Alice Weaver was a genuine New York show girl who had featured in the Ziegfeld Follies before making brief appearances as chorus girls in The Broadway Melody and Reckless.
Tag: MGM musical
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Alice Weaver
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Dorothy Vernon
Dorothea Christine Arens (1875-1970) was a hard-working small-part actor who made four Metro musical appearances: The Broadway Melody, Madam Satan, Bitter Sweet and Presenting Lily Mars.
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Blanche Payson
Blanche Payson (1881-1964) was a bit-part player who started out in silence in 1916. Her two roles in Metro musicals were satisfyingly distinct: a wardrobe lady in The Broadway Melody and a jail matron in Dancing Lady.
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Joyce Murray
Joyce Murray (1911?-68) was just 17 (possibly younger) when she filmed her speciality dance for The Broadway Melody. She provided the same service in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 . After a gap, she reappeared in Du Barry Was a Lady and, finally, Ziegfeld Follies.
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The Mawby Triplets
The Mawby Triplets were famous triplets who were not really triplets. Claudette (1922-42) and Claudine (1922-2012) were twins, but their sister Angella (1921-2000) was born a year earlier. They were British child actors who were marketed as triplets by MGM and made brief appearances in The Broadway Melody and The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
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Carl M Leviness
Carleton Mortimer LeViness (1884-1964) first appeared as the Tragedian in a silent version of Nicholas Nickleby in 1912 and his last appearance was an uncredited bit as a man in the hallway of a newspaper office in The Great Race in 1963. He was in hundreds of films, mostly uncredited, and even spent the period 1914-16 as a director. It was an unobtrusively spectacular career.
Leviness’s MGM musical appearances were The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, Reckless (in all three he played a guest at a party), Nobody’s Baby (for a change of pace, he played an elevator passenger), A Day at the Races (another party guest), Ship Ahoy (as a passenger), Presenting Lily Mars (as a tired man–must have been all the partying), Two Girls and a Sailor (nightclub patron), Music for Millions (theatregoer), Thrill of a Romance (hotel guest), Yolanda and the Thief (as a man who says tally-ho), On an Island With You (desk clerk), The Barkeleys of Broadway (guest at a country house), In the Good Old Summertime (patronizing a supper club), The Toast of New Orleans (eating in a restaurant this time), The Great Caruso (opera-goer, naturally), Small Town Girl (back to being a party guest), The Band Wagon (an investor), Easy to Love (maiitre d’), The Student Prince (churchgoer), Athena (another party guest) and Ten Thousand Bedrooms (another nightclub patron).
Twenty-two films: Carl M Leviness definitely did his bit for the MGM musical.
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Beatrice Hagen
Beatrice Hagen (1917-99) claimed a minor place in film history by providing the voice of Snow White in the French version of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). As well as being a Disney voice actor (she played Mickey’s nephews), she was a ubiquitous chorus girl in musicals from a number of studios.
For MGM, Hagen made uncredited appearances in The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Naughty Marietta, Broadway Melody of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance, Maytime, Broadway Melody of 1938, Rosalie, Ziegfeld Girl, Babes on Broadway, Thousands Cheer, The Harvey Girls and Texas Carnival.
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Mary Doran
Florence Arnot (1910-95) had a strange career arc, which is epitomized by her roles in MGM musicals. She was uncredited as Flo in The Broadway Melody, then played the second female lead (below Bessie Love) in They Learned About Women. After that, there were just uncredited appearances as a jilted lover in Lord Byron of Broadway and as a Casquette girl in Naughty Marietta.
It is ironic that Doran’s career never really took off, given that she was married for a time to Joseph Sherman, a senior member of Metro’s publicity department.
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Drew Demorest
Drew Demorest (1893-1949) was a small-part player who on occasion wore costumes designed by his wife, Henrietta Frazer.
Demorest made appearances in The Broadway Melody (uncredited, but fittingly playing Turpe the costumer), Marianne (as a doughboy), They Learned About Women (with onsceen credit as Edwards), Free and Easy (as Robert Montgomery’s valet), Children of Pleasure (as a songwriter) and as a French officer in The Firefly. All of these were uncredited.
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The Biltmore Trio
The Biltmore Trio actually began as a quartet in The Broadway Melody and comprised Eddie Bush (1911-69), Paul Gibbons (1904-87), Ches Kirkpatrick (19??-19??) and Bill Seckler (1905-83). They performed ‘Truthful Parson Brown,’ the only song not written by Freed-Brown.
They appeared again, as the Biltmore Quartet, in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and also in a musical by Fox, Words and Music (1929). After that, Kirkpatrick seems to have disappeared and they became the Biltmore Trio, featuring in Chasing Rainbows, Children of Pleasure and Love in the Rough. They were also the eponymous stars of a Metro musical short.
