The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • Billy May

    IMDb states that an actor named Billy May appeared uncredited in Free and Easy, and suggests that the Billy May in question is Edward William May Jr (1916-2004), a jazz trumpeter who found his greatest success as a composer and orchestrator. Billy May worked with some of the top orchestras of the Big Band era, including Glenn Miller’s. He also arranged songs for, amongst others, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Bobby Darin. In addition, May worked with humourist Stan Freberg on many of his comedy records.

    However, this particular Billy May would only have been aged 14 at the time, and unlikely to be the performer in the MGM picture, whose identify remains a mystery.

  • Theodore Lorch

    Theodore Lorch (1873-1947) translated stage experience into a 170-film career as a character. His appearance as Chingachgook in an early version of The Last of the Mohicans (1920) did not foreshadow his many later appearances in shorts starring the Three Stooges.

    Lorch made appearances uncredited in Free and Easy and Reckless. 

  • Pat Harmon

    Plummer Hull Harmon (1886-1958) appeared in about 170 films, many of them comedies starring Hollywood’s greatest comedians: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Harry Langdon.

    Harmon was in three of Buster Keaton’s early films under his MGM contract, including the musical Free and Easy.

    Harmon’s film career came to an abrupt halt in 1935 when he was sentenced to a term in Folsom Prison for stealing a horse. His final appearance was as a police officer in Modern Times (1936).

  • David Burton

    David Burton (1877-1963) was born in what is now Ukraine, though his original name and details of how he ended up in America are obscure.

    Burton was a theatre director who went out to Hollywood at the introduction of sound to work with Nick Grinde, directing the actors in The Bishop Murder Case (1929).

    Burton directed another sixteen pictures, for various studios. He never directed an MGM musical, but he did make an appearance as himself in the Hollywood-set Free and Easy, auditioning women to beat up Buster Keaton.

  • Pete Morrison

    George D Morrison (1890-1973) was a star of silent westerns who had actually worked as a cowboy in his youth. He was working as an engine fireman when he started undertaking stunt work for the Essanay Studio in around 1910. 

    Morrison moved to Hollywood and became an early western star, now almost forgotten. With the introduction of sound, his parts became mostly uncredited, and he also returned to stunt work. He appeared as a cowboy in Montana Moon.

    After retiring in 1935, Morrison maintained the western theme by becoming a rancher and sometime deputy sheriff in Colorado.

  • Bud McClure

    Ervin Thomas McClure (1883-1942) acted in over 100 films, virtually all of which were westerns, and in most of which he was uncredited. He rarely had dialogue.

    In 1930, McClure played a cowboy at the party in Montana Moon.

  • Claudia Dell

    Claudia Dell Smith (1909-77) became a chorus girl aged 16, and was soon appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies. 

    Dell was signed by Warner Bros to play opposite Al Jolson in Big Boy and the title character in Sweet Kitty Bellairs (both 1930). Shortly before, she had made an uncredited appearance as Cliff Edwards’s girlfriend in Montana Moon.

    Dell later signed with RKO, and turned to radio when the film roles started to dry up, frequently working on Lux Radio Theatre productions. She was also a newspaper columnist.

  • Lloyd Ingraham

    Lloyd Chauncey Ingraham (1874-1956) made around 300 screen appearances, but it is arguable that only one was of any significance in the context of film history. He plays the judge who sentences The Boy to go to the gallows in Intolerance (1916). 

    Otherwise, it was a career largely uncredited, and which included the role of Joan Crawford’s dad in Montana Moon. 

    Ingraham also directed over 100 shorts and features between 1913 and 1930.

  • Ricardo Cortez

    Jacob Krantz (1900-77) was the son of Jewish parents with East European backgrounds, but he grew up to have features that bore comparison with Latin lovers such as Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro. With this in mind, he took Ricardo Cortez as his screen name.

    By 1923, Cortez was getting featured character parts, and he occasionally played the lead, most memorably as the first Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1931). One of his prominent supporting roles, a year earlier, was with Joan Crawford in Montana Moon. 

    Cortez also directed seven low-budget programmers for 20th Century-Fox between 1938 and 1940.

    His last big screen appearance was in a film that gave a number of other actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age their last hurrah: John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (1958). After a guest spot in an episode of Bonanza in 1960, Cortex became a stockbroker.

    Ricardo Cortez’s brother, Stanley Cortez, was a celebrated cinematographer.

  • Pauline Paquette

    Belgian actors were few and far between in Old Hollywood, and Pauline Paquette (????-1950) had a career that included only five pictures.

    The possibility that she might have deserved better is suggested by one review of her first picture, Bluff (1924), which noted: “A bit contributed by Pauline Paquette stands out in the film”.

    Paquette appeared as Marie in Lord Byron of Broadway.

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