Charles B Crockett (1870-1934) had a long career as a stage actor before making his first film appearance at the age of 54. He only made about fifteen features and a few shorts, predominantly in credited supporting roles.
Crockett was a well-known raconteur, leading one newspaper to refer to him as “Hollywood’s Will Rogers”, shortly before Rogers himself became Hollywood’s Will Rogers.
Crockett made a single appearance in an MGM musical, playing a secretary in The Cat and the Fiddle.
Alice Carlisle (dates unknown) is a woman of mystery. The AFI seems confident that she appeared as the vegetable seller in Victor’s operetta within The Cat and the Fiddle, but there seems to be no other information about her anywhere.
Reginald Harry Barlow (1866-1943) led a busy life. Stage actor and director, including twenty or so plays on Broadway. Distinguished military service in three different wars. Active in the leadership of the actors’ union Equity. Post Commander in the American Legion. Married six times. And he still found time to appear in over seventy feature films and a a number of shorts, even directing a short himself. Barlow was the son of a minstrel show performer and claimed descent from the Tudor Bishop Barlow.
Reginald Barlow’s early involvement with films was in New York in 1915, and this was where he directed The Toy-Maker of Leyden (1915). His first Hollywood picture was Love’s Flame (1920). His film career only got properly underway in 1932, when he appeared in fourteen releases, including If I Had a Million and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Barlow was a character actor, sometimes in credited roles, more often without credit. He was the College President in the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932) and stood with the eponymous hero in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933). He had a featured role in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and in James Whale’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1939).
Barlow acted, without credit, in two MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle and (almost certainly) Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
Polly Van (1882-1952) started out in local amateur shows until, during a Hollywood studio tour in 1917, she was spotted, reportedly by Oliver Hardy, and offered a role in the appropriately-titled short Back Stage (1917). This was the first of over eighty appearances in character roles in a thirty-four-year career (though she took an extended break in the period 1925-1934). She also made frequent radio appearances.
Specializing in the mother/matron/landlady type, Bailey was usually uncredited. Her pictures included The Thin Man (1934), Kitty Foyle (1940), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), The Locket (1946), The Snake Pit (1948) and Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).
Bailey was in five MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Unfinished Dance, A Date with Judy, Annie Get Your Gun and Excuse My Dust.
Harry William Depp (1883-1957) started out as a comedian in vaudeville and travelling theatre companies. By 1907, he was appearing on Broadway, in the first of many productions.
Depp made his film debut in Between Midnight (1916), a Carter DeHaven short, but then travelled to Hollywood for the first of around 140 feature films. Early on, he worked for a number of small studios, always in comedic roles and with a penchant for cross-dressing. He also made appearances for Mack Sennett.
He had many featured roles in the 1920s, but after 1930 tended to have smaller, uncredited parts. He cropped up in Howard Hawks’s Barbary Coast (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). In 1945, Depp played the pharmacist who supplies Gene Tierney with the arsenic needed for suicide.
Harry Depp made uncredited appearances in six Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, The Big Store, Ship Ahoy!, I Dood It and Girl Crazy.
Ettore Vittorio Sarno (1880-1953) was an Italian-born actor known to have worked for New York-based film companies from around 1912. His first feature film is thought to have been Under the Gaslight (1914).
Sarno appeared in at least 200 features and shorts, mostly credited roles during the sound era, but more often uncredited after 1929, when he was largely restricted to ‘ethnic’ parts. He can be seen in King of Kings (1927), Lucky Star (1929), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Cloak and Dagger (1946) and The Egg and I (1947).
Sarno was a Mexican waiter in MGM’s Going Hollywood and the Gypsy leader at the beginning of Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. IMDb also suggests he appeared in Balalaika, which seems likely given its setting.
Both IMDb and the AFI cite a singing group called the Rangers as appearing in MGM’s Going Hollywood. This would appear to be the octet usually known as the KMBC Texas Rangers, a group that performed western songs on a Kansas City, Missouri radio station. The group also appeared in a number of 1930s ‘B’ westerns.
The lineup of the Texas Rangers changed, and it is currently difficult to be certain about which singers participated in Going Hollywood. They are likely to have been Clarence ‘Idaho’ Hartman, Gomer ‘Tenderfoot’ Cool, Joe ‘Monty’ Strand, Herbie ‘Arizona’ Kratoska, Fran ‘Irish’ Mahaney, Robert ‘Captain Bob’ Crawford and Edward ‘Tucson’ Cronenbold.
Vesey Alfred Davoren (1888-1989) was an Anglo-Irish actor from an upper-class background who started out in the British theatre in 1909. His career was interrupted by the First World War, in which he seems to have had a particularly bad time, sustaining several injuries, the effect of a mustard gas attack, and experiences that must have been traumatizing.
When he travelled to America in 1920, press reports mentioned him as a British film actor, but there is no indication of what films he might have made before emigrating.
While maintaining his theatrical work, O’Davoren developed a parallel career as a largely uncredited character actor in films, making his debut in Winds of the Pampas (1927). He was in approaching sixty feature films, frequently playing a butler, which is slightly ironic, given his roots.
Notable pictures in which O’Davoren played a small part include Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1937), Stella Dallas (1937), Four Men and a Prayer (1938) and Forever Amber (1947).
O’Davoren was in three of MGM’s musicals: Going Hollywood, Million Dollar Mermaid and Brigadoon.
He continued to live in California for almost thirty years after retiring at the age of 72.
Morita Mitsugi (1896-1985) was a Japanese character actor in Hollywood at a time when stereotyping was the order of the day and difficult to resist.
Morita left Japan when he was eighteen and worked at a variety of jobs in the United States and Canada. Some sources claim he appeared in silent films, but the first appearance cited by the AFI catalogue is in 1933. He had a prominent role in Nagana (1933). In fact, it is understood that he was originally slated to play the Japanese research scientist Noguchi Hideo in a biopic, but the idea was dropped. Instead, he played second fiddle to Melvyn Douglas in a story about the fight to cure sleeping sickness.
After that, Mikita was restricted to playing uncredited supporting roles, frequently as butlers, valets and assorted servants. He vigorously rejected a featured role in Marie Galante (1934) because he believed it showed Japan in a bad light.
Morita was a gifted actor, and his brief appearances in films such as Front Page Woman (1935) and It Couldn’t Have Happened (1936) were singled out for mention by some reviewers. In even the smallest role, he would fight against the stereotype, for example, when engaging in jujitsu with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (1937).
Miki Morita appeared as a florist in Going Hollywood at MGM.
Mary Thelma Lange (1912-73) travelled from Pennsylvania to New York City as a nineteen-year-old to join the Ziegfeld Follies. She was spotted by a Hollywood scout and invited to go West.
In Hollywood, Lange became a Goldwyn Girl, appearing in Roman Scandals (1933). She went on to play uncredited chorus girls in a dozen or so pictures for Goldwyn and a variety of other studios. For a change of pace, she was a lady in waiting in The Affairs of Cellini (1934).
In 1938, Lange got married and gave up performing to raise a family.
She appeared as chorus girls in three MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, Broadway Melody of 1936 and, back where she started, The Great Ziegfeld.
