INTIMATE ROYALTY

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22388, 29 April 1938, Page 5

INTIMATE ROYALTY

“Victoria The Great” Returning

For Brief Season

"Victoria the Great” has returned to Christchurch and begins to Civic. The film is a powerful dramatisation of the reign and incidentally the romance of the famous British sovereign with Prince Albert of SaxeCoburg and Gotha. Anna Neagle, the popular English film actress, appfears in the title role, starred with Anton Walbrook, the international stage and screen star, with Walter Billa. and H. B. Warner as featured players. The film emphasises the intensely human side of the Queen, Victoria’s love story is pictured in intimate detail. In her joyous girlhood, the queen is revealed as not a whit less vivacious and fond of pleasure than are the girls of our times. The film proves that the Victorian social atmosphere is by no means as drab as some writers have .seen fit to present it. Victoria loved to dance, to ride, liked horses and dogs. This may be a revelation to the average movie patron, who generally thinks of Victoria as a stern, black-clad widow altogether submerged in the affairs of Empire. That the Queen had a lively sense of humour is indicated by the scene where she derives much amusement from watching Lord Melbourne, her dignified Prime Minister, portrayed by H. B. Warner, astride a wooden horse, while posing for his portrait. Rilla is cast as Prince Ernest, Albert’s brother, with whom he suffers all the agonies of seasickness when the two are en route for England on a Channel paddle steamer, another of the film’s lighter moments. • The married life of Victoria and Prince Albert lasted 27 years. It has for background the series of historical events that made the Queen’s reign the most notable in British history. Highlights are numerous, but perhaps the most sensationally effective episode is when a would-be assassin fires at the Queen and her Consort guards her. with his body from the bullet. Infinite pathos develops in the scene

of Prince Albert’s death, so realistically acted by Anna Neagle and Walbrook, as she kneels apd clings desperately to the dying man in a hysteria of uncontrolled grief. Exciting in the highest degree is the episode in which Victoria defies the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, arid threatens to abdicate, rather than permit him to send to Washington a challenge regarding the Trent Affair, which would have, plunged the northern United States and Great Britain into war—and wins her point!

Ruth Chatterton and Anton Walbrook, starred ,in the new drama of the Paris underworld, “The Rat,” speak French fluently. Although the production was filmed in the French capital, neither was asked to use a single French word. The-film is based on the New York and London stage hit by Ivor Noyello and Constance Collier.

Merle Oberon’s beautiful colouring will be seen by film fans for the first time in “The Divorce of Lady X,” Alexander Korda’s gay technicolour comedy. Korda was delighted to find her complexion peculiarly suited to colour pictures.

One of the most thrilling scenes in “The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel,” the new London film, is that which reconstructs a sitting of the dreaded Revolutionary Tribunal. The hall is crowded with ragged “citizens," among whom is the dreaded Scarlet Pimpernel, played by the new Star, Barry K. Barries, who appears in this production in a number of remarkable disguises..