His first contact with motion pictures was in 1928, when he was part of the first foreign-language shorts in sound produced by Warner Bros.

Orth's first major screen credit was in Prairie Thunder, a Dick Foran western, in 1937.

Among his better roles were the newspaper man Cary Grant telephones early in His Girl Friday, one of the quartet singing "Gary Owen" in They Died with Their Boots On (thereby giving Errol Flynn as Gen. Custer the idea of associating the tune with the 7th Cavalry), and as the little man carrying the sign reading "The End Is Near" throughout Colonel Effingham's Raid.

A short, plump, round-faced man, often smoking a cigar, Orth as Faraday wore his own dark-rimmed spectacles, though rarely in feature films.

Orth took a position in radio in the fall of 1947 when he became production director with Sun Country Broadcasting Company in Arizona.