Harry F. Crane — A Survivor of the Old School (1914) 🇺🇸

Harry F. Crane, who is now playing the role of Louis XI in the Universal’s François Villon series, has supported such famous actors as Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, Stuart Robson, McKee Rankin, Frank Lawlor, Katie Estelle and Kittie Blanchard during his varied career.

He is one of the few survivors of the old school which has passed into history and his work is one of the delights of the present series, his age and general appearance qualify him to assume the king’s role with unusual success.

He was born in Baltimore, Md., and after the Civil War, in which he served as a drummer boy, went on the stage against the wishes of his father, who was a Baptist minister. He enacted the leading roles in such plays as Oliver Twist, Sea of Ice and The Black Brook. Later, urged by his father, he left the stage to take up the study of medicine. He became a graduate physician and practiced medicine for many years in Buffalo and finally, on account of his wife’s health, went to California.

Upon his arrival in Los Angeles he set aside all thought of medicine to return to his first love, the stage, but this time the motion picture stage. Mr. Crane is half brother of Honorable Joseph C. Sibley, ex-congressman and member of the Standard Oil Company.

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Selig’s “Blue Flame” Series

Ed. J. Le Saint is producing another of the “Blue Flame” series for the Selig company, The Black Diamond and during the course of the play, Guy Oliver takes three parts, an elderly man, his son and later on the grandson. Stella Razeto takes the part of one of the counterfeiters and gives one of her usually clever studies.

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German Goverment Keeps Film Records

The New York Sun of Sunday, October 25 prints a communication from one of its foreign correspondents to the effect that the Express Film Company, a connection of Pathé Frères, has been commissioned by the German government to take official moving pictures during the course of the war. These pictures are designed to disprove, the communication states, charges of German atrocities.

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To Film “The Old Homestead”

One of the most notable acquisitions of stage successes yet secured for the screen is Denman Thompson’s great rural drama, The Old Homestead, the film rights of which have just been obtained by the Famous Players Film Co. The Famous Players are now making preparations to produce the film version of this celebrated play in the old New Hampshire village which suggested the drama to its author, and to use the very house that is featured in the title of the subject.

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For Women Only

In the business district of Los Angeles, a motion-picture theater which restricts its patronage during the daytime exclusively to women and children has met with success. The policy of the house is to present only films which are clean and uplifting and at the same time provide a place which an unescorted woman need have no hesitancy in entering. Until six o’clock in the evening men are not admitted unless they accompany women, a rule which is rigidly adhered to.

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Little Kathie Fischer of the “Beauty Film” fame, has been missed about the studio for several days. She is recuperating from the effects of playing Cupid.

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Maclyn Arbuckle Talks at Stand

“Citizens, what I was going to say when they turned out the lights on me is this —,” was the way that Maclyn Arbuckle began his little talk to a blinking and gasping audience at the Strand theater, New York, on Friday evening, October 23. Arbuckle’s appearance was a distinct surprise to everyone, and the manner in which he made his entrance fairly dumb-founded them. The feature of the week was The County Chairman in which Arbuckle plays the titular role, and in one of the scenes he has the screen to himself. Just at this moment the house went dark, the spotlight flashed on the center of the stage, and there stood the “fat man” the same make-up in which he had been seen on the screen a moment before. He made a short speech a la Arbuckle style ending by saying, “Well, they’re through setting up the scenes back there now, an’ I gotta go back on the screen. Ain’t it hell?” As the picture started again where it left off the applause of some three thousand five hundred people told Arbuckle that he had made a big hit.

Collection: Motography Magazine, November 1914