DE LUXE THEATRE.

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 59, 7 September 1938, Page 8

DE LUXE THEATRE.

v > A Feast of Entertainment. •■

The exotic atmosphere of the interior of North China—rarely if ever before shown in a motion picture and particularly timely today with China in the headlines^ —comes to the screen in "West of Shanghai," a melodramatic thriller which commences on Friday at the De Luxe Theatre. Boris Karloff, chiefly familiar to movie audiences from his playing of "horror" pictures, is a war lord. He is a Chinese bandit general, and, fortunately, is not in the least horrible. The play revolves around the possession and ownership of an oil concession. Jim Hallett, an American played by Gordon Oliver, has discovered the field, borrowed money to develop it, but it is about to be foreclosed on *him because he has not enough cash. Myron Gait (Douglas Wood) and Gordon Creed (Ricardo Cortez), financiers, are in a race for the property and arrive at the field together, to find that General Wu Yen Fang (Karloff) is in possession of the adjacent village. It develops that'Hallet has once saved General Fang's life, and Fang repays him by seeing to it that Hallet becomes the complete owner of the oil wells. The feminine romantic interest is carried by Beverly Roberts, playing a young medical missionary, and a screen newcomer, Sheila Bromley, as a daughter of the financier Gait. The popular comedian, Joe E, Brown, has served out hjeaps of fun in his career, but rarely has he been as generous with his helpings as he is in Columbia's "Wide Open Faces," which is the second feature. As an amateur detective, Joe can get in plenty of trouble, and his current story finds him in just such a role. He gets mixed up with a wholesale shipment of metropolitan gangsters quite by accident; and in no time at all the situation is well out of hand. Such able and attractive performers as Lyda. Roberti, Alison Skipworth, Jane Wyman, Alan Baxter and Lucien Littlefield do much to enhance the general merriment.