The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Stymie Beard

    Matthew Beard Jr (1925-81) began appearing in Hollywood films when he was a baby, and was something of a veteran when he played an unnamed child in Hallelujah. 

    The following year Beard (or more probably his parents) signed a five year contract with Hal Roach to appear in the Our Gang series. Wearing a bowler hat given him by Stan Laurel, Beard played a character called Stymie, which he eventually adopted as his professional name.

    As he got older, Beard appeared in a range of Hollywood and independent ‘race’ films, but eventually the parts started to dry up. He spent many years on his uppers, using drugs and spending time in jail. But he cleaned himself up during the 1960s and developed a second career in television, in series such as Stanford and Son (1972-77) and Maude (1972-78). In 1978 he appeared, with his trademark bowler hat, in The Buddy Holly Story.

  • Milton Dickerson, Robert Couch and Walter Tait

    These three performers appeared as the younger children in the Johnson family of Hallelujah. Their dancing in an early scene is very entertaining, but there seems to be no information about any of them (although IMDb does claim 1920-77 as Robert Couch’s dates).

  • Eddie Nugent

    Edward J Nugent (1904-95) was a boy singer, then vaudeville performer, who went looking for work in Hollywood in the late 1920s. He was fortunate enough to get a credited role in his first film, The Man in Hobbles (1928).

    He had a featured part in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), and a prominent one in the Ramon Novarro vehicle The Flying Fleet (1929).

    Then, strangely, he crops up as an uncredited chorus boy in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. There is at least a possibility that this is misattributed, since Nugent was back to being third-billed in The Girl in the Show (1929).

    In 1939, Nugent went to New York to appear in a play and decided to stay in the East, settling in New England. He concentrated on the stage and radio, and in the 1950s moved into television directing.

  • Myrtle McLaughlin

    Myrtle McLaughlin (c1908-??) made a few appearances in films in the late 1920s. She is usually mentioned in reference to The General (1929), but it should be noted that this was a Benny Rubin short, not the Buster Keaton masterpiece of a few years earlier.

    McLaughlin made an uncredited appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, on the receiving end of Charles King’s rendition of ‘Orange Blossom Time’.

  • The Rounders

    The Rounders was a popular vocal act of the 1920s and 30s which featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. They can be heard performing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ immediately after Cliff Edwards.

    The individual members of the group were Dudley B Chambers, Ben McLaughlin, Myron Niesley, Richard C Hartt and Armand Girard.

    The Rounders made one of the many recordings of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ that appeared after the song’s success in Hollywood Revue.

  • Dorothy Coonan

    Dorothy Rae Coonan (1913-2009) started dancing professionally aged 14, making her first screen appearance in the chorus line of The Broadway Melody. She worked several times on films choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

    In 1933, director William Wellman gave her one of the leads in Wild Boys of the Road. She played Sally, the teenage hobo who disguises herself as a boy to ride the freight trains. 

    She and Wellman married in the following year, and remained together for over four decades, until his death in 1975.

    Dorothy Wellman retired after her marriage, though she did make an uncredited appearance as a nurse in her husband’s The Story of GI Joe (1945). IMDb states she played a chorus girl in Sis Hopkins (1941), a low-budget Judy Canova comedy, but this seems unlikely.

  • Diana Verne

    Like a number of other performers, Diana Verne (19??-??) was a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody and nothing else is known about her.

  • Marshall Ruth

    Marshall Ruth (1898-1953) was an actor who worked steadily in films for twenty years, almost always uncredited. His size and shape made him a natural choice when 20th-Century-Fox were looking for someone to play Roscoe Arbuckle in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939).

    In The Broadway Melody, Ruth played the impresario Zanfield’s assistant.

  • Alice Pitman

    Alice Pitman (19??-??) appeared as a member of the chorus line in The Broadway Melody. Nothing else is known about her.

  • Charlotte Merriam

    Charlotte Merriam (1903-72) started out as a screen actor playing in silent shorts, but graduated to features. Perhaps her most important role was the lead in The Brass Bottle (1923), which was directed by Maurice Tourneur. She also had an important part in the first screen version of Captain Blood (1923).

    Merriam transitioned into sound pictures, where she memorably played the negligent mother in Night Nurse (1931). Less memorably, she made an uncredited appearance in The Broadway Melody, playing a flapper.

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