Sumner Winfield Getchell (1906-90) started out as a child actor in San Francisco before relocating to Hollywood as a young man to work in moving pictures.
Getchell played Fat in Wesley Ruggles’s short The Collegians (1926) and several of its sequels. His first feature was The College Widow (1927) at Warner Bros. He went on to play, usually without a credit, in over forty feature films and as many shorts. These included Magnificent Obsession (1935) and Union Station (1950).
Getchell appeared in two MGM musicals, The Cat and the Fiddle and, as Little Jack Horner, Babes in Toyland.
Edward Alyn Warren (1974-1940) made his first film appearances while in his forties, which suggests some previous stage experience.
Warren was a character actor, never averse to donning a wig and beard. He was frequently cast in ‘ethnic’ roles; he played Wong Li in The Forbidden City (1918), the first of more than a dozen appearances in yellowface, where he was often credited as Fred Warren. He also portrayed Ulysses S Grant three times, starting with D W Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930).
Tod Browning used Warren in four of his pictures, including The Unholy Three (1925) and The Devil Doll (1936). Other pictures included A Free Soul (1931), The Cat’s Paw (1934), Annie Oakley (1935), You Only Live Once (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939).
Warren appeared in five Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, The Girl of the Golden West, Broadway Serenade and, his final film, Broadway Melody of 1940.
Canadian Germaine De Nelin (1904-83) had a brief career in Hollywood, from 1931 to 1935.
As Germaine De Néel, she was fourth-billed as French Sadie in a Poverty Row western, The Sunset Trail (1931), photographed by Archie Stout. She had a few other credits, along with uncredited roles, habitually playing a French character.
One of De Néel’s uncredited appearances was as a maid in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle.
De Néel appears to have returned to Canada at some point, but there is no information about her post-Hollywood life.
American sources claim Yvonne Gabrielle Julienne Vermeiren (1906-84) was born in France, while those in French say it was Belgium. All agree that she and her family relocated to the United States in 1921, where she found work as a dancer.
IMDb claims that D’Avril made screen appearances in 1926/26, including in the feature film The Dressmaker of Paris (1925). According to the AFI, her first feature was Orchids and Ermine (1927), and this was followed by 54 more, a mixture of small supporting roles, both with and without credits.
D’Avril played the first of many maids in Fox Movietone Follies of 1930 (1930), and was one of the French girls Paul meets in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Later appearances included Tarzan and His Mate (1934), Now Voyager (1942) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948, her final maid).
She also played a maid in her one MGM musical, The Cat and the Fiddle.
Charles B Crockett (1870-1934) had a long career as a stage actor before making his first film appearance at the age of 54. He only made about fifteen features and a few shorts, predominantly in credited supporting roles.
Crockett was a well-known raconteur, leading one newspaper to refer to him as “Hollywood’s Will Rogers”, shortly before Rogers himself became Hollywood’s Will Rogers.
Crockett made a single appearance in an MGM musical, playing a secretary in The Cat and the Fiddle.
Alice Carlisle (dates unknown) is a woman of mystery. The AFI seems confident that she appeared as the vegetable seller in Victor’s operetta within The Cat and the Fiddle, but there seems to be no other information about her anywhere.
German Hermann Bing (1889-1947) is a Pagliacci-like figure, literally starting out as a circus clown, adding comic eccentricity to dozens of films, and driven by depression to take his own life.
Bing left home at 16 to join the circus, and later worked as a comedian in varietétheaters. He entered the German film industry in the early 1920s, apparently working on the production side, though he may also have acted. By the late thirties he was working with F W Murnau, and travelled with him to the United States to work as assistant director on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). He can also be seen onscreen in a brief appearance as a tram conductor. He went on to assist on Murnau’s 4 Devils (1928).
Bing stayed on in Hollywood and developed a career as a supporting player, playing German characters with exaggerated accents and a general air of frustrated dignity. In the early 1930s, he also appeared in German-language versions of pictures such as Garbo’s Anna Christie (1930) and Menschen hinter Gittern (1931), a version of The Big House (1930) directed by Paul Fejos.
Herman Bing was often uncredited, but always memorable, and his more than 100 feature films included Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Ford’s Flesh (1932), Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Barbary Coast (1935) and Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). He was also the voice of the Ringmaster in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
His career was hit hard by the war and, by the mid-1940s, Bing was struggling to find work, which contributed to his tragic end.
Herman Bing appeared in eleven MGM musicals, including six with Jeanette MacDonald: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, Maytime, Sweethearts and Bitter Sweet. The others were The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, The Great Waltz and Broadway Melody of 1940.
Reginald Harry Barlow (1866-1943) led a busy life. Stage actor and director, including twenty or so plays on Broadway. Distinguished military service in three different wars. Active in the leadership of the actors’ union Equity. Post Commander in the American Legion. Married six times. And he still found time to appear in over seventy feature films and a a number of shorts, even directing a short himself. Barlow was the son of a minstrel show performer and claimed descent from the Tudor Bishop Barlow.
Reginald Barlow’s early involvement with films was in New York in 1915, and this was where he directed The Toy-Maker of Leyden (1915). His first Hollywood picture was Love’s Flame (1920). His film career only got properly underway in 1932, when he appeared in fourteen releases, including If I Had a Million and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Barlow was a character actor, sometimes in credited roles, more often without credit. He was the College President in the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932) and stood with the eponymous hero in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933). He had a featured role in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and in James Whale’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1939).
Barlow acted, without credit, in two MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle and (almost certainly) Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
Polly Van (1882-1952) started out in local amateur shows until, during a Hollywood studio tour in 1917, she was spotted, reportedly by Oliver Hardy, and offered a role in the appropriately-titled short Back Stage (1917). This was the first of over eighty appearances in character roles in a thirty-four-year career (though she took an extended break in the period 1925-1934). She also made frequent radio appearances.
Specializing in the mother/matron/landlady type, Bailey was usually uncredited. Her pictures included The Thin Man (1934), Kitty Foyle (1940), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), The Locket (1946), The Snake Pit (1948) and Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).
Bailey was in five MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Unfinished Dance, A Date with Judy, Annie Get Your Gun and Excuse My Dust.
Harry William Depp (1883-1957) started out as a comedian in vaudeville and travelling theatre companies. By 1907, he was appearing on Broadway, in the first of many productions.
Depp made his film debut in Between Midnight (1916), a Carter DeHaven short, but then travelled to Hollywood for the first of around 140 feature films. Early on, he worked for a number of small studios, always in comedic roles and with a penchant for cross-dressing. He also made appearances for Mack Sennett.
He had many featured roles in the 1920s, but after 1930 tended to have smaller, uncredited parts. He cropped up in Howard Hawks’s Barbary Coast (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). In 1945, Depp played the pharmacist who supplies Gene Tierney with the arsenic needed for suicide.
Harry Depp made uncredited appearances in six Metro musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, The Big Store, Ship Ahoy!, I Dood It and Girl Crazy.
