Features:
The career of a Hollywood ingenue
could be compared to that of an athlete. She may enjoy
several years of prominence, but she may not remain at the
top of her profession for more than a decade or so. One of
Laurel & Hardy’s co-stars not only outlasted many of her
contemporaries, but she had two flourishing screen
careers (and even dabbled in a third!) over three decades.
She appeared as a damsel in distress in Any Old Port,
and in the title role of The Bohemian Girl.
Laurel & Hardy fans know her as Jacqueline Wells.
Born Jacqueline Brown on August 30, 1914 in Denver, Colorado, she was a promising juvenile actress who was featured in stage plays at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. This theater was regularly attended by movie talent scouts, and many actors at Pasadena received offers from the studios. Using the professional name of Jacqueline Wells, she worked in two-reel comedies at the Hal Roach studios during the 1931-32 season, with Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, and The Boy Friends.
Many novice screen actresses were first tried in westerns and serials as a practical screen test, to gauge their ability and appeal. Jacqueline Wells also went this route when Universal offered her a contract. She appeared in serials under the name of Diane Duval. This phase of her career didn’t last long, however, because casting directors began to take notice of Jacqueline Wells. One of her more prominent roles was in Monogram’s The Loud-Speaker (1934), as an actress trying to get along in New York. That same year she was named one of the “WAMPAS Baby Stars,” an annual selection of starlets considered by exhibitors as good bets for stardom.
The Bohemian Girl (1936), co-starring Jacqueline Wells, climaxed her freelance career. She then signed a contract with Columbia Pictures. Columbia made a few important films each year, but the backbone of its organization was a steady stream of “B” pictures and short subjects for neighborhood theaters. Wells was the ingenue in many of Columbia’s unpretentious but entertaining features like Paid to Dance and When G-Men Step In.
Most Columbia
contract players were called upon to appear in anything.
In order to gain valuable experience before the cameras,
they’d appear in a big feature film on Monday, a little
feature film on Tuesday, a serial on Wednesday, or a
two-reel comedy on Thursday. It was all in a day’s work for
Columbia’s stock company. The seasoned Jacqueline Wells
managed to steer clear of Columbia’s slapstick shorts but,
because she knew the ropes, she was sometimes recruited for
screen tests, to recite sample scenes opposite neophyte
actors. The hectic Columbia workplace kept her busy, but the
studio failed to promote her to bigger productions — while her Columbia
contemporary Rita Hayworth rose in prominence and got all
the attention. Wells finally left Columbia in 1939 to resume
freelancing. Jacqueline Wells’s last credit found her back
at Monogram in Her First Romance, starring
another former Columbia stalwart, Edith Fellows.
The actress, already concerned about her stagnating career, recognized that 10 years of hard work hadn’t made her a star. She left Hollywood and joined a repertory company in Wisconsin. “It was getting away from people who knew me that did it,” she recalled in a 1943 interview. “In the little stock company, I was a big shot because I hailed from Hollywood, and for the first time I was fussed over. My inferiority complex began to vanish and when I returned to Hollywood I had blood in my eye and fight in my heart.”
She auditioned for Warner Brothers with a new hairstyle and wardrobe, and claimed to be an actress from New York named Julie Bishop. Still in her twenties, she was young enough to play ingenues and was promoted as a new face. She was cast in Warner product for the next several years, and her more famous credits include Action in the North Atlantic and Rhapsody in Blue. During her vogue as a Warner star, her older films were reissued to cash in on her popularity, and her “Jacqueline Wells” billing was revised to read “Julie Bishop.”
“The girl I used to be is dead and buried,” she said. “Until I shed Jacqueline Wells, I was the girl Hollywood overlooked.”
In 1946 the major studios released many of their contract players, Julie Bishop among them. She found work almost immediately at the smaller, independent studios. In 1952 she landed the feminine lead in the Bob Cummings sitcom “My Hero,” and she continued to work in movies and TV through 1957. She also appeared in regional stage productions.
In private life the former Jacqueline Wells pursued a wide variety of personal interests in California. She was a prolific painter, a licensed pilot, and the president of a national scholarship association. On August 30, 2001 — her 87th birthday — she succumbed to pneumonia.
We applaud the
professionalism of this talented actress, “a rose by any other
name.”
Copyright © 2023 by Scott
MacGillivray.
HENRY ARMETTA
Henry Armetta always played the same part in movies: a stocky, frustrated Neapolitan who tries to curb his temper. Imagine Edgar Kennedy with an Italian accent and you get the idea.
Born in Palermo, Italy on July 4, 1888, Enrico Armetta (later Americanized to Henry) came to America at 14, as a stowaway on a ship. He worked at various odd jobs, including a stint at New York's actors' fraternity, The Lambs Club. Stage and screen comedian Raymond Hitchcock gave Armetta his first acting job.
Many familiar movie character actors held conventional jobs in “real life.” Armetta was a barber. His outspoken, gregarious personality made an impression on filmmakers, and soon Henry the barber was in the movies. He cited his first movie appearance as Lady of the Pavement (1929), but he had appeared in silent films for years. When talkies arrived he became a prolific character player. His contribution to the Laurel & Hardy library is found in The Devil’s Brother: Armetta appears as an innkeeper continually exasperated by Stan’s finger games.
Armetta, in the words of film historian Don Miller, had a “peculiar walk like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in motion.” Between the walk and the heavily accented voice, Armetta became an adept scene-stealer, usually playing a comic foil, or comedy relief in melodramas. He was so familiar to movie fans that he was caricatured in a Walt Disney cartoon, and in 1935 Henry Armetta ranked #4 (out of 9000 actors) in the number of hours performing for the cameras.
Twentieth Century-Fox, experimenting with new series, made a handful of sports/action comedies. Henry Armetta appeared in the first one as the flustered owner of a restaurant. He was so well received that Fox used Armetta for the follow-up films. Family sitcoms were popular at the time (the Hardy family, the Jones family, the Bumstead family, etc.), and the presence of Armetta gave the format an ethnic twist. Three “Gambini family” misadventures were filmed by Fox’’s “B” unit in 1938–39. They were enjoyable fillers on double-feature nights at the local moviehouse, much as a weekly TV comedy viewed at random is pleasantly diverting today. The series stopped after three entries; the hot-headed Italian was refreshing in featured appearances but not as effective when he was the center of attention.
Armetta could also be hot-headed off-screen. Producer Jules White, always on the lookout for talent for his Columbia short subjects, liked Armetta’s work and invited him to the studio to discuss a series of two-reelers. According to White (quoted in “The Columbia Comedy Shorts” by Ted Okuda and Ed Watz), Henry Armetta the friendly barber had turned into Henry Armetta the temperamental movie star, and was unreasonably insistent about working conditions. His imperious manner cost him a movie contract and another chance at stardom.
Apparently the word got around about Armetta’s artistic temperament, because he wasn’t given the opportunity to star until 1941, and then it was for the poverty-row PRC studio. PRC could seldom afford star names, and had to rely on less expensive featured players. The studio leaned heavily on audience familiarity for Caught in the Act, which reunited him with Inez Palange (“Mama Gambini” in Armetta’s Fox films). The starring vehicle wasn’t strong enough to warrant a series.
Armetta was off the screen for more than a year until his cameo in the independent, all-star feature Stage Door Canteen attracted attention. Soon he was popping in and out of wartime musical revues on a regular basis. He also worked in local stage productions; on October 21, 1945, while starring in "Opening Night," Armetta suffered a heart attack and collapsed backstage at San Diego’s Russ Auditorium. He died that evening, at the age of 57.
Henry Armetta was certainly noticeable in The Devil’s Brother. One wonders what he could have brought to Laurel & Hardy’s other musical comedies. Imagine Armetta as the master toymaker in Babes in Toyland, or the bartender in The Bohemian Girl, or the owner of the cheese shop in Swiss Miss. Anyway, we’re fortunate to have his single appearance with Laurel & Hardy.
Copyright © 2021 by Scott MacGillivray.
It’s always nice to see a familiar face in a Laurel & Hardy movie, but it’s unusual to see a face familiar from television. One such player was Jay Novello, who played the nightclub master of ceremonies in Laurel & Hardy’s last American feature film, The Bullfighters (1945).
Novello was a dialect specialist, fluent in Italian and proficient in Greek and German. Like fellow dialectician Leo Carrillo, Jay Novello really spoke without a trace of an accent, but affected dialect for whatever role he was called on to play.
He was of Italian extraction, born Michael Romano on August 22, 1904, in Chicago, Illinois. His vocal capabilities made him a natural for radio, and he became established as a radio actor in the 1920s. When talking pictures took Hollywood by storm, Jay Novello was one of the many radio actors who relocated to the film capital. He made his movie debut in 1930 (in the Universal serial The Jade Box), but otherwise remained a radio performer until 1938, when he appeared in M-G-M’s hit feature Boys’ Town. Casting directors noticed him, and from then on Jay Novello was established as a screen actor. (In his personal resumé, he began listing his screen credits at 1938.)
The 1940s saw Novello playing enemy soldiers, spies, and subversives in war-themed movies (including at least two films where he played Japanese characters). During this period he almost always appeared in minor fare: westerns, serials, and B pictures, which is how he caught up with Laurel & Hardy in The Bullfighters.
As the market for these low-budget films transitioned from theaters to television, Hollywood veterans from both sides of the camera became involved in television production. This is where Jay Novello came into his own, because a half-hour TV episode had a much smaller supporting cast than a feature film, with individual cast members being more prominent in each storyline. From 1952 to 1976 Novello was a frequent guest in all types of filmed programming, and was equally skilled at comedy and drama. Oddly enough, he was cast as a series regular only once, toward the end of the run of McHale’s Navy. Novello played the scheming mayor of “Voltafiore,” the Italian locale where Ernest Borgnine’s crew was stationed.
Novello never turned his back on radio. In 1944 he took over one of the leads in the I Love a Mystery detective series during its final months. In 1956, during CBS Radio’s efforts to invigorate its primetime programming, Novello did guest shots on Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (starring Laurel & Hardy co-star Bob Bailey) and The CBS Radio Workshop.
Jay Novello’s last major motion-picture credit was Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961). Capra studded this Damon Runyon comedy with veteran scene-stealers (Edward Everett Horton, Byron Foulger, Thomas Mitchell, Mike Mazurki, Sheldon Leonard, etc.); Novello joined this enthusiastic fraternity in the role of an officious Spanish consul. Although Novello made a few more movies, including Carl Reiner’s dark comedy The Comic, he worked in television almost exclusively for the rest of his career. He retired in 1977, and died on September 2, 1982.
Jay Novello was one of those familiar faces who never became a major featured player in Hollywood movies, but lent color to the supporting cast. He was a talented actor and comedian, but seldom had a chance to display this range within the limits of the small roles he was assigned. Radio and television did him justice.
Copyright © 2021 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!
