Aileen Ranson (1911-1956) appeared briefly in a number of films during the 1930s, including two Metro musicals, It’s a Great Life and Madam Satan (in which she portrayed Victory).
Category: Performers
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Aileen Ransom
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George Davis
George Davis (1889-1965) was a prolific small-part actor for almost forty years. He appeared without credit in It’s a Great Life, played a groom in Devil-May-Care, was uncredited again in They Learned About Women, The Cuban Love Song and The Cat and the Fiddle. He appeared in The Merry Widow and played the same part, without credit, in the French version.
David showed up uncredited in Maytime, I Married an Angel, For Me and My Gal, Two Sisters from Boston, Words and Music, The Toast of New Orleans, Rich, Young and Pretty, An American in Paris, Lovely To Look At, the second version of The Merry Widow, Lili, Easy to Love, Interrupted Melody and Les Girls.
That’s twenty Metro musicals plus a French copy, with a single credited appearance.
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Oscar Apfel
Oscar C Apfel (1878-1938) was a successful Broadway director before moving into film direction. He made well over 100 films, and supervised Cecil B DeMille during his early days in Hollywood. He also pursued a secondary career as an actor, and that was what he continued after the introduction of sound.
He became a busy supporting player, and his MGM musical parts included Major Russart in Marianne and Mr Mandelbaum in It’s a Great Life. Both were uncredited.
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The Duncan Sisters
Rosetta Duncan (1894-1959) and Vivian Duncan (1897-1986) did not come from a show business background, but became one of America’s top vaudeville acts. They got their start in 1911 as part of Gus Edwards’s Kiddies’ Revue and matured into a music-with-comedy act, writing much of their own material.
The sisters’ most popular routine was the unashamedly racist ‘Eva and Topsy,’ in which they transformed Harriet Beechers Stowe’s tragic characters into blackface comedy. Rosetta was always the comedian, while Vivian’s persona was the naive innocent.
It is said that the Mahoney sisters in The Broadway Melody were based on the Duncans, and the ebullient Hank and demure Queenie have both physical and temperamental similarities with Rosetta and Vivian. But the Mahoneys are self-evidently a second-rate act that belongs in the boondocks, while the Duncans were at the top of their profession, headlining on Broadway and in the West End.
Following the triumph of The Broadway Melody, Irving Thalberg decided to attempt to repeat the success by hiring the Duncans themselves, starring them in It’s a Great Life. Where Hank had lost Eddie to her sister, in the new version it is Casey who competes with Jimmy for the love of her sister, in a manner that is not entirely non-creepy.
The film succeeded with Duncan fans, but was no great money earner. After working on the abandoned The March of Time, the Duncan Sisters’ film career was over.
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Gus Edwards
Gustave Schmelowsky (1878-1945) grew up in Poland, was a song plugger in New York, performed in vaudeville and eventually became a songwriter, despite the fact that he could not read music. He was also known as the Star Maker, because he launched Sally Rand, Ray Bolger, George Jessel, the Duncan Sisters and may others on successful careers via his revues. He even gave Groucho Marx an early job as one of Gus Edwards’s Postal Telegraph Boys.
Edwards composed the majority of the songs used in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and also performed a novelty item alongside Cliff Edwards and Charles King, and appeared solo singing ‘Lon Chaney’s Gonna Get You If You Don’t Watch Out’. Edwards also participated in The March of Time.
Edwards’s most famous number was ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon,’ with lyrics by Edward Madden.
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Lionel Barrymore
Although Lionel Herbert Blyth (1878-1954) apparently had no ambition to join the family business (the show business), by the time sound films were introduced he had been an actor for 36 years, with extensive stage and screen experience. Early on he had worked under D W Griffith at the Biograph Company and he was a contract player for MGM since its inception, having been signed by Louis B Mayer to work for Metro Pictures.
Barrymore also directed pictures, though far less skillfully than he acted in them. It is ironic, therefore, that his first two appearances in MGM musicals both cast him in the role of a director. In The Hollywood Revue of 1929 he is directing Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. And in Free and Easy he is directing the bedroom scene that is disrupted by Elmer.
Barrymore went from there to the director’s seat for real, taking charge of Metro’s new signing, Lawrence Tibbett, in The Rogue Song.
In 1939 Barrymore had a supporting role in Let Freedom Ring and two years later was the judge in Lady Be Good.
That was the end of Barrymore’s career in MGM musicals, though his most famous role, as Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) still lay in the future.
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Gwen Lee
Gwendolyn Lepinski (1904-61) was a department store model doing occasional stage work when she was discovered by producer-director Monta Bell and offered a contract with Metro in 1925. She mostly played supporting roles and made a successful transition to sound.
Lee appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and then secured a lead role as Peggy in Chasing Rainbows. She made a cameo as herself in Free and Easy, and was then let go by the studio. After a few years working on Poverty Row, Lee returned to MGM in 1935 as a stock player in minor roles. In that capacity, she turned up alongside Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera and was an audience member in The Great Ziegfeld.
Lee retired from screen acting in 1938.
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George K Arthur
Scottish-born Arthur George Brest (1899-1985) was under contract to MGM when producer Harry Rapf teamed him with Karl Dane for a series of silent comedy features.
Dane’s strong Danish accent posed problems when sound came along and their MGM career came to an end shortly after a short appearance in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Arthur also appeared in Chasing Rainbows. After making a few shorts for Paramount, he and Dane split up.
In 1957 Arthur won an Oscar for producing a short film, The Bespoke Overcoat (1956), an early film by director Jack Clayton.
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Karl Dane
Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb (1886-1934) was a Danish-born comedian who found fame supporting John Gilbert in Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925). Under contract to MGM, he formed a successful comedy partnership with George K Arthur, but things became difficult with the introduction of sound, as Dane had a strong accent. His contract was terminated and he took his own life a few years later. At the urging of Jean Hersholt, MGM paid for his burial.
Dane made an appearance with Arthur in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and had small parts in Montana Moon, Free and Easy and New Moon.
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Marie Dressler
Leila Marie Koerber (1868-1934) began her stage career in the 1880s and was a star on Broadway by the time she was 24. In 1914 she appeared with Chaplin and Mabel Normand in Hollywood’s first feature-length comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance.
By the early 1920s Dressler’s career was in decline, only to revive in 1927 when she was teamed with Polly Moran in The Callahans and the Murphys. Her stage experience meant that sound presented no problems, and by 1931 she was one of MGM’s top stars, winning an Academy Award for Min and Bill (1930). By 1934 she was dead from cancer.
Dressler was a natural comedian and makes on the the few genuinely funny contributions to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 ‘singing’ ‘For I’m the Queen’. She went to feature in a supporting role in Chasing Rainbows, in which she and Moran combine to steal the picture.
