Tell It To the Marines!

Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s “Tell It To the Marines,” an interbellum silent film featuring the great Lon Chaney, began filming in the summer of 1926, specifically running from 7 June to 3 August, for a Christmas weekend release. The first film made with the full cooperation of the service, its shooting locations included Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and aboard the top-of-the-line Tennessee-class dreadnought USS California (BB-44) while on a port call at San Francisco, with active duty servicemembers filling in as extras. I give you, some 100 years ago, the Corps’ two best-known bulldogs of the day: then-Brigadier General Smedley “Ol’ Gimlet Eye” Darlington Butler, then the commander of MCRDSD, and depot mascot “Sergeant Major Jiggs,” the first bulldog to “serve” in the Marine Corps, snapped between scenes in the filming of “Tell It To the Marines” in the summer of 1926. Note the two MoHs on Butler’s salad bar. From the Smedley Butler Collection (COLL/3124), Marine Corps Archives &…