Trivia: Joan Weldon was lucky enough as an actress to get in briefly at the end of the Hollywood studio system, make some good movies (and one great one), and then land on her feet in musical theater, which is where she wanted to be in the first place. Born Joan Louise Welton in San Francisco, she was the daughter of a prominent attorney. As a child, she showed a keen interest in music and studied piano and voice. She joined the chorus of the San Francisco Grand Opera Company and later sang with the Civic Light Opera Company. It was during a performance with the latter that she was spotted by screenwriter-turned-producer Stanley Rubin (Macao, The Narrow Margin, River of No Return), who arranged for her to have a screen test at 20th Century Fox. The studio passed on her, however, because it wasn't in the market for vocalists. Meanwhile, she appeared on television as a singer on the series This Is Your Music and later crossed paths with William T. Orr, the son-in-law of Warner Bros. co-founder Jack L. Warner (and later the executive in charge of the company's television division), which led to a contract with Warners. Her last name was changed to Weldon and she narrowly missed out being cast as a victim of Vincent Price's malevolence in André De Toth's 3-D horror classic House of Wax. Instead, her contribution to the 3-D movie craze was as the second female lead in De Toth's The Stranger Wore a Gun amid a cast that included veterans Randolph Scott, Claire Trevor, and George Macready and future stars Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Weldon was also loaned out to MGM in the Sigmund Romberg bio-musical Deep in My Heart (1954), and ended up cut from the picture for her trouble. Weldon was cast in a series of Westerns, including The Command and Riding Shotgun, but her greatest contribution to the screen was as the female lead in Gordon Douglas' Them! The first and best of Hollywood's radioactive/giant monster movies, the film relied more on characters than most others in the genre and featured an extraordinary cast, including one Oscar-winner (Edmund Gwenn), one Oscar-nominee (James Whitmore), one future TV star (James Arness) in the lead, and another two (Fess Parker and Leonard Nimoy) in small roles. Weldon broke some cinematic ground, playing a notably intelligent and assertive female character who also happened to be beautiful. "We took the movie very seriously," she recalled in a 2004 interview, "exactly like any other drama." Of her co-star Edmund Gwenn, she said, "He was the sweetest man, and he was quite elderly by then and riven with arthritis, but he worked as hard as any of us; when the director called 'Action,' he did everything asked of him, all of the climbing and the walking through the desert. It was just that, when they called 'Cut!,' he had a manservant that would rush over to him and get him to a chair." Weldon's career in movies ended with the expiration of her Warner Bros. contract in 1954. She resumed her singing career with Jimmy McHugh and was later in the road company production of The Music Man, playing Marian Paroo. Weldon made her way to Broadway in Kean, starring opposite Alfred Drake, and opened the State Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York playing opposite John Raitt in a scene from Carousel. She later toured with Fess Parker in Oklahoma and, in 1967, played the lead in a production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow at Lincoln Center. Weldon retired from the stage in 1980, but was still well remembered by opera and musical fans in the early 2000s. She also attracted a crowd when she turned up as a member of the audience in March 2004 at a rare 3-D screening of The Stranger Wore a Gun in New York.

Trivia: Leo Gordon cut one of the toughest, meanest, and most memorable figures on the screen of any character actor of his generation -- and he came by some of that tough-guy image naturally, having done time in prison for armed robbery. At 6 feet 2 inches tall, and with muscles to match, Gordon was an implicitly imposing screen presence, and most often played villains, although when he did play someone on the side of the angels he was equally memorable. Early in his adult life, Gordon did, indeed, serve a term at San Quentin for armed robbery; but after his release he studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and was a working actor by the early 1950's. His first credited screen appearance (as Leo V. Gordon) was on television, in the Hallmark Hall of Fame production of "The Blue And White Lamp", with Frank Albertson and Earl Rowe, in 1952. His early feature film appearances included roles in China Venture (1953) and Gun Fury (1953), the latter marking the start of his long association with westerns, which was solidified with his villainous portrayal in the John Wayne vehicle Hondo (1953). It was in Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), which was shot at San Quentin, that a lot of mainstream filmgoers discovered precisely how fearsome Gordon could be, in the role of "Crazy Mike Carnie." One of the most intimidating members of a cast that was overflowing with tough guys (and which used real cons as extras), Gordon's career was made after that. Movie work just exploded for the actor, and he was in dozens of pictures a year over the next few years, as well as working in a lot of better television shows, and he also earned a regular spot in the series Circus Boy, as Hank Miller. More typical, however, was his work in the second episode of the western series Bonanza, "Death on Sun Mountain", in which he played a murderous profiteer in Virginia City's boomtown days. Once in a while, directors triped to tap other sides of his screen persona, as in the western Black Patch (1957). And at the start of the next decade, Gordon got one of his rare (and best) non-villain parts in a movie when Roger Corman cast him in The Intruder (1962), in the role of Sam Griffin, an onlooker who takes it upon himself to break up a race riot in a small southern town torn by court-ordered school integration. But a year later, he was back in his usual villain mold -- and as good as ever at it -- in McLintock!; in one of the most famous scenes of his career, he played the angry homesteader whose attempt to lynch a Native American leads to a head-to-head battle with John Wayne, bringing about an extended fight featuring the whole cast in a huge mud-pit. Gordon was still very busy as an actor and sometime writer well into the 1980's and early 1990's. He played General Omar Bradley in the mini-series War And Remembrance, and made his final screen appearance as Wyatt Earp in the made-for-television vehicle The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Hollywood Follies. He passed away in 2000 of natural causes.

Trivia: American actor Jay Novello began his film career with Tenth Avenue Kid (1938). Small, wiry and mustachioed, Novello found a home in Hollywood playing shifty street characters and petty thieves; during the war he displayed a friendlier image as a Latin-American type, appearing as waiters and hotel clerks in innumerable Good Neighbor films set south of the border. Once the war was over, it was back to those scraggly little characters, even in such period pieces as The Robe (1953), in which Novello played the unsavory slave dealer who sold Victor Mature to Richard Burton. Adept in TV comedy roles as meek milquetoasts and henpecked husbands, Novello was a particular favorite of Lucille Ball, who used the actor prominently in both I Love Lucy (first as the man duped by the "Ethel to Tillie" seance, then as a gondolier in a later episode) and The Lucy Show (as a softhearted safecracker). Jay Novello remained active in films into the '60s, as scurrilous as ever in such fantasy films as The Lost World (1960) and Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961); he also stayed busy in such TV programs as The Mothers in Law, My Three Sons and McHale's Navy, playing a recurring role in the latter series as a resourceful Italian mayor.