[4][6] According to an article published in 1942 by the Harrisburg Telegraph, the brothers' transformation from newsboys to thespians occurred in 1934 when a party of passersby led by songwriter Gus Kahn encountered the pair hawking papers in front of The Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard.
Advised to report the next morning to United Artists, the brothers did so, and shortly thereafter made their uncredited screen debut in the 1934 Eddie Cantor musical comedy, Kid Millions.
[7] A rare opportunity to transcend the mostly uncredited and generally insubstantial film work that followed that debut came Davis's way in 1939 with the West Coast premiere of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.
In a production boasting "infallibly accurate [...] characterizations" from a cast "too numerous to mention,"[8] several reviewers nonetheless made a point of citing Davis's work,[9][8] as seen in this excerpt from The Hollywood Reporter: The presentation on a bare stage is by now an old story, but the spell woven over the audience by Frank Craven as narrator, and the delineations by James Spottswood, Tim Davis, Martha Scott, Thomas Coley, Tom Fadden, Anne Shoemaker, Helen Carew and all the others of the large cast made it possible to build without losing the audience.
[10]On December 14, 1942, roughly 4 months after the release of Bambi (and a year after U.S.'s entry into World War II), the trade publication Broadcasting reported that Davis had resigned from NBC Hollywood and joined the United States Navy.