The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Edith Fellows

    Edith Marilyn Fellows (1923-2011) was five when she made her first film, a Charley Chase comedy short. Over the next 65 years she notched up a modest 80-odd appearances on the big screen and television. She also began working on the stage in the 1940s, appearing a number of times on Broadway.

    Fellows had already made twenty films by the time she was 13, most memorably alongside W C Fields in Mrs Wiggins of the Cabbage Patch (1935). Later, she was Polly Pepper in Columbia’s Five Little Peppers series. She managed to continue working after her years as a child actor were over, but mostly for Poverty Row studios. 

    Financial exploitation by her family, prescription drugs and alcohol all interfered with her career, as did serious stage fright. But she soldiered on, eventually playing herself in Dreams Deferred, a play based on her life and experiences. This led to more television work, including the role of Edith Head in a biopic about Grace Kelly.

    Fellows had made appearances with Hal Roach’s ‘Little Rascals’, and also used her in the musical The Devil’s Brother.

  • Jackie Lynn Taylor

    Jacklyn DeVon (or Devon) Taylor (1926-2015) appeared in five of Hal Roach’s Our Gang pictures, and the producer also used her in Laurel and Hardy’s The Devil’s Brother and Babes in Toyland.

    Taylor later wrote a book about ‘the Little Rascals’ who featured in well over 200 Roach films, and in the 1970s she co-hosted a television revival series called The Little Rascals Family Theatre.

    IMDb states that Taylor’s career as a screen actor more or less ended in 1936 after eleven appearances. But then, it also insists on calling her Jacqueline Taylor. Obituaries published in 2015 suggested that she had been a bit-part player in 75 pictures, as well as doing theatre work.

    She was later a host for KTTV in Los Angeles and worked as a reporter for a range of local TV stations, whilst maintaining a career in the theatre. She also became an ordained minister during the 1970s. 

  • John Collum

    John Keith Collum (1926-62) stumbled into acting by virtue of being the son of a casting director at the Hal Roach studios.

    In 1932, aged six, Collum was given a role in one of the Our Gang pictures, playing a boy whose response to everything was a drawled “Uh-huh”. He was never a full member of the gang, but a recurring character in 22 episodes of the 200-plus series.

    The year after his debut, Roach also used Collum in The Devil’s Brother.

    Collum made a handful of uncredited screen appearances as an adult, but, like many other child actors, had little success and died young. 

  • Tiny Sandford

    Six feet five inch, 300 pound Stanley John Sandford (1894-1961) was fated to be given the nickname ‘Tiny’. With over 150 appearances, Sandford is best known for his work in comedies, usually cast as the heavy.

    Sandford made his screen debut for Metro Pictures in 1919, and in the same year played a bit part in Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands. He later worked regularly for Chaplin, including in The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and, most prominently, as Big Bill in Modern Times (1936).

    Sandford was also a regular collaborator with Laurel and Hardy, including in three of their musical features, The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland and The Bohemian Girl. He was the police officer who attempts to restore peace in the classic Big Business (1929).

    Sandford was also in MGM’s Here Comes the Band..  

  • Carl Harbaugh

    Carl Lee Harbaugh (1886-1960) was an actor, writer and director who, while working on Broadway, appeared in his first film, for a New York company, in 1912. Four years later he was writing and directing pictures for the Fox Film Corporation. In 1917, Harbaugh adapted and directed an early screen version of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).

    Harbaugh never directed anything of great note, and his best-remembered film in that capacity is Elysia (Valley of the Nude) (1933), an early example of one of those earnest, ‘educational’ films that allowed plentiful nudity.

    In 1927, Harbaugh co-wrote the story for Buster Keaton’s College, in collaboration with Brian Foy, who also produced Elysia. Harbaugh also acted in College.

    Harbaugh was a featured player in silent films, but was mostly uncredited in the sound era. But he made appearances in some outstanding pictures, especially for Warner Bros, and including The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), White Heat (1949) and The Far Country (1954).

    Carl Harbaugh was in just one MGM musical, The Devil’s Brother.

  • Grace Woods

    Grace Woods (dates unknown) appeared in a couple of dozen pictures, mostly shorts, during the 20s and 30s.

    Woods did a lot of work for the Mack Sennett and Hal Roach studios, and was in a number of Laurel and Hardy films, including Two Tars (1928), where she got a faceful of oil, and the musical The Devil’s Brother.

  • Walter Shumway

    Walter Shumway (1884-1965) was a character actor from 1918 to 1950. He actually played the lead in his first picture, What Becomes of the Children? (1918), and directed a remake of the same story, sometimes known as Children of Divorce in 1936. This, his sole outing as a director, was made for Puritan Pictures, the forerunner of Monogram.

    Shumway was generally in credited roles throughout the silent period but, by 1933, was taking uncredited bit parts, one of which was in The Devil’s Brother. In 1941, he played the garbageman at the end of Hawks’s Ball of Fire. 

  • Lillian Moore

    Information is scarce on the show business career of Lillian E Moore (1916-2001), and this is not helped by IMDb confusing her with a later actor with the same name.

    She certainly appears to have had small parts in two Laurel and Hardy pictures, The Devil’s Brother and Sons of the Desert (both 1933), and also in the Claudette Colbert vehicle She Married Her Boss (1935). There is also a suggestion that she was in some Our Gang shorts. A Lillian Moore also appeared on Broadway as chorus girls in at around the same time, but is probably not the same person.

    But that’s about it, apart from the fact that she was married to the hugely prolific character actor Roy Roberts and is buried alongside him.And it is her gravestone that reveals Moore’s real claim to fame. It describes her, not as an actress, but as a Women Air Force Service Pilot.

    When America entered the Second World War, Moore secured a pilot’s licence and became one of the first women to fly for the US military in wartime, serving as a ferry pilot. 

  • Scotty Mattraw

    Winfield Scott Mattraw (1880-1946) weighed 362 pounds at his heaviest, and was discussed as a possible new Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. He never achieved that level of success, but did appear in over fifty films in sixteen years.

    And Mattraw didn’t even make his first film until he was 44. Although well-known as an amateur comedian and actor in his home town, his day job was managing a local theatre, which included booking the acts and shows. 

    In 1922, Mattraw made a tentative move towards professionalism by accepting a three-day vaudeville engagement. Then, in 1923, he decided to try his luck in Hollywood. He made a good start, with a two-reel comedy western bringing him to the attention of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. This led to an uncredited comic turn as a eunuch in Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924). 

    Mattraw worked steadily thereafter, including as comic relief in a series of Universal ‘B’ westerns. He was also uncredited but noticeable (Mattraw was always noticeable) in some ‘A’ pictures, including The Invisible Man and Design for Living (both 1933), Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). He lives on (though uncredited) as the voice of Bashful in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

    He was in two MGM/Hal Roach musicals with Laurel and Hardy: The Devil’s Brother and Babes in Toyland (as the town crier).

  • Kay Deslys

    Kathleen Marjorie Herbert (1899-1974) began performing in British music halls before moving to the United States, where she first worked in vaudeville and the legitimate theatre.

    Deslys made her screen debut in Tarnish (1924), and notched up around 75 appearances over the next twenty-eight years. She was in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), establishing her frequent persona as the heroine’s more rotund friend. She later became a regular at the Hal Roach Studios. She played a variety of roles in six Laurel and Hardy pictures, including as Ollie’s wife in Should Married Men Go Home? (1928). She also made regular appearances with Charley Chase.

    Deslys later appeared, uncredited, in You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). playing it straight as a jail matron in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), and Pat and Mike (1952, her last film).

    Kay Deslys acted, without credit, in three MGM musicals: The Devil’s Brother (with Laurel and Hardy), The Big Store and Singin’ in the Rain.

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