- published: 27 Aug 2014
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Henry Richard "Huntz" Hall (August 15, 1920; – January 30, 1999) was an American radio, theatrical, and motion picture performer noted primarily for his roles in the "Dead End Kids" movies, such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), which gave way to the "The Bowery Boys" movie franchise, a prolific and highly successful series of comedies in the 1940s and 1950s.
Henry Richard Hall was born in 1920 in New York City to Joseph Patrick Hall, an Irish immigrant air-conditioner repairman, and his wife Mary Ellen Mullen. The 14th of 16 children, he was nicknamed "Huntz" because of his Teutonic-looking nose.
Hall attended Catholic schools and started performing on radio at age 5.
He appeared on Broadway in the 1935 production of Dead End, a play written and directed by Sidney Kingsley. Hall was then cast along with the other Dead End Kids in the 1937 film Dead End, directed by William Wyler and starring Humphrey Bogart.
Hall later played the increasingly buffoonish Horace DeBussy "Sach" Jones in 48 "Bowery Boys" films, gaining top billing when his longtime partner, Leo Gorcey, left the series in 1956.
Robert "Bobby" Jordan (April 1, 1923 – September 10, 1965) was an American actor, born in Harrison, New York, most notable for being a member of the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys.
Bobby Jordan was a talented toddler and by the time he was six years old, he could sing, tap dance and play the saxophone. At the age of four, he was working in an early film version of A Christmas Carol.
His mother took him to talent shows in and around Harrison, New York. He also modeled for newspaper and magazine advertisements, and appeared in short films and radio programs. In the late 1920s, his family moved to the upper west side of Manhattan. In 1929, he was cast as Charles Hildebrand in the 1929 Broadway play, Street Scene.
Though he was the youngest, Jordan was the first of the boys who made up the Dead End Kids to work in films, with a role in a 1933 Universal short. In 1935, he became one of the original Dead End Kids by winning the role of Angel in Sydney Kingsley's Broadway drama Dead End, about life in the slums of the east side New York City. The play was performed at the Belasco Theatre, and ran for three years with over 600 performances. He appeared for the first season and the beginning of the second, but left in mid-November 1936. He returned in time to join the others in 1937 in Hollywood to make the movie version of the play, starring big names such as Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrea, Sylvia Sidney and Claire Trevor.
Actors: John Hart (actor), Louis Hayward (actor), Edgar Bergen (actor), Lou Antonio (actor), Larry Hankin (actor), Michael Ansara (actor), Dick Clark (actor), Xavier Cugat (actor), Andy Devine (actor), Busby Berkeley (actor), Fritz Feld (actor), James Brown (actor), Leo Gorcey (actor), Huntz Hall (actor), George Jessel (actor),
Plot: An athlete, a campus militant, a black model, and an American Indian are picked by a computer (shaped like a woman) to form a rock group called the Phynx and go on tour in Albania where American show biz people have been kidnapped by Communists. Some of the stars that the phony band rescues: Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan (the most famous movie Tarzan and Jane), Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall (the Bowery Boys), Ed Sullivan, James Brown, Colonel Sanders, Guy Lombardo, Andy Devine, Ruby Keeler, Edgar Bergen, Butterfly McQueen, Jay Silverheels (Tonto), Rudy Vallee, Xavier Cugat, Trini Lopez, Dick Clark, Richard Pryor, Harold "Oddjob" Sakata, George Jessel, and Rhona Barrett. Warner Bros. Studios thought it was so bad that they decided at the last minute not to release it!
Keywords: albania, castle, communist, computer, copenhagen-denmark, espionage, kidnapping, london-england, orgy, recording