The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Harry Burns

    Some confusion surrounds Harry Burns, who played the gardener in Love in the Rough.

    IMDb asserts confidently that he was born in 1887, died in 1948, and in between was married to actor Dorothy Vernon. It says he was an actor who made 15 films between 1915 and 1920, took a ten-year break, then made another 39 appearances between Love in the Rough and 1948, two of which were in Music for Millions and It Happened in Brooklyn. IMDb also claims Burns was the father of Bobby Vernon, even though Bobby was only ten years younger, but we will not go there.

    According to the AFI Catalog, Harry Burns acted in a couple of pictures in 1923-24, but was mainly a director at that time, notably of a series of films starring Joe Martin the Chimp (no space here, but Joe is worth looking up).

    As a further complication, the New York Times reported, in 1939 (not 1948), the death of “Harry Burns, former film director for William Fox and other early film producers and one-time publisher of Filmograph”. It notes that, at the time of his death, he had been working as an extra and was a champion for better treatment for extra players, and that his widow was Dorothy Vernon.

    Which leads to a second IMDb entry, for director Harry Burns (1882-1939), also married to Dorothy Vernon.

    It seems pretty clear that there were two men called Harry Burns making films in the same period and, probably the 1887-1948 version who made appearances in two MGM musicals. The silent pictures attributed to him by IMDb must belong to the 1882-1939 Harry Burns (especially given that one of them starred the aforesaid Joe Martin the Chimp.

    He was also the one married to Dorothy Vernon. He may well have been the father of Bobby Vernon, but, if so, was a father at the age of 15.

    Harry Burns, Director

  • Tyrell Davis

    British actor Harry Davis (1902-70) performed in the West End and on Broadway before making his first film for Pathe Exchange, shortly after the company’s restructuring by Joseph Kennedy.

    Davis’s screen career only lasted ten years, but he squeezed in 38 films, one of which was Love in the Rough.

    It has been suggested that Davis’s portrayal of a dance instructor in George Cukor’s Our Betters (1933) established the Hollywood template for the flamboyant gay man. 

  • Love in the Rough

    The Cast

    Robert MontgomeryJack Kelly
    Dorothy JordanMarilyn Crawford
    Benny RubinBenny Leibowitz
    J C NugentWaters
    Penny SingletonVirgie Wilson (as Dorothy McNulty)
    Tyrell DavisTewksbury (as Tyrrell Davis)
    Harry BurnsGardener
    Allan LaneHarry Johnson
    Catherine MoylanMartha
    Edwards DavisJoseph P. Crawford
    Roscoe AtesProprietor (as Rosco Ates)
    Clarence WilsonBrown (as Clarence H. Wilson)
    Eddie BushGuitarist of the Biltmore Trio (uncredited)
    George ChandlerTaxi Driver (uncredited)
    Ray CookeBellhop (uncredited)
    Ann DvorakChorus Girl (uncredited)
    Paul GibbonsSteel Guitarist of the Biltmore Trio (uncredited)
    Wilbur MackGolf Umpire (uncredited)
    Donald NovisSinger with Orchestra (uncredited)
    Broderick O’FarrellDoctor O’Farrell (uncredited)
    Jack RaymondC. Wesley Rappaport (uncredited)
    George ReedTrain Porter (uncredited)
    Bill SecklerUkelele Player of the Biltmore Trio (uncredited)
    Earl ‘Snakehips’ TuckerDancing bellhop (uncredited)
    Polly Ann YoungOffice Worker (uncredited)

  • Adolph Milar

    Adolph Milar (1895-1950) was born in Switzerland, but had a career in American films that lasted over 25 years.

    From 1919, Milar played featured supporting roles in many silent films, but tended to be restricted to ethnic roles with the coming of sound, owing to his accent. He made an auspicious start with his first talking picture, Bulldog Drummond (1929). Later, he came to specialize in nazis, notably in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and in The Hitler Gang (1944), by which time he was usually uncredited.

    Milar appeared as a police officer in Call of the Flesh.

  • Lillian Leighton

    Lillian Brown (1874-1956) appeared in more than 250 films in a career that began in 1910 in Chicago, working with the Selig Polyscope Company. She made her final film in 1937.

    Most of Leighton’s pictures were silent (she even provided the stories for some of them in the early years). In the sound era, she tended to be credited in low-budget films, but uncredited in those with bigger budgets.

    One such was Call of the Flesh, in which she played the shawl seller.

  • Lillian Lawrence

    Lillian Lawrence (dates unknown) is frequently mistaken for Lillian Lawrence (1882-1926), who was a well-known stage actor.

    The screen Lawrence was a bit-part character actor between 1924 and 1953, rarely credited in over fifty appearances. The stage Lawrence made occasional screen appearances, with credit, and mostly in the last two years of her life: she played the Mother in Buster Keaton’s Three Ages (1923). 

    It was the little-known screen Lawrence, of course, who played a nun in Call of the Flesh, her namesake having died four years earlier. 

    She was in some very good pictures–Footlight Parade (1933), Judge Priest (1934), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Easy Living (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1940)–but always in a very minor role.

  • 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.

  • Anita Louise

    Anita Louise Fremault (1915-70) was one of those rare child performers who went on to an adult career in acting and exhibited no major trauma.

    Louise made her debut on Broadway aged seven, making her first film appearance in the same year for an east coast company.

    By the mid-thirties, Anita Louise was playing leading roles, perhaps most notably as Titania in Max Reinhardt’s star-studded version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). She was generally the second female lead in the bigger pictures, supporting stars like Olivia de Havilland and Norma Shearer. Her final big screen role was in Joseph H Lewis’s evocatively-titled Retreat, Hell! (1952), but she continued working one-and-off on television until 1970.

    In The Florodora Girl, Anita Louise, aged 15, played the hero’s younger sister.

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