"[4][2] In 1918, he starred in, stage-managed and rewrote an Oliver Morosco-Elmer Harris-Harry Plani production titled Look Pleasant, playing at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles.

Three of his better remembered roles were as the theatre manager driven to distraction by James Cagney's character in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the local constable who throws the entire cast in jail and winds up there himself in the Howard Hawks classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, and as Morrow, the drunken poet in the restaurant who "knows when [he's] been a skunk" and takes Longfellow Deeds on a "bender" in Mr.

[8] The New York Times film critic Mordaunt Hall wrote that "This clever comedian runs away with the acting laurels" in Big City Blues (1932).

[9] He played John Barsad in the 1935 David O. Selznick production of A Tale of Two Cities, starring Ronald Colman.

For his contributions to the film industry, Catlett was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 8, 1960, with a motion pictures star located at 1713 Vine Street.