The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Jane Keckley

    Jennifer L Corrie (1876-1963) gained considerable stage experience in stock companies and vaudeville before starting out in films in 1911. Her earliest appearances were in shorts, including a number of westerns, before her feature debut in The Parson of Panamint (1916).

    Keckley appeared in over 160 feature films and shorts, and was a regular in bit parts for Cecil B DeMille. She played uncredited character parts in The Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Magnificent Obsession (1935), Show Boat (1936), Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). She featured in dozens of ‘B’ westerns, ending her career in a Tim Holt programmer.

    Keckley showed up in just one MGM musical, as a teacher in Going Hollywood.

  • Louise Mackintosh

    Louise Mackintosh (1864-1933) was a British actor who made the first of many appearances on Broadway in 1902.

    Mackintosh started out in films with credited roles in pictures shot in New York city, including Chickie (1925), which starred her compatriot Dorothy Mackaill. She went on to play character parts in over a dozen films, both credited and uncredited.

    Her final role, completed shortly before her death, was as one of the teachers in MGM’s Going Hollywood.

  • The King’s Men

    The King’s Men was a musical quartet formed in 1928 by Kenneth ‘Ken’ Lorin Darby (1909-92) and also comprising Jon Dodson [Blunt] (1907-63), Grafton ‘Bud’ Linn (1909-68) and Radburn ‘Rad’ Brown Robinson. 

    The group sang on radio in the Hollywood area before being invited by Paul Whiteman to appear with his orchestra. They were later the backing singers on Bing Crosby’s recording of ‘White Christmas’.

    The King’s Men appeared on screen in a number of films during the 1930s and 40s, including five MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Honolulu, Cairo and For Me and My Gal. In addition, they provided singing voices for the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They also undertook vocal work for Disney animations.

    Ken Darby had a varied and successful career in Hollywood. In addition to his appearances with the King’s Men, he was a composer and musical arranger, winning three Academy Awards. The films he worked on included The Wizard of Oz and At the Circus for MGM, Disney features such as Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (942),  and The King and I (1956), Porgy and Bess (1957) and Camelot (1962). He was also musical director on non-musicals such as How the West Was Won (1962).

    Darby also worked as a vocal coach, including with Marilyn Monroe in several pictures, and coached the chorus onThe Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

  • Harry Bowen

    Harry Jerome Bowen (1888-1941) appeared in well over 160 films. The majority were shorts and he was generally, though not always, uncredited. His first appearance was probably in the ‘Little Rascals’ short Your Own Back Yard (1925).

    Bowen’s feature films included King Kong (1933), Flying Down to Rio (1933), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) and The Milky Way (1936).

    Harry Bowen was in two MGM musicals, Going Hollywood and The Bohemian Girl. 

  • Charles C Wilson

    Charles Cahill Wilson (1894-1948) was the type of stage actor with Broadway experience who was welcomed by Hollywood in 1929.

    He started out as dialogue director on Lucky Boy (1929), a George Jessel musical in which he also took a small role. He worked in that capacity on one further picture, in 1933, but otherwise restricted himself to acting., appearing in around 250 films in just seventeen years.

    Wilson was usually uncredited, but he did feature prominently in It Happened One Night (1934), playing Clark Gable’s irascible editor. This was one of several times he worked with Frank Capra; he played Charlie Dawson in Meet John Doe (1941).

    Wilson also played the DA in the first version of The Glass Key (1935) and was Jim Green in James Whale’s Show Boat (1936). In 1945 he made an appearance in the Fritz Lang masterpiece Scarlet Street, and the following year was uncredited in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

    Wilson acted without credit in four MGM musicals:  Dancing Lady, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

  • Charles Williams

    Charles Williams (1898-1958) is seen by millions every year in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), working away at the adding machine as the contributions pour in. But Williams appeared in well over 200 films in a career stretching from 1922 until 1956.

    Williams started out in the East Coast film business, working as a writer and actor. He moved to Hollywood with the advent of sound, and worked as a busy character actor. Most of his appearances were uncredited, and notable pictures included The Thin Man (1934), Dames (1934), History is Made at Night (1937), A Star is Born (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), Roxie Hart (1942) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

    Williams was in two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Ice Follies of 1939. 

  • Charles Sullivan

    Charles Sullivan (1899-1972) was a ubiquitous character actor in American films between 1925 and 1966, accumulating around 550 appearances on the big screen.

    Notable appearances include King Kong (1933, where he was also Robert Armstrong’s stunt double), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Glass Key (1942), State of the Union (1948) and The Last Hurrah (1958).

    Sullivan can be seen, uncredited, in fourteen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Student Tour, San Francisco, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Music for Millions, Easy to Wed, Living in a Big Way, Big City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Rose Marie and It’s Always Fair Weather. 

  • Pat Somerset

    Patrick Holme-Sumner (1897-1974) was a stage actor who starred in British films during the late 1910s, including a series about the adventures of a couple called Adam and Eve.

    After travelling to the USA to work on Broadway, Somerset ended up in Hollywood, where he was generally restricted to uncredited roles. He became a member of John Ford’s stock company, appearing in nine of the director’s films, including The Informer (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1936).

    Somerset also worked with Rouben Mamoulian (Becky Sharp [1935]), Clarence Brown (Anna Karenina [1935]), George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett [1935]) and Frank Capra (Mr Deeds Goes to Town [1936]).

    Pat Somerset appeared in three Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Maytime and The Firefly.

  • C Montague Shaw

    Charles Montague Discombe Sparrow (1882-1968) was an Australian actor who acted in the UK and elsewhere before arriving in America. In 1919 he starred, as Charles Sparrow, in With Edged Tools, a rarity in being a film made in South Africa.

    Shaw’s first American feature was The Set-Up (1926), a western. He went on to make over 140 appearances as a character actor, sometimes uncredited but often not. If he had an area of specialism, it was serials.

    Shaw can be seen in Blondie of the Follies (1932), The Mummy (1932), Cavalcade (1933), Queen Christina (1933, as King Gustavus Adolphus), Becky Sharp (1935), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1936, as the Clay King), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Unconquered (1947). 

    The only MGM musical featuring Shaw is Dancing Lady, where he was uncredited.

  • Victor Potel

    Victor Potel (1889-1947) appeared in around 450 films, most of them made in the 1910s, when they were churned out. He was in 19 releases in 1910, and that was by no means his busiest year. 

    Potel made around eighty appearances for Essanay as a character named Slippery Slim (including one with the bizarre title Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage [1915]). In another long-running series, he played Slim Hoover, and was a regular in ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s westerns. He also occasionally turned his hand to writing and directing.

    The pace of work slowed down over the years, but Potel was always a hard-working character actor in silent and sound features, usually in comic roles. During the 1930s, he was credited and uncredited in equal proportions. His films were mostly programmers, though he appeared in Fury (1936) as the customer who listens trepidatiously while his barber talks about the urge to cut someone’s throat.

    In the 1940s, Potel was one of Preston Sturges’s stock company, in nine pictures and credited as the newspaper editor in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943).

    Victor Potel showed up in six MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.

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