The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • 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.

  • Dixie Jubilee Singers

    The singing group the Dixie Jubilee Singers appeared in two feature films, both in 1929. One was Universal’s near-silent version of Show Boat, where they sang in an added two-reel sound prologue alongside performers from the original Broadway show. 

    There other film was Hallelujah, in which they joined Daniel Haynes in singing Irving Berlin’s ‘Waiting at the End of the Road’.

  • 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).

  • Everett McGarrity

    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 DeKnight

    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

    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.

  • 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.

  • Natacha Nattova

    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. 

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