"North West Mounted Police"

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 157, 29 March 1941, Page 16

"North West Mounted Police"

“ATORTH-WEST Mounted Police,” the ' Cecil B. de Mille technicolour film that is to come to the. Regent Theatre next change, was shown privately this week to an audience that included the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom, Sir Harry Batterbee, and the High Commissioner for Canada, Dr. W. Riddell.

De Mille is a great showman, and his newest film has all the attributes of a film that delights the vast majority of moviegoers. To begin with it is coloured, lovely Canadian scenery forming the background for the picturesque Indians and police in scarlet uniforms. Then it has 10 stars: Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll. Paulette Goddard, Preston Foster, Robert Preston. Akim Tamiroff, Lynne Overman, George Bancroft, Lon Chaney, jum, and Walter Hampden. Thirdly it has a straightforward plot of love, fiction and adventure.

Cooper has the role of a Texas Ranger who penetrates to the Canadian backwoods in search of a fugitive murderer and arrives at an outpost where his quarry is stirring up trouble with the French Canadians and Indians just in time to assist the mounties fight down the revolt. It is a part right into Gary Cooper’s hands; Madeleine Carroll photographs beautifully in colour, and the talent of the actors in the minor roles results in their being unusually vivid.

Wells's Story Of A Simple Soul Out Of His Element WHEN H. G. Wells wrote “Kipps” ’’ in 1905, it caused a controversy, split his public into rival camps, those who wanted the imaginative Wells, writer of fantasy and imagination in novels like “The Time Machine” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau,", those who preferred the new Wells, the man who obviously had more to say than could be expressed in a scientific romance, this author who bad revealed a brilliant insight into the petty normalities of humanity and a keen perception of the failings and strivings of the little man.

By casting Michael Redgrave as Kipps, in the production which is now nearing completion at Shepherd’s Bush studios, the producers have placed a great star in a great role. Wells’s character is known throughout the English-speaking world. This Kipps is a “simple soul” blundering awkwardly, hesitatingly through life, a shop assistant with a small-town mind caught momentarily in the pretences and artificialities of provincial- society, testing dubiously the delights of life above his station. His ultimate salvation is his own honest simplicity, his realization that his happiness lies where he started, in the confines of his own narrow small-town world.