George Magrill (1900-52) was a bit-part player and occasional stunt performer whose work spanned cute cartoon animals and a range of henchmen, hooligans and thugs. When you accumulate around 500 films on your cv, it’s inevitable that some of them will be MGM musicals; in Magrill’s case, thirteen of them.
Magrill began with Marianne in 1929 and ended with Three Little Words in 1950. In between came New Moon, The Merry Widow, The Bohemian Girl, San Francisco, Rosalie, The Great Waltz, New Moon (again), Meet the People, Music for Millions, Yolanda and the Thief and Good News.
Sherry Hall (1892-1984) appeared in more than 250 features, almost always without credit.
His Metro musicals were Marianne, Hollywood Party, Student Tour, Here Comes the Band, San Francisco, Born to Dance, Hullabaloo, Words and Music, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Three Little Words and The Strip.
Alice Weaver was a genuine New York show girl who had featured in the Ziegfeld Follies before making brief appearances as chorus girls in The Broadway Melody and Reckless.
Dorothea Christine Arens (1875-1970) was a hard-working small-part actor who made four Metro musical appearances: The Broadway Melody, Madam Satan, Bitter Sweet and Presenting Lily Mars.
Blanche Payson (1881-1964) was a bit-part player who started out in silence in 1916. Her two roles in Metro musicals were satisfyingly distinct: a wardrobe lady in The Broadway Melody and a jail matron in Dancing Lady.
The Mawby Triplets were famous triplets who were not really triplets. Claudette (1922-42) and Claudine (1922-2012) were twins, but their sister Angella (1921-2000) was born a year earlier. They were British child actors who were marketed as triplets by MGM and made brief appearances in The Broadway Melody and The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
Carleton Mortimer LeViness (1884-1964) first appeared as the Tragedian in a silent version of Nicholas Nickleby in 1912 and his last appearance was an uncredited bit as a man in the hallway of a newspaper office in The Great Race in 1963. He was in hundreds of films, mostly uncredited, and even spent the period 1914-16 as a director. It was an unobtrusively spectacular career.
Leviness’s MGM musical appearances were The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, Reckless (in all three he played a guest at a party), Nobody’s Baby (for a change of pace, he played an elevator passenger), A Day at the Races (another party guest), Ship Ahoy (as a passenger), Presenting Lily Mars (as a tired man–must have been all the partying), Two Girls and a Sailor (nightclub patron), Music for Millions (theatregoer), Thrill of a Romance (hotel guest), Yolanda and the Thief (as a man who says tally-ho), On an Island With You (desk clerk), The Barkeleys of Broadway (guest at a country house), In the Good Old Summertime (patronizing a supper club), The Toast of New Orleans (eating in a restaurant this time), The Great Caruso (opera-goer, naturally), Small Town Girl (back to being a party guest), The Band Wagon (an investor), Easy to Love (maiitre d’), The Student Prince (churchgoer), Athena (another party guest) and Ten Thousand Bedrooms (another nightclub patron).
Twenty-two films: Carl M Leviness definitely did his bit for the MGM musical.
Beatrice Hagen (1917-99) claimed a minor place in film history by providing the voice of Snow White in the French version of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As well as being a Disney voice actor (she played Mickey’s nephews), she was a ubiquitous chorus girl in musicals from a number of studios.
For MGM, Hagen made uncredited appearances in The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Maytime, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, Ziegfeld Girl, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, The Harvey Girls and Texas Carnival.
Drew Demorest (1893-1949) was a small-part player who on occasion wore costumes designed by his wife, Henrietta Frazer.
Demorest made appearances in The Broadway Melody (uncredited, but fittingly playing Turpe the costumer), Marianne (as a doughboy), They Learned About Women (with onsceen credit as Edwards), Free and Easy (as Robert Montgomery’s valet), Children of Pleasure (as a songwriter) and as a French officer in The Firefly. All of these were uncredited.
Ray Cooke (1905-63) was a go-to player in the 1930s if you needed a bellhop, or a messenger, or a cabbie. His career peaked when he starred in a series of comedy shorts from Poverty Row as a character named Torchy (not to be confused with the Glenda Farrell character of the same name).
Cooke was a bellhop in The Broadway Melody, a messenger in The Hollywood Revue of 1929,a student (like pretty much everyone else) in So This Is College, another bellhop in Love in the Rough and a cinema-goer in Hollywood Party.
