Edward T Gribbon (1890-1965) started making comedy shorts in around 1917, doing a lot of work for Mack Sennett. He progressed to supporting roles in many features. Later in his career he did a lot of uncredited work, but was a regular in the Joe Palooka series, and showed up as a storm trooper in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940).
Gribbon played Coach Brennan in They Learned About Women.
The AFI Catalog lists Devil-May-Care, made in 1929, as the final credit of the Canadian stage and film actor Clifford Bruce, who died in 1919. On balance, it seems unlikely that it is the same man.
The Clifford Bruce who played Gaston the butler in the MGM film seems to have no other credited or uncredited roles, at least under that name. So far, he remains a mystery.
William Jonathan Humphrey (1863-1942) was an actor and director, from 1908 and 1910 respectively. He made around 140 appearances and directed about 80 pictures, with much of his early work being for the Vitagraph Company. He had a lengthy contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the mid-twenties.
Humphrey made his screen debut playing Napoleon Bonaparte, a role he returned to at least eight times, including in MGM’s Devil-May-Care.
Leonard Charles Shumway (1884-1954) appeared in over 450 films in his forty-year career, with the earliest-known title being 1913’s The Snake, where he was Leon C Shumway. In his final film he played a bartender in Calamity Jane (1953). He had previous stage experience.
Shumway’s roles fluctuated between credited and uncredited, with one of the former being as the Coach in So This Is College.
Eugene Meszaros (1892-1947) was a Hungarian actor who, it may be assumed, moved to the United States at a young age, since he acted with an American accent.
Stone made his first film in 1927, at a relatively advanced age (around 35), suggesting he may have come from the stage. He started out with featured roles, but his role in So This Is College seems to have done little for his career, as he was uncredited thereafter.
Émile Chautard (1864-1934) was forty-four when he made his first screen appearance in 1910, following a successful stage career. He directed his first film in the same year, and was appointed head of production at Paris’s Éclair Films in 1913. Between 1910 and 1924, Chautard directed over 100 films, but stopped acting in 1917. During a period at the World Film Company in 1915, he trained an apprentice cutter named Josef Von Sternberg.
Chautard took a job with Famous Player-Lasky in around 1922, but only directed a handful of films in America. He returned to acting, making around over sixty appearances. Notable films included 7th Heaven (1927) and three by his former protegé, Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus (both 1932). In the last of these, Von Sternberg cast him as a nightclub manager named Chautard. He was also in the French-language versions of several pictures.
Chautard was in Marianne and Free and Easy. He was uncredited in the latter, which was increasingly the case during the final years of his career.
Robert Edeson (1868-1931) was an actor on Broadway and a vaudeville performer before making his film debut in 1914, starring in Cecil B DeMille’s The Call of the North. He had played his role in the original stage production.
Edeson continued to play leading roles throughout the silent era, including as Colonel Zapt in Rex Ingram’s 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. He also created the first screen version of lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1927).
Edeson acquired his most unusual assignment when actor Rudolph Christians died before Erich Von Stroheim had completed Foolish Wives (1922). Edeson took over as the character, but always acting with his back to the camera.
Robert Edeson’s only involvement in MGM musicals was as the General in Marianne.
Walter Scott Kolk (1905-93) was a professional drummer before becoming an actor, and also sang in revues.
Kolk made his film debut in Marianne, and the following year experienced the harsher side of the First World War when he played one of the volunteers in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Shortly before finally retiring from acting (he had taken several years out in the early thirties), Kolk portrayed the eponymous hero on the 12-part serial Secret Agent X-9 (1937), based on a comic strip co-written by Dashiell Hammett.
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’.
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.
