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.
Tag: MGM musical
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Hazel Craven
Hazel Craven (dates unknown) was a chorus girl who, in a brief Hollywood career, played a series of…chorus girls.
She started out with a credited part in Lord Byron of Broadway, dancing alongside Rita Flynn. Thereafter, Craven was uncredited, though in a string of prestigious pictures (The Kid from Spain [1932, 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and Duck Soup [all 1933]). She apparently played a bit part in one Rainy Afternoon (1936), and there the trail seems to end.
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Rita Flynn
Edith Flynn (1905-73) was briefly Micky Flynn when performing on the stage in musical comedies, before settling on the “ritzier” Rita at the start of her film career.
Flynn was generally cast in supporting roles, though she was a featured player, as a character with her own name, in a series of short comedies known Hollywood Girls, directed by Roscoe Arbuckle in 1931-32.
A little earlier, Flynn appeared briefly in Lord Byron of Broadway, as one of the women inexplicably attracted to Charles Kaley.
In a chorus girl cliché, Flynn retired from acting in 1933 after marrying a millionaire.
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Carl ‘Major’ Roup
Carl Roup (1915-2002) had a long career with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, briefly as a child actor, and then in various production capacities.
Roup was discovered and cast in his first film, The Red Mill (1925), by Marion Davies, who saw him selling newspapers on the studio lot. She paid for his education at a military school, leading Lon Chaney to nickname him ‘Major’.
Roup made a number of other appearances in silent pictures, and played a young baseball fan in They Learned About Women.
Roupe later became a script clerk, including on A Day at the Races and At the Circus. In 1946, he started working as a second assistant director on Till the Clouds Roll By, and also carried out that role on On an Island With You, Easter Parade, The Kissing Bandit, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Pagan Love Song, Show Boat, Lili, Dangerous When Wet, Rose Marie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jupiter’s Darling, Silk Stockings and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
The Los Angeles Times obituary described Roup as “as much a part of MGM as Leo the Lion”.
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Mike Donlin
Michael Joseph Donlin (1878-1933) was a Major League baseball player, nicknamed Turkey Mike, who is generally held to have frittered away his enormous talent. A chaotic lifestyle was exacerbated by an ill-conceived ambition to become an actor. He abandoned baseball in 1906 to perform in a Broadway play with a baseball theme.
After an ill-fated attempt to return to the game, Donlin sought a Hollywood career. He made around 70 films, often uncredited and generally without interest, though he did become an early member of John Ford’s stock company, making half a dozen pictures with him.
Donlin’s bit as a baseball player in They Learned About Women would not have stretched his talents.
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Eddie Gribbon
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.
