The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • C Montague Shaw

    Charles Montague Discombe Sparrow (1882-1968) was an Australian actor who acted in the UK and elsewhere before arriving in America. In 1919 he starred, as Charles Sparrow, in With Edged Tools, a rarity in being a film made in South Africa.

    Shaw’s first American feature was The Set-Up (1926), a western. He went on to make over 140 appearances as a character actor, sometimes uncredited but often not. If he had an area of specialism, it was serials.

    Shaw can be seen in Blondie of the Follies (1932), The Mummy (1932), Cavalcade (1933), Queen Christina (1933, as King Gustavus Adolphus), Becky Sharp (1935), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1936, as the Clay King), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Unconquered (1947). 

    The only MGM musical featuring Shaw is Dancing Lady, where he was uncredited.

  • Victor Potel

    Victor Potel (1889-1947) appeared in around 450 films, most of them made in the 1910s, when they were churned out. He was in 19 releases in 1910, and that was by no means his busiest year. 

    Potel made around eighty appearances for Essanay as a character named Slippery Slim (including one with the bizarre title Snakeville’s Eugenic Marriage [1915]). In another long-running series, he played Slim Hoover, and was a regular in ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s westerns. He also occasionally turned his hand to writing and directing.

    The pace of work slowed down over the years, but Potel was always a hard-working character actor in silent and sound features, usually in comic roles. During the 1930s, he was credited and uncredited in equal proportions. His films were mostly programmers, though he appeared in Fury (1936) as the customer who listens trepidatiously while his barber talks about the urge to cut someone’s throat.

    In the 1940s, Potel was one of Preston Sturges’s stock company, in nine pictures and credited as the newspaper editor in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943).

    Victor Potel showed up in six MGM musicals, starting with Dancing Lady, A Day at the Races, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.

  • Jess Mendelson

    Jess Mendelson (dates unknown, some sources say Mendelsohn) was a dancer who worked throughout the United States during the 1920s and at one point led his own dancing troupe.

    In 1933, MGM cast him as the dance director in Dancing Lady. 

    The AFI Catalogue also suggests that he played a reporter in Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and appeared in Call Me Mister (1951). 

  • Florine McKinney

    Florine McKinney (1909-75) was an actor and singer who worked in Hollywood for about ten years, making around 35 pictures.

    McKinney played with the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers (1932) and was Little Em’ly in David Copperfield (1935). She was uncredited in Waterloo Bridge and The Philadelphia Story (both 1940).

    Four MGM musicals featured uncredited appearances by Florine McKinney: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Student Tour and The Merry Widow.

    McKinney continued to work on the stage after leaving Hollywood.

  • Frank Hagney

    Australian Frank Sidney Hagney (1894-1973) had a long and industrious Hollywood career: 48 years and around 450 films. Out of all that work, it is unlikely he would have predicted that every Christmas millions of people would watch him pushing Mr Potter’s wheelchair in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

    Hagney was a professional cyclist and boxer in Australia before moving to the United States and beginning his film career in 1919. During the 1920s he had many featured roles in low-budget pictures, and appeared uncredited as the army recruiter in Keaton’s The General (1926). The majority of his roles were in westerns.

    By the late 1930s, Hagney was mostly playing uncredited bit parts, in films that included The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Northwest Passage (1940), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), Unconquered (1947), The Big Clock (1948), All the King’s Men (1949), The Wild One (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

    Hagney acted without credit in ten Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Naughty Marietta, Swing Fever, Meet the People, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, Easy to Wed, On the Town, Rose Marie and The Fastest Guitar Alive (his final film).

  • Ferdinand Gottschalk

    Ferdinand Gottschalk (1858-1944) was a British actor who started working in Canada in the late 1880s, supporting music hall star Rosina Vokes. He made his Broadway debut in 1894, and went on to act in and direct many productions, as well as writing for the stage.

    Gottschalk’s first screen appearance was in 1917, when he was 59, in Please Help Emily, recreating one of his stage roles. This, and three other silent films, were shot in New York.

    Moving to Hollywood after the introduction of sound, Gottschalk had a prominent role in the Gloria Swanson comedy Tonight or Never (1931). He only worked in films until 1938, but during that period was a distinguished character actor in over seventy pictures. 

    Gottschalk’s notable appearances included: Grand Hotel (1932), as the ballet master Pimenov; The Sign of the Cross (1932), as the decadent Glabrio, a role he repeated in Cleopatra (1934), but his scenes did not make the final cut; and Thenardier in Les Misérables (1935).

    Gottschalk made many uncredited appearances, and three were in the MGM musicals Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party and Here Comes the Band.

    After retiring, Gottschalk returned to the UK.

  • Stanley Blystone

    William Stanley Blystone (1894-1956) had a proper job in the mining industry as a young man, before he switched to the cinema. During the silent era he started out working behind the camera, including as an assistant director, making his first appearance onscreen in 1924. In thirty-three years, he was in well over 500 pictures.

    Blystone was usually uncredited, though he had a few featured roles, mostly in ‘B’ westerns. He was most prominent in Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), where he played Paulette Goddard’s father, shot and killed during the street protest.

    He was also pitted against the Three Stooges in a number of their short films, and also appeared with Laurel and Hardy. He made a fleeting appearance in John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), but his career was generally very much in the lower half of a double bill.

    Blystone made uncredited contributions to nine MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, A Night at the Opera, Swiss Miss, Born to Sing, Big City, Words and Music, That Midnight Kiss, Rich, Young and Pretty and Jupiter’s Darling.  

  • John Sheehan

    John Sheehan (1885-1952) had a long stage career and two distinct film careers.

    In the period 1914-16, Sheehan appeared in over sixty pictures, mostly shorts, made in both New York and Hollywood. These included thirteen comedy shorts about Billy Van Deusen; Sheehan played a different character in each film.

    From 1917, Sheehan concentrated on stage work until 1930, the period when sound brought many stage actors to Hollywood. During the next twenty years he was in over 180 films, frequently without credit, though occasionally with featured roles. He played Boris Karloff’s cell mate in The Criminal Code (1931) and was in the 1936 version of Three Godfathers, and in Margie (1940). 

    Sheehan was in two MGM musicals, uncredited on both occasions. They were Dancing Lady and Hullabaloo.

  • Harry C Bradley

    Harry Charles Bradley Cockrill (1869-1947) was 60 when he made his first film, but still managed to accumulate well over 200 appearances in the next seventeen years.

    Bradley started out as a legitimate actor on the stage, performing regularly on Broadway from the late 1900s. From 1922 to 1927 he performed more than 2,300 times in the original production of Abie’s Irish Rose. 

    In 1929, Bradley was part of the exodus from New York to Hollywood, making his screen debut in a Paramount short called The Home Edition (1929). Thereafter, he was mostly uncredited, but with the occasional featured role, for example in Warner’s Convention City (1933). He had a prominent role in Heat Lightning (1934) for the same studio. He worked for Capra in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Hawks in His Girl Friday (1940).

    Bradley was uncredited in four MGM musicals:Dancing Lady, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Big Store and Girl Crazy.   

  • Earl Blackwell

    Samuel Earl Blackwell Jr (1909-95) had a short career as an actor, and an even shorter one in Hollywood. He appeared in just two pictures: as a dancer in MGM’s Dancing Lady; and in The Marriage Bargain, a Poverty Row production. He also wrote a musical comedy which was staged, with little success, on Broadway in 1937.

    In 1939, Blackwell co-founded Celebrity Register, subtitled “ an irreverent compendium of American quotable notables”. This was a regularly updated collection of biography and gossip about ‘celebrities’, years before the World Wide Web was even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. This led to a high profile and a successful career in publishing.

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