Jed Prouty Movies
American actor Jed Prouty got his first taste of show business as a teenaged performer at Austin Stone's Museum (a sort of flea circus-variety show concern) in his native Boston. Working for years as a vaudeville song and dance man, Prouty made it to Broadway in 1921, appearing occasionally in silent films. The actor was prominently cast as a stuttering actor's agent Uncle Jed in his first talking picture, the Oscar-winning Broadway Melody (1929), though he found it expedient to drop the stammer for his subsequent films. Most often in bits and character roles in A-pictures -- as, for example, the unctuous columnist in A Star is Born (1937) -- Prouty was firmly in the lead in the Jones Family series of B-comedies filmed by 20th Century-Fox. Prouty played the Jones paterfamilias, with Spring Byington as his wife, in nearly all seventeen pictures in the Jones series. Jed Prouty is also familiar to Alice Faye fans for his antic appearance in Ms. Faye's Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), wherein he was made up to resemble silent comedian Ford Sterling for the film's slapstick chase sequences. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1921
Comedy was not the forte of great character actor Lionel Barrymore, and this picture, based on the novel by Arnold Bennett, suffers as a result. When his valet, Henry Leek (Thomas Braidon) dies, famed English artist Priam Farll (Barrymore) takes on his identity to escape the grasping romantic clutches of Lady Sophia Entwistle (Octavia Broske). He attends his own funeral but escapes before the tearful Lady Sophia can see him. Later Farll, as Leek, meets widow Alice Challice (Doris Rankin, Barrymore's real-life wife), who had answered a matrimonial ad of the valet's. They fall in love and marry, but to Farll's dismay, he is forced to return to painting to make money. Even though he is recognized through his work he is loathe to admit his real identity until it develops that Leek already had a wife and two children. Finally he proves that he is Farll, but only if he is allowed to officially remain dead so that Lady Sophia will stay away. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lionel Barrymore, Diana Manners, (more)
