Features:

Biography: Phyllis Barry

Biography: Felix Knight

Biography: Patricia Ellis

Biography: Bob Bailey

PHYLLIS BARRY

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 Hollywood was close-knit, and people who worked with the big-name comics almost always worked with Laurel & Hardy at least once. Phyllis Barry did appear in a Laurel & Hardy movie — once. It’s only a bit role; she’s one of the women gossiping about military officers in Bonnie Scotland.

She was born in London on December 7, 1908. Her first screen credit appears to be the 1932 Samuel Goldwyn production Cynara. The Keaton film was Phyllis Barry’s next screen credit, and a leading role in a prominent M-G-M movie was a prize that actresses dreamed about. So it’s interesting that she went from neophyte starlet to leading lady at M-G-M in one jump. Possibly M-G-M hired her as a backup for Maureen O’Sullivan, another M-G-M contractee of British origin. (Laurel & Hardy co-star Felix Knight said that M-G-M often signed performers similar to those under contract.) M-G-M did not extend Phyllis’s contract, however; she was generally limited to continental vamp roles. A brief stay at RKO yielded a few features, including the two Wheeler & Woolseys; Bonnie Scotland was in fact filmed on RKO’s set for The Little Minister. But movie actors, like the rest of America, were hit by the depression and took whatever work they could get. Phyllis Barry, without a long-term contract, found herself freelancing. By 1937 she was playing small roles: she’s a Cockney barmaid in Paramount’s “B” adventure Bulldog Drummond Comes Back.

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 Columbia’s two-reel comedies (not a prestigious move) and in 1940 she was back in the slightly scarlet exploitation field, for the film Secrets of a Model. (Phyllis Barry is not to be confused with actress Phyllis Barrington, who started in the exploitation field in 1930 and never advanced beyond the minor-league studios.)

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.

FELIX KNIGHT

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 Macon, Georgia. Although one source gives his date of birth as 1908, Knight’s own account of Toyland places his birth at 1915. Many of Toyland’s storybook characters were played by young people: Felix Knight, Charlotte Henry, Henry Brandon, Johnny Downs, Virginia Karns. “We were all young,” explained Knight to this writer, “because they needed somebody who would be believable in re-enacting the rhymes of Mother Goose. I was 19, and you couldn't tell whether I was 14 or 15.”

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 Hungary, and I had a good singing part in that. I also did the French version, because I was quite fluent in French at that time. Then I went to First National and did two color [two-reelers] there, Springtime in Holland and Carnival Days. And I made the three at Roach.”

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 New York for the Metropolitan Opera stage and network radio work.

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 New York, and they were frequent guests at Sons of the Desert banquets and conventions.

Felix Knight passed away on June 18, 1998. He was a genial, charming gentleman, and he is missed by his many friends and fans.

Copyright © 2009 by Scott MacGillivray.

PATRICIA ELLIS

Laurel & Hardy movies were often used as training grounds for actors who were new to the screen: Vivian Blaine, Stephen McNally, Bob Bailey, Trudy Marshall. These actors might be assigned small parts in major films, but they would be entrusted with major supporting roles opposite Stan and Ollie in B pictures, and then move up the Hollywood ladder. So it’s unusual to find a Laurel & Hardy co-star who nearly ended a career with the team, which brings us to Patricia Ellis.

Patricia Ellis was a young and pretty 22 years old in Laurel & Hardy’s 1938 feature Block-Heads, so it may come as a surprise that hers was not a new face. The blonde from Birmingham, Michigan was only 16 when she signed a contract with Warner Brothers in 1932, and like most Hollywood players she learned the ropes by playing bits, then small supporting roles, then featured roles in A pictures, and leads in short subjects and B features.

Like the Laurel & Hardy co-stars, Patricia Ellis had her first lead opposite a comedy star: (cavern-mouthed Joe E, Brown, in Elmer the Great) before getting chances to show her stuff in bigger films. She is featured in Convention City, the Holy Grail of pre-Code films; no print is known to exist of this exceptionally spicy feature. She co-starred in two more Joe E. Brown features and appeared opposite James Cagney in St. Louis Kid, probably her biggest break to date. But Warners didn’t keep moving her forward, and most of her assignments were undistinguished vehicles for contract players on the Warner payroll, in which she either played the ingénue or the other woman. The studio began loaning her out to other producers, often a danger sign that the employer was losing interest in an actor’s career. Back at Warners she was paired twice with singer James Melton, who Warners had introduced in 1935, but the coupling didn’t catch on. She was then teamed with the personable Warren Hull, with better results. (Their campus musical Freshman Love, a 1936 update of the old play “The College Widow,” is an enjoyable diversion.)

Warners dropped Patricia Ellis from the roster in 1937. That same year the economical but enterprising Republic Pictures, always on the lookout for big-studio names, hired both Patricia Ellis and Warren Hull for a pleasant musical, Rhythm in the Clouds. It was during this period that Patricia Ellis took freelance jobs in Hollywood, including one at the independent Hal Roach studio for Block-Heads. She played Billy Gilbert’s wife, who gets mixed up in another nice Laurel & Hardy mess.

Her last Hollywood credit (a Jack Holt action feature from budget producer Larry Darmour) dates from 1939, and she got married the following year. She moved back east, and filmed four three-minute musicals for the “Soundies” movie jukeboxes in 1941: I Cried for You, Just a Little Bit South of North Carolina, You Appeal to Me, and I Thought About You. These were produced in New York, all at the same time, and reveal that Patricia Ellis was a talented singer as well as an attractive performer. These were her last films; she withdrew her name from the movie casting directories in 1943 — when she was only 27 — and devoted herself to her family. She died in Missouri in 1970, at the age of 53; her husband of 30 years survived her.

There weren’t any “breakthrough” roles for Patricia Ellis, no single movie for which she’ll be remembered (with the possible exception of Block-Heads), but it’s easy to see what the studios saw in her, and it’s a shame she didn’t work more often with Laurel & Hardy.

Copyright © 2009 by Scott MacGillivray.

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND EXPANDED

Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward
by Scott MacGillivray

Scott 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.” — BOSTON HERALD

“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, Minnesota Public Radio