Sterling Holloway

Here is another name that is well known to most generations.  Sterling Holloway (1905 - 1992) had a long career, starting in silent films.  He progressed through many stages in his acting.  Some great movies, quite a bit of TV work, and of course, as a popular voice actor for animated features.

In the late silent era, many comedies were two-reelers that ran about 20 minutes.  Features would usually be 60 to 90 minutes.  There were also epic movies such as Napoleon, the 1927 release written by Abel Gance (1889 - 1981), which ran 222 minutes.  Holloway's first feature was Casey at the Bat (1927) starring Wallace Beery (1885 - 1949) and another favorite, Zazu Pitts (1894 - 1963).

Sterling is best known as a comic actor, but he was no stranger to dramas.  In 1933 he appears in Hell Below with Robert Montgomery (1904 - 1981) and Walter Huston (1884 - 1950).

I remember picking him out in Gold Diggers of 1933 in an uncredited part.  He was in two movies with Will Rogers (1879 - 1935), and started working for Walt Disney (1901 - 1966) in Dumbo (1941) and then Bambi (1942), plus many others.  

Another good dramatic role was in the war movie Walk in the Sun in 1945, starring Dana Andrews (1909 - 1992).  He also worked on four Frank Capra (1897 0 1991) films, including two education movies, Our Mr. Sun (1956) and Hemo the Magnificent (1957).

Holloway's earliest TV work was in 1949, before many people had TVs, but he became a regular on "The Adventures of Superman" and "The Life of Riley" in the 1950s.  He can be seen on most of the golden age of TV series'.

In 1963 he scores a part as the fire chief in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, with a cast that has to be the greatest gathering of comedic talent ever attempted.  His last role was on the 1980s hit TV series "Moonlighting" starring Cybill Sheperd (b. 1950) and Bruce Willis (b. 1955).

I think of all his work, his most famous role is as the voice of Winnie the Pooh, which should keep him endeared in the minds of children for years to come.  He was named a Disney Legend in 1991.

Irving Bacon - The Early Years

In my post about Blondie, I mentioned a bit player named Irving Bacon (1893 - 1965).  With 515 titles listed on IMDb, I thought he was worth a closer look.

Bacon started working in silent films, and made almost 70 films at the Mack Sennett Studios.  While many silent movie stars had difficulty moving into sound films due to heavy accents or poor voices, Irving Bacon flourished.  By that time, though, he had found his niche playing "regular Joe" parts as milkmen, mailmen, carnival workers, etc., which he continued for most of his career.

In 1933 Bacon worked with Bing Crosby (1903 - 1977) and Franklin Pangborn (1889 - 1958) in one of the last Mack Sennett (1880 - 1960) films, a 19 minute short called Sing, Bing, Sing.  He made ten more films with Bing, including Holiday Inn (1942)

Irving worked with many of the early greats.  He made 9 movies with W.C. Fields (1880 - 1946).  He is in 12 Frank Capra (1897 - 1991) films, including some early silent shorts.  Look for Bacon in It Happened One Night (1934) with Clark Gable (1901 - 1960) and Claudette Colbert (1903 - 1996), and also in the 1930s he was in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can't Take it With You (1938). 

I can't seem to get out of the 1930s!!  Just two more...A Star is Born and Topper, both in 1937...oh, and Blondie (1938) of course.  (Actually, several Blondies in the 1930s.)  Whew!  And I can't forget Gone With the Wind (1939).

1940 starts with His Girl Friday and The Grapes of Wrath, plus 25 other movies that year.  This is going to be a long post!  Let's cover the war years and come back tomorrow.

Just to quickly touch on some highlights:
The Return of Frank James (1940) with Henry Fonda (1905 - 1982)
Barnacle Bill (1941) with Wallace Beery (1885 - 1949)
Great Guns (1941) with Laurel and Hardy
King of the Cowboys (1943) with Roy Rogers (1911 - 1998)
Action in the North Atlantic (1943) with Humphrey Bogart (1899 - 1957)
This is the Army (1943) with Lt. Ronald Regan (1911 - 2004) which was really a George Murphy (1902 - 1992) film, but Regan is on the cover.
Spellbound (1945) by Alfred Hitchcock.

Pick ANYTHING above that is in bold, and watch it!  You will not be disappointed.

Richard Carlson

I just wrote about Richard Denning (1914 - 1998) who was in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).  Another star in that movie was Richard Carlson (1912 - 1977).  The pair made one other movie together, West Point Widow in 1941, also starring Anne Shirley (1918 - 1993) who started acting at age 4 and made 66 movies, retiring at age 26.

Back to Carlson.  He has 103 titles listed on IMDb, in film and on TV, starting in 1938 and all the way to 1975.  In 1941 he was in The Little Foxes with Bette Davis (1908 - 1989), and the next year he was in White Cargo with Hedy Lamarr (1914 - 2000). 

Carlson is best remembered for his parts in sci-fi classics like Creature, but he didn't start making those films until well into his acting career...even after starting on TV.  His first real sci-fi was The Magnetic Monster in 1953. 

Up until then he was in many movies in quite a range of genres.  In 1948 he was in The Amazing Mr. X, a detective story (more or less), starring Turhan Bey (b. 1922), and then in 1950 an action film, King Solomon's Mines, starring Deborah Kerr (1921 - 2007) and Stewart Granger (1913 - 1993).  In 1952 he made two Korean War pics, Retreat, Hell! and Flat Top. 

The truth is that of his 103 titles, he only made four of the sci-fi movies on which his reputation is based.  Magnetic Monster, It Came from Outer Space (1953), Riders to the Stars (1954) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Those movies and that time frame, the early 1950s, were all it took to start a new generation of baby boomers on the path to a lifetime of "Star Trek," Star Wars and other sci-fi movies and TV shows.

I remember Carlson in three educational films made by Frank Capra (1897 - 1991), "Hemo the Magnificent" and "The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays" in 1957 and then "The Unchained Goddess" in 1958.  These were made for TV, but when I was in elementary school, they were shown as 16mm prints to the school.  They starred Frank Baxter (1896 - 1982) who played Dr. Research, and Carlson was along for the ride, with a bunch of animated characters as well.  They were great!

Carlson's later work included the TV series "Mackenzie's Raiders" where he was the star, and then he was basically a guest star on TV shows, like  "Rawhide" and "Bonanza."  His last film was Change of Habit in 1969 starring Elvis Presley (1935 - 1977) which was also Presley's last film.

More Charles Lane

Since I mentioned him yesterday, I started looking at his history in acting.  Charles Lane lived for 102 years, from 1905 to 2007.  He was an actor in film and later TV, for 75 of those years.


He started in 1931 acting in films as a desk clerk, salesman or reporter.  Usual fair for a new actor getting extra work or bit parts at $35 a day.  His face allowed him to create his dour character.  


Here is a quote from IMDb written by Gary Brumburgh that sums it up.  "Glimpsing even a bent smile from this unending sourpuss was extremely rare, unless one perhaps caught him in a moment of insidious glee after carrying out one of his many nefarious schemes. Certainly not a man's man on film or TV by any stretch, Lane was a character's character."  The full biography page can be seen here.

Lane was in four Busby Berkeley films, and TEN Frank Capra films, including some of the best...Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take it with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, It's a Wonderful Life, and State of the Union.


He must have acted with every big name in the movies, including four films with Jimmy Stewart, and many times with his good friend Lucille Ball.  He was also in three Blondie films with Penny Singleton.  Two are included in the set in the insert link at left.


I think he has made himself well known to baby boomers like me and even a younger crowd because of all of his television work.  It would be difficult to turn on a TV in the fifties and sixties and not see him on a sitcom somewhere!


And he kept on working.  In the seventies he was a regular on "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Bewitched" and "Soap."  And he appeared on other TV hits that decade, "The Rookies," "Rhoda" and "Maude."   In the eighties he was seen on Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War", and on "St. Elsewhere" and "LA Law."  He worked into the eighties and even into this millennium, but he slowed down a bit after he hit 90!


According to his bio page on IMDb he was a wonderful man in real life, and he remained married to his only wife, Ruth Covell, from 1931 until she died in 2002.  He was a class act all his life.

The Russian's are Coming!

At least one Russian, Mischa Auer, has made a full life out of bit acting.  I suppose I first saw him in Destry Rides Again, the 1939 version with Jimmy Stewart.  Then I started noticing him in everything!

Check out this list of major films...
Anna Karenina
My Man Godfrey
Pick a Star  (I consider it a major film...Laurel and Hardy are in it!)
You Can't Take it with You
Destry (of course)

Mischa Auer had a total of 175 roles, from a 1928 silent film called Something Always Happens, to an Italian romance film called For Love...For Magic in 1967, the year he died.  Some of these are major films with major stars, and they used Mischa in parts that he was able to bring life to. 

He even worked with a young Humphrey Bogart in a film called Women of all Nations in 1931.  Bogart's scenes were deleted from the final cut, and Mischa's part went uncredited.  I wonder if they spent any time together and talked about their careers.  Bogart was born in 1899 and Auer was born six years later, but they both started in films in 1928.


My wife and I love You Can't Take it with You.  Frank Capra directing Lionel Barrymore, Jean Arthur, Jimmy Stewart, Ann Miller and Mischa Auer.  If the story was trash, the cast would have carried the film. 

Dub Taylor, another famous bit actor, started his career in this film, and ended it in Maverick in 1994.  Ann Miller was only 15 years old, but she was already spinning!  (I think my wife likes Ann Miller the best.) 

Let's see...Spring Byington, Mary Forbes, Eddie Anderson, Charles Lane, Ward Bond...the cast of this movie is about 155 strong.  I believe that what makes some movies great is not only the leads, but casting really good bit actors who can add to the film, but sometimes remain in the background so they don't overshadow the story.

One last thing.  I added a search box to my blog.  It should work if you want to see if I have touched base on any of your favorite movies or actors!