Samuel Newman (1906-99) was, as the nickname ‘Rubber Legs’ might suggest, a dancer of the eccentric variety, in the manner of Ray Bolger.
Al Norman found his greatest success in vaudeville and nightclubs, and occasionally in Broadway revues, but he also made a number of film appearances, usually as a speciality performer. The sheer weirdness of his act can be seen at its best in Universal’s King of Jazz (1930), but soon after that he turned up at MGM in Good News.
Clarence Linden Crabbe II (1908-83) was an Olympic swimmer who used his good looks and athletic prowess to maintain a long career as a minor film star.
Most of Crabbe’s films were ‘B’ westerns, but he was also the only actor to play Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Tarzan. The first of these kept his name alive for many years thanks to repeated Saturday morning television re-runs.
Buster Crabbe’s first screen appearance was as a student in Good News.
Abraham Simon (1897-1957) was a drummer who ended up leading his own orchestra. One of his regular singers in the 1920s was Charles Kaley, who starred in Lord Byron of Broadway.
Lyman was also a songwriter, his biggest hit being the standard ‘I Cried for You’, co-written with Gus Arnheim and with lyrics by Arthur Freed. It was sung by Judy Garland in Babes in Arms.
Abe Lyman and his Orchestra made their screen debut in Syncopated Symphony (1928), a Vitaphone short. Out of a dozen or so subsequent film appearances, two were in Good News and Madam Satan.
Lyman gave up music in the late forties to become a restaurateur.
Kurt Fritz Schneider (1902-85) was a member of the Doll Family, four siblings all affected by dwarfism. For more than forty years, starting in the 1910s, they toured the United States, appearing in circuses and sideshows.
Earles made a number of films, most memorably a starring role in Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932). His sister Daisy was also in Freaks, and they both appeared as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
Earles had earlier made a brief appearance in Good News.
Vera Merle Marsh (1905-84) was a vaudeville performer who hit the big time in 1932 when understudying Adele Astaire in The Band Wagon (1931). Adele Astaire left the show when she got married, leaving Vera Marsh (as she was then known) to dance with brother Fred in the remaining performances. Marshe also performed regularly in a comedy duo with Sterling Holloway.
Marshe’s screen career was lengthy, though not auspicious. One of her few leads was opposite Eddie Foy Jr in Nearly Naked (1933), a comedy set in a nudist camp.
A few years earlier she had made a brief appearance in Good News and was ‘Call of the Wild’ in Madam Satan.
What can be said about Helyn Virgil (19??-??)? She spelled her name funny. She had no known relationship with the Roman poet. And she made a credited appearance in the 1930 Good News as ‘Girl’.
That’s it.
No one would claim that Italian-born Francesco Yaconelli (1898-1965) had a distinguished film career, yet after his death a Senate resolution described him as “devoting a lifetime to unselfish service and entertainment to people all over the world”.
Yaconelli could most often be seen in cheap westerns, frequently as a Mexican, and sometimes playing the accordion, at which he was proficient. In the mid-twenties he and his brother set up their own studio, for which he both produced and directed a handful of pictures before it was wiped out by the Depression.
Yaconelli had served in a US aero squadron during the First World War. In the Second World War, he worked as a USO tour director, also performing his vaudeville act. He did the same during the Korean War. It was these activities that secured the citation from the Senate.
Yaconelli was in four 1930s MGM musicals: Call of the Flesh, A Lady’s Morals, A Night at the Opera and The Firefly.
Fred Hueston (1879-1961) was a British-born actor who appears to have made just sixteen screen appearances in 24 years.
Hueston was an opera spectator in Call of the Flesh, and rounded off his screen career playing a critic in Till the Clouds Roll By.
Julia Griffith (1880-1961) started out in the theatre, but became a perennial bit-part player in Hollywood, from her debut as ‘town gossip’ in 1923 to her last appearance as ‘committee woman’ twenty years later. She was usually uncredited.
Griffith can be spotted in four MGM musicals. She was an audience member at the opera in Call of the Flesh, and then a party guest in Hollywood Party. She was back in the audience for A Night at the Opera and later played a committee woman in Girl Crazy.
Sidney D’Albrook (1886-1948) notched up over 170 film appearances. He started making shorts in 1914, but his first feature was The Gilded Cage (1916). (I draw the last-named film to attention only because it features a character called Lesbia the Goose Girl.) He also appeared as Ambrose, the brother-in-law, in Hal Roach’s series of shorts about the Spat family.
When the silent period came to a close, most of D’Albrook’s appearances were uncredited. These included five Metro musicals: Call of the Flesh, A Night at the Opera, The Great Waltz, I Married an Angel and The Unfinished Dance.
