Edward Quillan (1907-90) was a kind of cutprice forerunner to Mickey Rooney. As a child, he also performed in vaudeville with his parents. He was still a child when he signed a contract to make comedy shorts for Mack Sennett. He was a leading man throughout the 1930s, and moved down to ‘B’ pictures later. His film career lasted a respectable 58 years.
Quliian’s career took off in 1929, when he starred in The Godless Girl for Cecil B DeMille. He featured prominently in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and was one of Alice Brady’s sons in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939). He worked again for Ford in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), as treacherous Connie Rivers.
Quillan always worked steadily, making his last feature film in 1979, and also making many television appearances. But his last film role of note was as Sandy in Brigadoon.
He was in two MGM musicals during his 1930s heyday, Broadway to Hollywood and Hollywood Party.
A film career that lasted 88 years. About 285 pictures. The biggest box office draw in the United States in 1939. 1940 and 1941, from age 19 to 21. Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr (1920-2014) was no ordinary film star: he was a phenomenon, utterly unique. He was not, by most accounts, a particularly pleasant person; there are plenty of horror stories about his behaviour and attitudes. But I cannot find that this detracts greatly from his achievements on the screen.
Rooney claimed that he first appeared as part of his parents’ vaudeville act aged 17 months. After they divorced, he went with his mother to Hollywood and made his first film appearance in 1926, and from 1927 to 1934 was the star of over sixty comedy shorts, as a character named Mickey McGuire. He became associated with the name, but was prevented from taking the name as his own, so chose Rooney instead.
Aged 14, Rooney played Puck in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), one of the film’s brighter spots, a fact all the more remarkable when you know he gave much of his performance with a plaster cast on a broken leg.
He played the younger son in an adaptation of Ah, Wilderness (1935), and then was cast as the older son in a rehash of the plot, 1937’s A Family Affair. His character was named Andy Hardy, and Rooney played him in 13 sequels, most of which put plenty of cash into MGM’s coffers (he was by now contracted to the studio)
Rooney starred opposite Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town (1938), and went on to receive a special Oscar known as the Academy Juvenile Award. He was later nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for The Human Comedy (1943).
Rooney did not look like a leading man, and when it became impossible for him to continue playing teenagers, his career went into decline. But, in Jeanine Basinger’s words, he “kept on working and growing, the mark of a professional”. Even as late as 1979, he achieved critical recognition, and another Academy nomination, for Coppola’s The Black Stallion. And he regularly took part in successful Broadway productions. He even tried his hand, without great success, as a producer and director.
Mickey Rooney was in twelve MGM musicals, appearing with Judy Garland in seven of them. They were: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, Girl Crazy, Summer Holiday, Words and Music and The Strip.
Margherita Harrison Evans (1909-81) appeared in around 80 films, well over half of them as a child actor in the 1910s and 20s.
Evans took a six-year break at 15, learning her craft on the stage. She came back in 1930 and was soon typecast as one of Hollywood’s ‘good girls’. In that capacity she lived (and died) in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood. She also played one of Dickens’s good women, Agnes, in David Copperfield (1935).
Typecasting led to a paucity of challenging roles, which Evans deeply resented. In a well-known interview with Leonard Maltin she said: “I don’t want to be a sort of female George M. Cohan. I want to get me a long jade green cigarette holder, drooping eyelids, and drooling earrings and a personality to match.”
By 1938, Evans had had enough, and gave up screen acting to return to the stage, before retiring completely in 1943. She returned to acting in the 1950s with a number of television appearances.
William Russell Hardie (1904-73) was a stage actor who made occasional appearances in films. He featured in a couple of dozen Broadway productions, including playing the lead in the original staging of The Criminal Code (1929), later filmed by Howard Hawks. He also starred in the premiere of The Primrose Path (1940).
Hardie featured prominently in two 1933 MGM musicals, acting alongside Alice Brady in both of them. In Broadway to Hollywood he played Brady’s son, while in Stage Mother he was her husband, dying both tragically and early in the picture.
In 1958, Hardie played Lt. Byrnes, head of the 87th Precinct in the film of Ed McBain’s Cop Hater.
John Cooper (1922-2011) was a rare child actor who managed to extend early success into a long and successful life and career. Cooper made his screen debut aged six, though he had been carried around as an extra before that, and appeared for a couple of years as one of Hal Roach’s ‘Little Rascals’.
Under contract to Roach, Cooper was loaned to Paramount to star in Skippy (1931), under the direction of his uncle, Norman Taurog. In the same year he supported Wallace Beery’s Oscar-winning turn in The Champ.
Cooper worked regularly throughout his teenage years, notably as the second male lead in Fritz Lang’s The Return of Frank James (1940), also finding time to have an affair with Joan Crawford. His films as an adult in the 1940s were not of great note, and he took time out to serve in the navy. By 1949 he had started working regularly in television. In 1954 he made his first foray into television direction, going on to work on a wide variety of comedy and drama series, and winning two Primetime Emmys. From 1959, he was also working as a producer.
Cooper continued to act, and is well-known for playing Perry White in the Christopher Reeves Superman pictures. He finally retired in 1989.
Jackie Cooper made appearances in two MGM musicals: as a child in Broadway to Hollywood, and as a teenager in Ziegfeld Girl, as Lana Turner’s brother and Judy Garland’s beau.
Francis Phillip Wuppermann (1890-1949) was the Wizard of Oz. It was his most famous role, the one that has gained him immortality. But it was not his only role: he made about a hundred films altogether, including thirteen other MGM musicals.
A graduate of Cornell University (he studied business administration), Morgan made his start in acting in the theatre, in a Broadway production of Mr Wu in 1914. His screen debut came two years later, a supporting role in a Vitagraph picture. He was a journeyman player in both media until the late 1920s, when he appeared on stage in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1927). Three years later he created the title role in the comedy Topaze.
In the cinema, a highlight was co-starring as Bunny in John Barrymore’s Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917). He was always based in New York, and apparently told his friend Ralph Bellamy he was selling out by going to Hollywood. Six months later, Morgan was there himself and, after returning East for two Broadway productions, became a fixture in the film capital. He was under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the rest of his life, though he was loaned out in 1933 for Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.
Morgan had a few leading roles, for example in The Affairs of Cellini (1934), which earned him an Oscar nomination. More often, he worked as a character actor, always bringing added value to whatever picture he was in. Particular highlight was Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), as the tragi-comic Mr Matuschek, and his role in the anti-Nazi The Mortal Storm (1940).
The musicals in which Morgan appeared, beside The Wizard of Oz, were Broadway to Hollywood (playing the lead), The Cat and the Fiddle, Naughty Marietta, The Great Ziegfeld, Rosalie, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, Balalaika, Broadway Melody of 1940, Hullabaloo (another lead), Thousands Cheer, Yolanda and the Thief and Summer Holiday. This means he worked with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Mickey Rooney and Kathryn Grayson: most of the musical performers whose stars glittered in the MGM firmament.
Frank Morgan, despite his usually cheery persona on and off screen, had a serious problem with alcohol, believed to have been triggered by the murder of the brother with whom he was closest. He was a functioning alcoholic, but the impact on his general health was almost certainly a contributing factor to his death from heart failure at the age of 59, just after he had started shooting Annie Get Your Gun.
Mary Rose Brady (1892-1939) will have found it relatively easy to break into the New York film industry, given that her first picture, As Ye Sow (1914) was made by William A Brady Productions, her father’s company. She had previously acted on stage, including in a Broadway production with which her father was associated. She continued to work in the theatre during her film career, including a leading role in the 1931 premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra.
Brady acted in films until 1923, then concentrated on the stage until travelling to Hollywood in 1933. After one supporting role at MGM, she starred in two musicals, playing very different kinds of stage mother: Broadway to Hollywood and Stage Mother.
Alice Brady’s most beloved role is probably as Carole Lombard’s batty mother in My Man Godfrey (1936), which earned her a nomination for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She won in the category the following year, for her part in In Old Chicago (1938), this time as Tyrone Power’s mother, responsible for starting the cataclysmic fire.
Brady’s final role was as yet another mother, the noble Abigail Clay in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939)a
Ever since Laurel and Hardy’s last-minute insertion into The Rogue Song, Hal Roach had wanted to put them into a feature-length operetta. He chose Fra Diavolo, a one-hundred-year old work by Daniel Auber; the film was known by that title outside the United States.
Stanlio (Stan Laurel) listens as Ollio (Oliver Hardy) explains why they have nothing to fear from Fra Diavolo
The Devil’s Brother (a meaningless title) is essentially an editing together of two separate films. Hal Roach directed the musical and dramatic sequences, using Hap Depew as cinematographer, while Charley Rogers (and Stan Laurel) directed the comedy sequences, photographed by Art Lloyd. This ended up proving that Roach was a better producer than he was director: the parts attributed to Rogers were highly praised, while those for which Roach was responsible were not. In fact, previews led to the excision of a significant amount of the non-comedic footage.
This was an untypical Laurel and Hardy picture (historical setting, no bowler hats) and the pair were hesitant about making it. But it turned out to be one of their favourites amongst their films, as well as the most commercially successful. It features some classic Laurel and Hardy routines, including the introduction of ‘Kneesy-Earsy-Nosy’, the frustratingly difficult coordination game that Stan made look so easy.
Lady Pamela (Thelma Todd) is pleased that the Marquis de San Marco has arrived at the inn
There is a third excellent performance in The Devil’s Brother, with Thelma Todd being given a rare opportunity to show her range. She plays Lady Pamela, an English aristocrat, and actually sounds more convincing than British-born James Finlayson, playing her husband. Todd is almost unrecognizable as the fast-talking working girl she played in most of her films.
Dennis King, as might be expected, carries off the musical sequences with aplomb, though it cannot be said he is totally convincing as a ruthless cutthroat. He holds his own in his scenes with Stan and Ollie, though he later admitted to finding their improvisations very challenging. Lucile Brown is an effective ingenue and handles her one song capably (and fetchingly, since she is in lingerie). But Arthur Pierson’s Lorenzo demonstrates why he gave up acting to move behind the camera.
Stanlio demonstrates Kneesy-Earsy-Nosey
A feature musical with the MGM imprimatur, The Devil’s Brother clearly has a larger budget than was normal for Hal Roach productions. This is demonstrated by the number of actors and extras on screen, and by Dolly Tree’s costumes.
