
Elizabeth Kathryn Leopold (1910-2005) was a dancer who was, apparently, discovered at a young age by prima ballerina and dessert inspirer Anna Pavlova.
She made a handful of screen appearances in the late twenties,and her low point as a dancer may well have been in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody.
Edward Dillon (187?-1933) appeared on at least 340 films, most of them in the silent era, from 1908 onwards. He worked under D W Griffith and played leads opposite Mary Pickford. He also directed around 140 films, including a 1915 version of Don Quixote.
In sound pictures, Dillon was usually uncredited. This includes The Broadway Melody, which starred Bessie Love, whom Dillon had directed in A Daughter of the Poor (1917).
J Emmett Beck (19??-45) is an actor with just three citations in the AFI register.
One of these, and the last one, is Babe Hatrick in The Broadway Melody.
In the manner of one of Hollywood’s own stories, Frederick William Bowditch (1906-73) was working as a film booker when he was persuaded to audition for the moving pictures.
After a number of uncredited appearances, including as a student in Good News, Richmond won the lead in The Leather Pushers (1922), a boxing series at Universal. According to Richmond, he ended up fighting two or three hundred rounds for the camera, breaking his nose (twice) a hand and an ankle.
Richmond notched up over 100 credits before retiring from the screen, including working alongside the Gipper in Knute Rockne, All American (1940).
