

Walter Long is tough. Charles Middleton is grim. But the meanest villain in Laurel & Hardy movies has to be Richard Cramer, who made Laurel & Hardy very uncomfortable in Pack Up Your Troubles, Scram!, The Flying Deuces, and Saps at Sea.
Richard Cramer (not Rychard, and not Kramer, as he was sometimes known) was born on July 3, 1890, in Bryan, Ohio. He spent his youth in his home state and didn’t go into show business until 1911, while attending Ohio State University. In those days before mass media, when live entertainment was most prevalent, Cramer joined a repertory troupe that put on plays in various cities. His travels ultimately took him to New York, where he worked in dramatic productions. His burly frame suited him for character roles, often villainous, and in 1925 he appeared in his first Hollywood film, Kid Gloves. When talkies arrived, Cramer’s stage-trained voice assured his success.
While on the west coast, Cramer found screen work more plentiful at the smaller, independent studios. These very-low-budget outfits often made action pictures and westerns because they could be filmed largely outdoors, without building or renting sets. Cramer played his share of gangsters, sheriffs, hired thugs, and gamblers in minor fare of the early 1930s. Like many supporting players, Cramer supplemented his income by working in short subjects. He played super-villains opposite Laurel & Hardy at the Hal Roach studio, but at the Mack Sennett studio he demonstrated a flair for offbeat comedy. In the famous W. C. Fields short The Fatal Glass of Beer — a Yukon satire that few people in its day understood or appreciated — Cramer plays the stalwart Mountie “Constable Posthlewhistle,” who asks Fields to sing the title song. As Fields drones away about the curse of drink, Cramer loses his composure and sobs uncontrollably! One of Cramer’s generally forgotten Laurel & Hardy credits is Hollywood Party, released by M-G-M in 1934. Cramer appears not with Laurel & Hardy, but with The Three Stooges (he’s the tall. bearded scholar debating anthropology).
Cramer then appears to have accepted stage work, because in 1935 we find him back in New York, moonlighting (or more accurately, daylighting) in Vitaphone and Educational two-reelers. He’s terrific in the “Mr. Widget” comedies, menacing cheerful Joe Cook. In one lunatic scene Cook totally disarms Cramer by reading a children’s story to him! Cramer beams happily and listens intently to “the story of the little bird.”
But the movie industry offered more opportunities in California, so Cramer returned there for more work. He plays an iceman in M-G-M’s After the Thin Man, one of his relatively few A-picture credits, which could have been a turning point for the actor. Unfortunately his work in quickie movies seems to have typed him, and back Cramer went to westerns, melodramas, and serials. Stan Laurel remembered Cramer’s brand of villainy, because he arranged for Cramer to appear in some of the Fred Scott musical westerns he was producing.
Cramer shared the same plight as Charles Middleton: his memorable “stage” villainy of the old school was a little too broad for the more sophisticated 1940s, so he received fewer opportunities in important films. Laurel & Hardy director James Horne seems to have cast Cramer because he was of the old school; Cramer appears in Horne’s tongue-in-cheek Columbia serials. During the 1940s Cramer worked most frequently at PRC, the lowest of the low-budget studios still active by that time.
A liver ailment evidently slowed the actor’s career. Richard Cramer may well have had a drinking problem, which could account for his spotty film output as the 1940s came to a close. The only steady work he had during this period was in PRC’s inexpensive westerns with Eddie Dean and/or Lash LaRue. He retired from acting soon afterward, and died (of cirrhosis) in Los Angeles in 1960.
Richard Cramer was more versatile than his Laurel & Hardy pictures would indicate, and on occasion he had the chance to show the public how funny he could be.
Copyright © 2010 by Scott MacGillivray.
We
are
frankly
at a loss to explain the strange detours of
Phyllis Barry’s career. Movie-comedy buffs know her as Buster Keaton’s
leading
lady in What! No
Beer? and as Wheeler & Woolsey’s femme fatale in both Diplomaniacs
and Hips Hips
Hooray. The comedy community in
She
was
born
in
Then
her
career
took a wrong turn. In 1937 she accepted a
major role in Damaged
Goods, an exploitation film dealing with social diseases.
Based on a prestigious play, and filmed by professional screen actors
and
technicians, the project wasn’t as sordid as it might have been but the
notoriety seems to have hurt Phyllis’s career. By 1938 she was working
for
Jules White in
Many
hungry
actors
took jobs in exploitation pictures, and
in fairness, this often resulted in job offers from mainstream
producers. Secrets
of
a
Model was a cheap-thrill melodrama that wasn’t as overtly
shocking as the
subject matter of Damaged
Goods, so this time an exploitation picture improved
Phyllis Barry’s fortunes. It jump-started her career in the early
1940s; she
played small supporting roles until 1947. She passed away in 1954.
Phyllis
Barry
could
have been another Thelma Todd: a
dependable, attractive foil for lowbrow comedians. It’s too bad she
wasn’t more
firmly established in comedies, but she is probably best remembered for
the
handful she did.
Copyright
©
2009
by Scott MacGillivray.

Laurel & Hardy fans (and
video-store shoppers) look
forward to this time of the year, because they're almost sure to find Babes in
Toyland (also known as March of the Wooden
Soldiers), one of Laurel &
Hardy's most popular features. Among the memorable things about this
1934
feature is the performance of the juvenile lead, Felix Knight.
Felix
Knight
was
born in
When
Laurel
&
Hardy tackled another operatic project, The
Bohemian Girl, Felix Knight was called in. One of the score’s
successful songs,
“Then You’ll Remember Me,” became a vehicle for Knight’s lyric tenor.
Knight
also appears in Hal Roach’s Pick a Star —
an appearance he didn’t even know
about until years later. “I did a test — a nightclub scene for a movie
that
they were going to make — and the excuse they used was that they didn't
raise
the money for it, so they had to shelve it.” Felix Knight’s specialty
number
was then incorporated into Pick a Star.
“And I wasn't the star picked!” he
quipped. “But the best part of that story is, I was never paid anything for it.
That was one of Mr. Roach's tricks. He was tricky!”
Felix
Knight’s
film
career was relatively short. “First
movie I made was a real stinker,” he said with a chuckle, “called Down to Their
Last Yacht for RKO. And then I went to 20th Century-Fox and made
a movie with
Charles Boyer and Loretta Young called Caravan. It was
about the grape country
in
Knight
was
under
contract to M-G-M, where he usually sat on
the bench. The huge studio would sign promising performers, but keep
them idle
or loan them to other studios, so they could gain experience somewhere
else.
M-G-M “had Nelson Eddy and Allan Jones, and they had three or four
younger
singers who didn't do anything,” explained Knight, “but they were all
under
contract. They signed me so they'd have somebody to farm out! I was
paid $750 a
week and they used to collect $1500 to $2000 a week for farming me out.”
Later
in
the
1930s, film roles became scarce because “the
movie musicals were dying out. I had done about everything that the
young American
tenor could do on the Coast.” Knight was a frequent soloist with
several West
Coast symphony orchestras and opera companies, and he sang with diva
Lily Pons
at the Hollywood Bowl. He moved to
Knight
went
to
war in the 1940s, serving in the South
Pacific. “After the war I did a lot of early television. I did the
first
complete opera ever broadcast on NBC, the opera Carmen.” His wide experience
made him a fine teacher, and he spent his later years as a vocal coach.
Babes in Toyland was
reissued
in
1950 as March
of the Wooden
Soldiers, and the film became a perennial movie-matinée
and TV favorite. Felix
Knight was pleasantly surprised by the public's renewed interest in his
career:
“I've become a movie star in my old age!” Felix and his wife Ethel made
their
home in
Felix Knight passed
away on
Copyright © 2009 by Scott
MacGillivray.

SECOND EDITION,
REVISED AND EXPANDEDScott
MacGillivray’s Laurel &
Hardy: From the Forties Forward was the first book to fully
chronicle the later
careers of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and everything that followed,
from
theatrical reissues to home videos. If you enjoyed the book the first
time, you’ll like
this new edition even more. The author has expanded the original text
by more
than 50 percent, to include new insights, new information, and new
discoveries
in Laurel & Hardy history, never before published. (Which Laurel
&
Hardy comedy of the 1940s
was withheld from release for almost four years? Which “forties”
movie was their all-time biggest hit? Which movie was almost shut down
by
federal intervention?) You’ll read much more about Stan and Ollie’s
unrealized
projects, including five more
feature films, two TV series, and two Broadway shows. A must-read for
Stan and
Ollie’s fans
everywhere, Laurel
&
Hardy:
From the Forties Forward is better than ever!
Praise for the
first edition of Laurel & Hardy:
From the Forties Forward…
“What a marvelous
book! I read it straight through, getting happier by the minute to
think that
more and more material is being set into history about the boys. The
writing is
so lucid — and
that in this day of film books that aren’t is high praise.
Really wonderful!” — JOHN
McCABE, Laurel & Hardy’s authorized biographer
“Scott
MacGillivray has accomplished something that most historians
can only dream of doing: overturning the conventional wisdom… he
rewrites the book on the movie-comedy team.” —
“All the world’s
admirers
of
Laurel & Hardy will now forever be indebted to Scott
MacGillivray for providing so much new information about two of the world’s
most beloved figures.” —
STEVE ALLEN
“Displays a
knowledge and affection for its subject that one would be hard pressed to find in most academic
texts.” — CLASSIC
IMAGES
“To write a book
about screen performers as well covered as these two
and still present a wealth of heretofore unpublished information is quite an accomplishment.” — FILM
QUARTERLY
“MacGillivray
takes great pains to provide the context necessary to reassess these
films
after so many years of knee-jerk dismissal and neglect… His
book will remain the definitive study of the late years of the Laurel and Hardy phenomenon.” — ARNE
FOGEL,
Order the paperback from Barnes and Noble
Order the hardcover from Barnes
and Noble
You don't think of "leading men" in a Laurel & Hardy movie. With Stan and Ollie as the center of attention, the male leads consisted of either a traditional "juvenile" role or an incidental romantic presence.
Only rarely did we see an actor who shared equally in Laurel & Hardy's dialogue, plot situations, and comic routines. In the 1930s, it was Dennis King (The Devil's Brother). In the 1940s, it was Bob Bailey (Jitterbugs and The Dancing Masters).
Robert Bainter Bailey was born on
Bob Bailey answered the call from
Bailey worked so well with Laurel & Hardy that he was hired for their next film, The Dancing Masters. His role of "Grant Lawrence," boy inventor, was neither as demanding nor as prominent as his work in Jitterbugs, but he tried his best with low comedy. In the aftermath of a ginger-ale-spraying sequence, Bailey's half-sheepish, half-snarling "I got my pants wet!" is a comic highlight.
Bob Bailey had superb dialogue
skills but limited visual "business"; his few
moments of facial mugging in The Dancing
Masters are amusing but mechanical, as though he was
uncomfortable in broad comedy. 20th Century-Fox took the hint and
turned him into "Robert Bailey," promising young dramatic actor.
Throughout 1944 Bailey had moderate to minor roles in five 20th
Century-Fox features. He lacked the chiseled profile and rugged
physique of the typical
In 1955 CBS Radio revived one of
its
popular detective series, "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," and cast Bob
Bailey in the lead. The role had been played in the hard-boiled gumshoe
tradition
by
In late 1960, CBS moved production
of "Johnny Dollar" to
After this film, Bailey suddenly
withdrew from show business and settled into a solitary private life,
apart from family and friends for many years. In the 1970s, reunited
with his daughter Roberta Goodwin, he lived comfortably in a
Bob Bailey was a skilled dramatic actor who made two funny movies almost by accident. We salute his contributions to the world of Laurel & Hardy.
Copyright (c) 1998 by Scott MacGillivray. Acknowledgment is made to John Gassman and Roberta Goodwin for background information.
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