Film follies follow-up

A few months ago, we shared a few photos from the long-gone book on cars in Hollywood, “Fit for the Chase,” authored in 1969 by cinema historian and silent-era child star Raymond Lee. Here’s a few more for your perusal, which, like practically all the book’s images, were studio publicity stills. The one above shows Joe E. Brown trying to shove a Rolls-Royce out of a mud hole. I don’t know what movie this is from, or who the guy in Boss Hogg garb is, but during the 1930s, Brown was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, having jumped from vaudeville to one of the first talkie musicals, “On With the Show.”

This is terrific. The kid on the trolley steps is Jackie Cooper, a huge child star who also had a successful adult career, best known to audiences today for playing Perry White in the Superman movies. This staged accident, involving a 1929 Cadillac, is probably from an early short produced by Hal Roach, who later transitioned Cooper into the Our Gang film series. Jackie Cooper, I’m happy to report, is still with us at age 87. He still holds the record as the youngest person ever nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor – in 1931, for “Skippy,” although the Oscar went to Lionel Barrymore for “A Free Soul” – and is the oldest living Best Actor nominee.

If you’re a Three Stooges fan like I am, you probably recognize this guy. This is Vernon Dent, probably the most prolific straight man of the entire Stooges era, usually playing a tycoon, judge or other blueblood driven to apoplexy by the boys’ antics. Dent got into the movies during the 1920s as a Mack Sennett stock player and then became a studio player at Columbia Pictures, which produces the Stooges shorts. This image of him beating on a 1932 Buick in full touring mode dates from the Columbia years. Dent suffered from diabetes in his later years, and continued to appear in later Stooges shorts through old footage even after he’d gone blind from the disease. He died in 1963.