The confusion surrounding the birth year of Armand David Kalisz (1887?-1941)–1882 and 1883 are often cited– was in all likelihood created by Kaliz himself. Press reports of his death stated he was only 49, suggesting he maintained secrecy and subterfuge around his age. The most likely year seems to be 1887, which would have made him 53.
Armand Kaliz was Polish, but emigrated to the United States in 1907. He became a vaudeville performer and, from 1910, worked with his wife, the singer Amelia Stone, in both dramatic and comic sketches. They both also had Broadway experience.
Kaliz appeared in at least eighty feature films from 1918 onwards, generally in credited roles, though this tailed off later in his career. Pictures of note included: The Temptress (1926), Greta Garbo’s second American film; Michael Curtiz’s epic Noah’s Ark (1928); Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929); Little Caesar (1932); Flying Down to Rio (1933); A Star is Born (1937); Ninotchka (1939); and Down Argentine Way (1940).
Kaliz played the King in the show-within-a-show in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle, and followed this with uncredited appearances in Ice Follies of 1939, Bitter Sweet and Ziegfeld Girl.
Otto Hugo Fries (1887-1938) had a background in travelling medicine shows and vaudeville when he started making comedy shorts for Hal Roach in 1916.
His first feature, Free and Easy, came in 1921. This was the first of over seventy appearances in features, though he made more than 100 shorts across his career, including many filmed in German.
Notable pictures featuring Fries include Mauritz Stiller’s Hotel Imperial (1927), John Ford’s Riley the Cop (1928), the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (1932), Anna Karenina (1935), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and The Mad Miss Manton (1938).
Fries appeared uncredited in five MGM musicals, beginning with The Cat and the Fiddle, followed by The Merry Widow, Here Comes the Band, A Night at the Opera and Born to Dance.
Frank Adams (dates unknown) is another of those actors who passed briefly through Hollywood, made a few films on the way, and then disappeared, leaving no trace to follow.
IMDb claims he appeared uncredited in ten features, of which the AFI confirms only three, one of which is MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle. They agree that he plays a musician.
Going Hollywood has the potential to be a good musical, but does not quite get there. It has its moments, but fights a losing battle against the unusually lacklustre direction of Raoul Walsh, whose strengths the musical form does not play to.
Bill Williams (Bing Crosby) is understandbly shocked to find Sterling Holloway in his living room
Star Marion Davies would go on to make half a dozen more pictures, but she was in her mid-thirties by now, and her heart never seems to be in te portraying yet another ingenue. Her appearance in blackface as the world’s most unconvincing ‘mammy’ is a low point. Davies’s singing is kept to an absolute minimum, with all the heavy lifting done by co-star Bing Crosby, on loan from Paramount at Davies’s specific request. Which is a pity, because the film has the best score of any of her musicals, with Freed and Brown in good form.
“Why are we here?” could be the question on the lips of Jill (Patsy Kelly) and Sylvia (Marion Davies)
MGM found itself in September 1933 shooting two pictures set in Hollywood. The other was Bombshell (1933), which has all the verve and insider knowledge that is lacking in Going Hollywood. The dead hand of William Randolph Hearst is probably a factor here: satire was not really his forte. And Marion Davies was no longer able to compete with twenty-two year old Jean Harlow.
The film’s musical highlights are ‘Going Hollywood’ and ‘Temptation’. The former is the big production number set at Grand Central Station, in which dance director Albertina Rasch seems to throw everything apart from the kitchen sink into the mix. Crosby sings ‘Temptation’, one of Freed and Brown’s best songs, into the sultry eyes of Fifi D’Orsay, achieving a depth of emotion that was generally lacking from his easy-listening style of crooning.
The comedy in Going Hollywood is left in the capable hands of Ned Sparks and Patsy Kelly, though both find slim pickings in Donald Ogden Stewart’s sub-par screenplay; it is difficult to believe he would go on to write Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). On the subjects of comedy, Sterling Holloway also provides a few minutes of his always entertaining zaniness.
Conroy (Ned Sparks) doesn’t mind encouraging Sylvia, but there is no way he is returning her smile
Going Hollywood is not exactly a bad film; it is just not a particularly good one.
Leonid Nikolaevich Kinskii (1903-98) started out working as a theatrical mime in Czarist Russia. He left the country in 1921 and acted on stage in various countries until arriving in the United States in 1924.
After further stage work, and working on a film in 1926 where he did not make the final cut, Kinskey finally made it to the screen with an uncredited appearance in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932). He went on to become one of the most instantly-recognizable character actors in Hollywood.
Pictures featuring Kinskey include Duck Soup (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Algiers (1938), The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), Ball of Fire (1942) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1956).
Kinskey is best remembered as Sascha the “crazy Russian” bartender in Casablanca (1942) and was the last-surviving member of its leading cast.
During the Second World War, Kinskey worked with the US government to help select American films to be shown in the Soviet Union. Later in life, he worked extensively on television.
Kinskey acted in eight MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Maytime, The Great Waltz, I Married an Angel, Presenting Lily Mars and Nancy Goes to Rio.
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.
