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).
Everett McGarrity (1908-93) was discovered by King Vidor studying music at a conservatory in Chicago while the director was on a nationwide search for Black actors to appear in Hallelujah.
McGarrity gives a strong performance, but never made another film.
Fanny Belle Johnson(1869-1950) began working with her pianist-husband as a comic reciter, usually in dialect, from the 1890s.
DeKnight did some legitimate theatre work, usually cast in ‘Mammy’ roles, and it was this that led King Vidor to choose her to play the mother in Hallelujah.
She made one further, uncredited, film appearance, then returned with her husband to their previous touring act.
June Pursell (1902-??) was a radio singer and recording artist dubbed “the girl with the ballad voice”.
Pursell (whose name was frequently mispelled) appeared in two feature films, one of which was The Hollywood Revue of 1929. She performed ‘Low Down Rhythm’ and subsequently released the number as a recording.
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 (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 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.
Russian-born Nathalie Schmit (1905-88) trained as a dancer at the Paris Opéra and, from 1924, was in a dancing partnership with Gene Myrio. They worked as headline dancers in London and New York, demonstrating a very acrobatic form of adagio dancing.
After that act broke up, Nattova toured the vaudeville circuit with other male dancers, marrying one of them along the way. One of their routines involved a giant flower pot: “Flying through space, she executed an arabesque on an azalea, a pirouette on a poppy and a toe-hold on a tulip. Nattova showed ‘great grace in movement’”.
It was this iteration (miscredited as Natova and Company) that appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
The Brock sisters–Eunice (1901-93), Josephine (1902-99) and Kathleen (1904-88)–became the singing Brox Sisters as children, and were touring the vaudeville circuit when barely in their teens.
By the early twenties they were singing in Broadway revues, and recorded a number of songs which they debuted for their friend Irving Berlin, notably ‘Everybody Step’. They performed in The Cocoanuts (1925) with the Marx Brothers and were featured performers with Eddie Cantor in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927.
The Brox Sisters’ first screen appearances were in some of the very earliest Vitaphone shorts made by Warner Bros. Photoplay wrote at the time: “Low voices register most successfully on the Vitaphone, so the performance of the Brox sisters, with their mezzo-soprano and contralto, is flawless.”
Later, they sang a couple of numbers, including ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
The Brox Sisters became radio stars, but disbanded after Josephine (known professionally as Bobbe) got married. They reunited once, in 1939, for a radio tribute to Irving Berlin.
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.
