The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Pete Morrison

    George D Morrison (1890-1973) was a star of silent westerns who had actually worked as a cowboy in his youth. He was working as an engine fireman when he started undertaking stunt work for the Essanay Studio in around 1910. 

    Morrison moved to Hollywood and became an early western star, now almost forgotten. With the introduction of sound, his parts became mostly uncredited, and he also returned to stunt work. He appeared as a cowboy in Montana Moon.

    After retiring in 1935, Morrison maintained the western theme by becoming a rancher and sometime deputy sheriff in Colorado.

  • Bud McClure

    Ervin Thomas McClure (1883-1942) acted in over 100 films, virtually all of which were westerns, and in most of which he was uncredited. He rarely had dialogue.

    In 1930, McClure played a cowboy at the party in Montana Moon.

  • Claudia Dell

    Claudia Dell Smith (1909-77) became a chorus girl aged 16, and was soon appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies. 

    Dell was signed by Warner Bros to play opposite Al Jolson in Big Boy and the title character in Sweet Kitty Bellairs (both 1930). Shortly before, she had made an uncredited appearance as Cliff Edwards’s girlfriend in Montana Moon.

    Dell later signed with RKO, and turned to radio when the film roles started to dry up, frequently working on Lux Radio Theatre productions. She was also a newspaper columnist.

  • Carl ‘Major’ Roup

    Carl Roup (1915-2002) had a long career with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, briefly as a child actor, and then in various production capacities.

    Roup was discovered and cast in his first film, The Red Mill (1925), by Marion Davies, who saw him selling newspapers on the studio lot. She paid for his education at a military school, leading Lon Chaney to nickname him ‘Major’. 

    Roup made a number of other appearances in silent pictures, and played a young baseball fan in They Learned About Women. 

    Roupe later became a script clerk, including on A Day at the Races and At the Circus. In 1946, he started working as a second assistant director on Till the Clouds Roll By, and also carried out that role on On an Island With You, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Pagan Love Song, Show Boat, Lili, Dangerous When Wet, Rose Marie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jupiter’s Darling, Silk Stockings and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.

    The Los Angeles Times obituary described Roup as “as much a part of MGM as Leo the Lion”.

  • Mike Donlin

    Michael Joseph Donlin (1878-1933) was a Major League baseball player, nicknamed Turkey Mike, who is generally held to have frittered away his enormous talent. A chaotic lifestyle was exacerbated by an ill-conceived ambition to become an actor. He abandoned baseball in 1906 to perform in a Broadway play with a baseball theme. 

    After an ill-fated attempt to return to the game, Donlin sought a Hollywood career. He made around 70 films, often uncredited and generally without interest, though he did become an early member of John Ford’s stock company, making half a dozen pictures with him.

    Donlin’s bit as a baseball player in They Learned About Women would not have stretched his talents.

  • Bob Kortman

    Robert F Kortman (1887-1967) made around 300 screen appearances in a career lasting the best part of fifty years. The majority of his films were westerns, and was a favoured opponent of William S Hart. 

    The majority of Kortman’s roles were uncredited, but he was in a number of outstanding films, including: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927); The Criminal Code (1931), playing the convict barber who shaves the governor; Beau Geste (1939); The Big Clock (1948); Ace in the Hole (1951); Rancho Notorious (1952); and his last picture, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961).

    Kortman was also the forest ranger pursuing Laurel and Hardy in one of their early appearances together, Duck Soup (1927).

    Along the way, Kortman made an appearance as one of Ramon Novarro’s fellow Bonapartists in Devil-May-Care.

  • Wylie Watson

    Scottish actor John Wylie Robertson (1889-1966) has a secure place in cinema history thanks to his playing of Mr Memory in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), the character who holds the secret to the film’s MacGuffin. 

    Watson’s whole career was in the British stage and film industries. He was in a host of notable pictures, including Jamaica Inn (1939), Tawny Pipit (1944), Waterloo Road (1945), Brighton Rock (1948) and Whisky Galore! (1949). He emigrated to Australia in 1952 and his final role was in The Sundowners (1960). 

    All of which makes it puzzling that online sources cite him as playing an uncredited bit in It’s a Great Life. Wylie Watson is an unusual name, so it is difficult to see him being confused with another actor. But it is even more difficult to understand why he would be in Hollywood in 1929, playing uncredited in a Duncan Sisters’ flop.

  • Clarence Burton

    Clarence Forrest Burton (1882-1933) started working as a child in a family vaudeville act. By his 20s he was acting in plays and musicals, and moved into screen acting in 1912, making regular appearances in Cecil B DeMille pictures. His final role was in DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932). It was noted in the press at the time of his death that he had previously died more than 100 times in films.

    Burton played, uncredited, the cop who chases the Duncan Sisters at the start of MGM’s It’s a Great Life, and was also in They Learned About Women.

  • John J Richardson

    Harold Jack Joseph Richardson (1888-1942) was a British-born actor who appears to have travelled to the United States at the same time as Charles Chaplin and Stan Laurel, as part of the Fred Karno troupe. He made 160+ appearances in Hollywood films, starting with his debut as Goulash the lion tamer in Roaring Lions and Wedding Bells (1917). 

    Most of Richardson’s roles were uncredited, including that in MGM’s It’s a Great Life.

    Richardson’s wife Mabel, who appeared in a couple of pictures before becoming a makeup artist, is reputed to be the longest-living Hollywood performer, having died in 2001 at the age of 110.

  • George Periolat

    George E Periolat (1874-1940) was a Broadway who made his first film in New York in 1909, for the Vitagraph Company, but later moved to Hollywood. He was a busy character actor, playing, amongst other roles, the Governor in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Mark of Zorro and Mary Pickford’s father in the Lubitsch-directed Rosita (1923).

    Most of Periolat’s appearances in sound picture were uncredited, including his Mr Weill in It’s a Good Life. 

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