Edward Sedan (1896-1982) had a fifty-eight-year career as a Hollywood bit player, notching up over 300 appearances, including many Ernst Lubitsch pictures. He also worked regularly in the theatre and on radio.
Sedan’s MGM musicals were It’s a Great Life, They Learned About Women, Call of the Flesh, The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, A Night at the Opera, Rose Marie, The Firefly, The Wizard of Oz and Silk Stockings.
Aileen Ranson (1911-1956) appeared briefly in a number of films during the 1930s, including two Metro musicals, It’s a Great Life and Madam Satan (in which she portrayed Victory).
George Davis (1889-1965) was a prolific small-part actor for almost forty years. He appeared without credit in It’s a Great Life, played a groom in Devil-May-Care, was uncredited again in They Learned About Women, The Cuban Love Song and The Cat and the Fiddle. He appeared in The Merry Widow and played the same part, without credit, in the French version.
David showed up uncredited in Maytime, I Married an Angel, For Me and My Gal, Two Sisters from Boston, Words and Music, The Toast of New Orleans, Rich, Young and Pretty, An American in Paris, Lovely To Look At, the second version of The Merry Widow, Lili, Easy to Love, Interrupted Melody and Les Girls.
That’s twenty Metro musicals plus a French copy, with a single credited appearance.
Oscar C Apfel (1878-1938) was a successful Broadway director before moving into film direction. He made well over 100 films, and supervised Cecil B DeMille during his early days in Hollywood. He also pursued a secondary career as an actor, and that was what he continued after the introduction of sound.
He became a busy supporting player, and his MGM musical parts included Major Russart in Marianne and Mr Mandelbaum in It’s a Great Life. Both were uncredited.
Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb (1886-1934) was a Danish-born comedian who found fame supporting John Gilbert in Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925). Under contract to MGM, he formed a successful comedy partnership with George K Arthur, but things became difficult with the introduction of sound, as Dane had a strong accent. His contract was terminated and he took his own life a few years later. At the urging of Jean Hersholt, MGM paid for his burial.
Dane made an appearance with Arthur in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and had small parts in Montana Moon, Free and Easy and New Moon.
Charles William Haines (1900-73) was a popular actor of the 1920s and one of MGM’s biggest stars. His career was cut short by his refusal to hide the fact that he was in a gay relationship by entering into a lavender marriage. This led Louis B Mayer to tear up his contract. Haines went on to become one of Hollywood’s top interior designers, aided in no small part by the willingness of his former colleagues to give him work.
In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 it is Haines who, bizarrely, cuts Jack Benny’s tuxedo to shreds. And in Free and Easy he is glimpsed as a guest at the premiere.
Joel Albert McCrea (1905-90) worked with many of Hollywood’s greatest directors during his career, including Hitchcock, Hawks, Vidor, Wyler, George Steven and Preston Sturges.
Before all that, he was the guy who got the girl in Sam Wood’s So This Is College.
Few actors appeared in more of Hollywood’s greatest films than Wardell Edwin Bond (1903-60), outstanding supporting player and notorious conservative antisemite. This was, in great part, owing to his membership of the John Ford Stock Company.
Ford met Bond when he was still a member of the University of Southern California football team, casting him in Salute (1929). In the same year, Bond featured in So This Is College as…a USC footballer. It was his only Metro musical appearance.
Nellie Crawford (1873-1959) was enrolled into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame under the much more exotic stage name she began using at some point in the late 20s or early 30s. Donald Bogle has suggested that she chose the unusual name because it enabled her to seek work as Asian as well as Black characters. Sul-Te-Wan was the first Black actor to secure a Hollywood contract when D W Griffith hired her at $25 a week for The Birth of a Nation (1916).
Like Clarence Muse and others, Sul-Te-Wan was a talented actor restricted by Hollywood racism, but she had a featured role in Erich Von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1920), and recieved praise for her appearance as Tituba in Maid of Salem (1937), Paramount’s story of the Salem witch trials.
Sul-Te-Wan’s MGM musicals were Hallelujah, San Francisco and Broadway Rhythm, all in uncredited parts.
Samuel Rufus McDaniel (1886-1962) started his show business career singing with his three sisters, including the subsequently renowned Hattie. Like most Black actors, his Hollywood career was largely limited to servants and railway porters, though he was notable as Doc (a cook) in Captains Courageous (1937), even if his name was misspelt in the credits.
McDaniel’s MGM musical appearances were Hallelujah, Going Hollywood, Music for Millions and Living in a Big Way.
