The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Ethel Sykes

    IMDb wrongly claims that Ethel Sykes (1906-61) made her screen debut in Into Society and Out (1914). She would have been eight years old at the time, making this unlikely.

    Sykes’s actual first film was The Complete Life (1926), a Fox short based on an O Henry story. The busiest period in her career was 1934-35, when she was in seventeen pictures, including the two John M Stahl classics Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935). Most of her appearances were without credit.

    Sykes played a chorus girl alongside Marion Davies in The Florodora Girl.

  • Patricia Caron

    Mary Marie Sittlow (1904-88) appeared in a couple of dozen pictures between 1927 and 1936. She played a couple of leads for minor studios in 1929, but was generally uncredited.

    In 1930, Caron played one of the Florodora Girls in The Florodora Girl.

  • Lenore Bushman

    Lenore Konti Teresa Bushman (1913-88) was the daughter of silent star Francis X Bushman, and made her first screen appearance aged 12 in one of her father’s pictures, The Masked Bride (1925).

    Aged 17, Bushman played one of Marion Davies’s fellow chorines inThe Florodora Girl. 

    Her screen career was short and sporadic, and Lenore Bushman made her final film in 1938.

  • Tom Costello

    It was in the nature of classical Hollywood that an actor  could appear in 25 feature films, work with actors like James Cagney, Fred Astaire and Barbara Stanwyck, and under directors including Michael Curtiz, Frank Capra, Jacques Tourneur, Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk, yet almost never play a character with a name, let alone a credit.

    Such was the career of Tom Costello (1892-1954), who appeared briefly in In Gay Madrid.

  • Jack Dart

    Jack Dart Richards (1916-76) was a child actor who made a handful of appearances in Hollywood pictures in 1929-30.

    One of these, now lost, was in The Rogue Song.

  • Ruth Metzger

    In old Hollywood, actors would sometimes show up in one or two pictures, then disappear, leaving behind no clue as to how they came to stand briefly in the spotlight. One such was Ruth Metzger (dates unknown).

    IMDb states that she appeared in Honky Tonk (1929), a Sophie Tucker musical, and in The Rogue Song. No specific character is named in either case.

    Presumably someone had a basis for inputting this information, but it is difficult to be certain that Ruth Metzger actually existed.

  • Edward Martindel

    Edward Martindel (1876-1955) was a Broadway actor and singer who started making films in 1915. His early pictures were made in New York, but he seems to have relocated to Hollywood in around 1920.

    Martindel was always a supporting player, though generally in credited roles. One of the exceptions was his appearance as Mr Thayer in Children of Pleasure.

  • Billy May

    IMDb states that an actor named Billy May appeared uncredited in Free and Easy, and suggests that the Billy May in question is Edward William May Jr (1916-2004), a jazz trumpeter who found his greatest success as a composer and orchestrator. Billy May worked with some of the top orchestras of the Big Band era, including Glenn Miller’s. He also arranged songs for, amongst others, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Bobby Darin. In addition, May worked with humourist Stan Freberg on many of his comedy records.

    However, this particular Billy May would only have been aged 14 at the time, and unlikely to be the performer in the MGM picture, whose identify remains a mystery.

  • Theodore Lorch

    Theodore Lorch (1873-1947) translated stage experience into a 170-film career as a character. His appearance as Chingachgook in an early version of The Last of the Mohicans (1920) did not foreshadow his many later appearances in shorts starring the Three Stooges.

    Lorch made appearances uncredited in Free and Easy and Reckless. 

  • Pat Harmon

    Plummer Hull Harmon (1886-1958) appeared in about 170 films, many of them comedies starring Hollywood’s greatest comedians: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Harry Langdon.

    Harmon was in three of Buster Keaton’s early films under his MGM contract, including the musical Free and Easy.

    Harmon’s film career came to an abrupt halt in 1935 when he was sentenced to a term in Folsom Prison for stealing a horse. His final appearance was as a police officer in Modern Times (1936).

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