In a varied career, Ilka Chase (1905-72) acted on stage and screen, presented radio and television shows, and found time to write a novel, two volumes of autobiography and several travel books.
Chase’s film career was not prestigious in itself, but involved some high-quality films. For example, she played Bette Davis’s sister-in-law in Now Voyager (1942), the catalyst for the Davis character’s transformation.
Ilka Chase’s only Metro musical was The Florodora Girl, playing Fanny, one of the central character’s cynical but loyal friends.
For lovers of screwball comedy, Walter Leland Catlett (1889-1960) will always be the befuddled Constable Slocum who throws almost the entire cast of Bringing Up Baby (1937) into his jail. He also has immortality as the voice of J Worthington Foulfellow, the villainous fox, in Pinocchio (1940).
But Catlett had a successful career on the stage in musical comedies before making Second Youth in 1924, the first of over 160 screen credits. He was a comic performer of exceptional ability. Howard Hawks asked him to coach Katharine Hepburn in playing comedy, contributing in no small part to her outstanding performance in Bringing Up Baby. But Catlett’s brief appearance in the closing minutes of A Tale of Two Cities (1935) shows that, like all great comic actors, he could play straight when he needed to.
Catlett only appeared in one MGM musical, when he played the hero’s friend De Boer in The Florodora Girl.
Francesc d’Assís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu (or Xavier Cugat i Mingall for short, 1900-1990), was one of the more idiosyncratic performers to work on musicals at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, reliably introducing an element of camp to every film he appeared in.
Born in Catalonia, Cugat and his family emigrated first to Cuba, and then to the United States in 1915. His beginnings in show business were as a classical violinist. He took time out to work as a cartoonist, and then formed his own band, which ended up performing at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Specializing in Latin music, Cugat, clutching his signature chihuahua while conducting or performing, became known as the ‘King of Rumba’.
Cugat’s first involvement in a Metro musical was behind the scenes, working with Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey on a couple of numbers for In Gay Madrid. Fourteen years later he made his debut on screen for Metro (having made a few musicals at Paramount), in Two Girls and a Sailor. Here, as on every other occasion, he played a fictionalized version of the band leader Xavier Cugat.
Cugat appeared in four Esther Williams vehicles: Bathing Beauty, On an Island with You, This Time for Keeps and Neptune’s Daughter. He also supported Jane Powell in Holiday in Mexico, A Date with Judy and Luxury Liner, and showed up in No Leave, No Love.
British-born Beryl Mercer (1882-1939) was a successful stage actor who had small roles in more than fifty pictures. Her place in film history depends on two maternal roles: as the mother of Lew Ayres’s character in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and as the mother of James Cagnet in Public Enemy (1931).
In Gay Madrid was Mercer’s only appearance in an MGM musical.
British actor Claude Ewart King appeared on stage and in silent films in the UK, making his screen debut in 1912. After serving in the First World War, he emigrated to America, successfully continuing to work in both fields.
King’s most significant American credit was probably as Roger Balfour, whose murder and resurrection were the focus of Tod Browning’s lost film London After Midnight (1927).
King played Ramon Novarro’s disapproving father in In Gay Madrid, and followed this with uncredited appearances in Maytime and Broadway Serenade. His final MGM musical was the 1940 version of New Moon, where he played Monsieur Dubois.
Florence Silverlake (1904-80) had a long career that took her from playing Edgar Kennedy’s long-suffering wife in a series of comedy shorts in the early thirties to a part in The Day of the Locust (1975), which was set in the early thirties.
One of Lake’s earliest roles was as the tragic Nadja in The Rogue Song.
Florence Lake was the older sister of Arthur Lake, Blondie’s very own Dagwood.
Elsa Alsen (1880-1975) was a German opera star who relocated permanently to the United States in 1928. She was a soprano, and best-known for her performances in Wagner.
During a trip to Hollywood, where she sang at the Hollywood Bowl, Alsen played Lawrence Tibbett’s mother in The Rogue Song. Ironically, she does not appear to have sung a note in the film.
Ullrich Haupt (1887-1931) was a German actor who relocated to America and made his fil debut in 1916. He worked steadily in supporting roles, and made a successful transition to sound. Haupt was fourth-billed in Josef Von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930), but his career was cut tragically short when he was killed in an accidental shooting on a hunting trip.
Haupt appeared in one MGM musical, as the wicked Prince Serge in The Rogue Song.
Judith Voselli (1895-1966) was born in Barcelona, but was playing supporting roles on Broadway throughout the early 1920s, including several musical comedies.
Vosselli made her first film in 1926, and worked regularly until 1935. Three of her films were MGM musicals. One of these, The Rogue Song, gave her one of her best roles, as the scene-stealing Tatiana. She also made appearances in A Lady’s Morals and Naughty Marietta.
