Margaret Prussing (1915) 🇺🇸

From the staid dignity of the acting of the old English plays of college dramatics to the dare-devil “stunts” of motion picture actress, is a leap, but one that Miss Margaret Prussing, the latest selected for leading roles in the Edison Stock Company, has successfully bridged with characteristic energy.

Her career is unique inasmuch as, after making a successful debut on the legitimate stage while still a college girl, she left the stage to go back to complete her course of two years more at Bryn Mawr. Eight or nine old English dramas are staged by the Bryn Mawr students for which they painstakingly prepare for during a whole year. The plays are given at the famous May Day spectacle. It was due to the marked talent for acting that Miss Prussing displayed in this exacting style of drama and acting that determined her stage career.

During her college vacations she made her first stage appearance in Chicago as the stenographer in The Gentleman from Mississippi, where she understudied the leading woman, and when the opportunity presented itself, played that role with accredited skill. That was five years ago. She dutifully spent the next two years in college when she left to join the Southern company playing in Seven Days.

Three months at home with an unsuccessful record as a housekeeper and she was back again in Belasco’s The Woman as general understudy, where she gained a broad technical experience. Her first motion picture experience came in the summer with Éclair when she left to go with Charlotte Walker in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, later in Loretty, and then a summer season with the Selig Stock, when Wm. A. Brady [William A. Brady] sent for her to play Meg in Little Women, the stage drama.

She returned again to the screen to play leads with Kalem and various companies until she began with the Edison company last October where she did commendable work as the adventuress in “The Glory of Clementina,” as Priscilla in “The Landing of the Pilgrims,” and in the forthcoming “Arcadian Maid,” where athletic agility is shown in riding. She is cast also for the lead in the Edison three-reeler, “The Deadly Hate,” with Marc MacDermott.

Enthused still with all the direct and frankly engaging spirit of the college girl, and with a keen and quick susceptibility as to character values, there is good reason to believe that her large and expressive brown eyes and beauty will register well an individual personality and popularity.

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“Shadows”

Punchinello one-reel comedy in which shadows and reality each have a different version of the story to tell.

Reviewed by Margaret I. MacDonald.

The excellence of this little comedy released through the Kriterion Service, wins for it a review all to itself. It has been produced by Henry Travers, with Kathryn Sheldon and Tom Ward impersonating distinctive types. The comedy is built around the tell-tale quality of shadows, emphasizing with comic effect their remarkable tendency toward stretching the truth. The idea is a clever one, and the treatment given the subject in this particular instance is original.

The play is, strictly speaking, straight comedy, which gets considerable of its fun out of a couple of eccentric types that have been introduced in the leading roles. Across from the Jones’s there lives an old maid Busybody, whose window conveniently faces a window of one of the living rooms of the Jones’s house. One evening Mr. Jones bidding his wife an affectionate goodbye hurries away to his club. Mrs. Jones shortly afterward accompanies a friend to the theater, thereby affording ample opportunity for the maid-of-all-work to entertain her beau who has been waiting patiently on the back doorsteps.

And now for the play of the shadows, which really starts at the departure of Mr. Jones. Busybody has witnessed the silhouette on the window shade, of the Jones’s kissing, and being at the rear end of the house she has failed to note Mrs. Jones’ departure. Hence the awful significance of the story of the shadows, which in the inflated imagination of Busybody is the prelude to a frightful matrimonial tangle.

Her nerves withstand the shock of what the shadows tell, kissing, cigarette smoking, etc.; until the maid and the man rocking gaily back and forth, a sandwich in one hand and a glass in the other, accidentally topple backward off the couch, when propriety and the shadows part company altogether, and Busybody with a wild and ghastly glare reels from her seat by the window and falls in a heap on the floor. She recovers her equilibrium, however, in time to waylay Mr. Jones on his return, and reveal the dreadful truth.

Following this are a series of incidents that can be easily imagined when Mrs. Jones is confronted with the debris of her supposed misdeeds, the real offenders are extricated, the one from the recesses of a box couch, and the other from a clothes closet, and angrily dismissed from the scene, and the shadows conclude their play with a duplicate of the opening scene, leaving Busybody to ponder on the idiosyncrasies of human nature.

The production was made at the All Comedy studio, and is an early March release.

Scene from “Shadows” (Punchinello).

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Sessue Hayakawa to support Ina Claire.

Mr. Samuel Goldfish announces that the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co. has engaged the famous Japanese photodramatic artist, Sessue Hayakawa, to play an important role in the production in which Miss Ina Claire is destined to make her screen debut. The title of this production and the entire cast will be announced in the near future.

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Gilligham plans $50,000 theater.

The United Theater Company of Grand Rapids, Mich., have had plans prepared for a big moving picture theater which it is to build in that city. It is estimated that $50,000 will be involved in erecting the house. Work on the building will begin early in next May, and the location of the structure will be on Monroe avenue, N. W.

Both the interior and exterior will be handsomely decorated, and a big pipe-organ as well as an orchestra of several pieces will be used to furnish selections for the pictures. The United Company hope to have the theater in operation late in the summer or early in the fall. The Orpheum and the Columbia theaters are also owned and controlled by the United Theater Company.

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Columbus Lyceum to open with “Satan Sanderson.”

Anderson and Ziegler’s Lyceum Theatre, Columbus, Ohio, will open as a motion picture theatre with “Satan Sanderson,” the first release of the Metro Pictures Corporation. A magnificent stage setting, pipe organ and new projection equipment has been installed. Ten, fifteen and twenty-five cent admission prices prevail.

Collection: Moving Picture World, March 1915