Trivia: After working several odd jobs, Harry Langdon joined an Omaha medicine show and went on to spend 20 years traveling with minstrel shows, circuses, burlesque, and vaudeville; he had some success with a comedy act called "Jimmy's New Car." Langdon was in his late 30s when he joined Mack Sennett's film company in 1923. He quickly appeared in numerous two-reel comedies, in the course of which he developed his own screen persona: his childlike face covered by traditional pantomime white make-up, he wore a tightly buttoned jacket as though he were a boy who had outgrown it. Juvenile in appearance, he played the bewildered, clumsy, wide-eyed simpleton out of step with the behavior of normal adults, eerily baffled by erotic situations and naively trusting in the world's goodness. The character caught on, and by 1926 he was one of the Big Four of American screen comedy (along with Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton). His best work was done in collaboration with director Harry Edwards and writer Frank Capra. Langdon's enormous success fuelled his ego, and after a year or two he dispensed with Edwards and Capra and took sole responsibility for his films. Langdon was soon fired by his film company, after which he returned to vaudeville for almost two years. When he returned to Hollywood, the sound era was underway and he was out of touch with prevailing fashions. He went on to appear in numerous films as a character player, and also starred in dozen of talkie shorts, never reclaiming his earlier popularity.

Trivia: Actor Vernon Dent launched his career in stock companies and as one-third of a singing cabaret trio. Silent comedian Hank Mann, impressed by Dent's girth (250 pounds) and comic know-how, helped Vernon enter films in 1919. Dent starred in a 2-reel series at the Pacific Film Company, then settled in at Mack Sennett studios as a supporting player, generally cast as a heavy. During his Sennett years, Dent was most often teamed with pasty-faced comedian Harry Langdon, who became his lifelong friend and co-worker. Remaining with Sennett until the producer closed down his studio in 1933, Dent moved to Educational Pictures, where he was afforded equal billing with Harry Langdon; and when Langdon moved to Columbia Pictures in 1934, Dent followed, remaining a mainstay of the Columbia 2-reel stock company until 1953. Here he was featured with such comic luminaries as Andy Clyde, Buster Keaton, Hugh Herbert, Vera Vague, and especially the Three Stooges. Among Dent's dozens of talkie feature-film credits were W.C. Fields' Million Dollar Legs (1932) and You're Telling Me (1934); in one of his rare feature starring roles, Dent played a boisterous, wife-beating sailor in the 1932 "B" Dragnet Patrol. Well-connected politically in the Los Angeles area, Dent supplemented his acting income by running the concession stand at Westlake Park. Vernon Dent retired in the mid-1950s, due to total blindness brought about by diabetes; the ever-upbeat actor was so well-adjusted to his handicap that many of Dent's close friends were unaware that he was blind.

Trivia: Dimpled American silent-screen comedian Ruth Hiatt starred opposite Raymond McKee in Mack Sennett's 1926 Our Gang rip-off, The Smith Family series. By then, the 20-year-old actress was already a tried and true veteran, having begun her screen career at the age of nine with the Lubin Company in 1915. Voted a 1924 WAMPAS Baby Star by the Hollywood publicists (along with, among others Clara Bow), Hiatt starred opposite Lloyd Hamilton and Harry Langdon. In her feature debut, she was His First Flame (1927) (Langdon's of course) and was then teamed with strong-man Joe Bonomo in The Chinatown Mystery (1928), a fast and furious serial made for pennies by Poverty Row entrepreneur Trem Carr. In a (posed) scene-still from this hair-raising chapterplay, Bonomo is seen attempting to rescue Hiatt from a fast-approaching train, and she looks much the worse for wear. Hiatt, whose career in comedy two-reelers lasted well into the '30s and included The Three Stooges' Men in Black (1933), was married three times and eventually retired from the screen in the early '40s to operate a professional makeup business.

Trivia: An exotic-looking brunette leading lady of silent B-pictures, Peggy Montgomery is often confused with silent child star Baby Peggy, whose family name is Montgomery.