PARAMOUNT WEEK

Evening Star, Issue 18720, 23 August 1924, Page 3

PARAMOUNT WEEK

SOME COMING PICTURES. The fourth annual Paramount week will he celebrated in New Zealand between September 1 and 16. During this time Paramount pictures will bo screened throughout New Zealand, and the local Paramount exhibitors fn every city and almost. every town in New Zealand will make special efforts to give picture patrons the very best that can bo had in screen entertainment. The idea of fourth annual Paramount is to stimulate the moving picture business generally, and it has been taken up whole-heartedly by showmen alhnost everywhere. This scheme, as sot out by Paramount, is one of the most important promoters of the film industry, and its benefit to theatre proprietors is fast becoming recognised. During the celebration of fourth animal Paramount week no fewer than nineteen lekding newspapers in this country will participate in the biggest campaign over launched in the interests of the moving picture. Looking back, picture-goers will agree that some of the screen’s greatest successes have come from the Paramount studios. Such pictures as ‘The Miracle Man,’ ‘The Sheik,’ ‘The Covered Waggon ' will never be forgotten. Moro recent successes are ‘The Call of the Canyon,’ Rex Beach’s ‘Big Brother,’ and : The Light That Failed ’ Budyard Kipling). For the future the following may no taken as a guide to some really worthwhile pictures:—‘ West of the Water Tower,’ from the novel which created such a sensation among fiction readers a few years ago; ‘The Humming Bird,’ with Gloria Swanson ; ‘ Shadows of Paris,’ with Pola Negri; ‘The Fighting Coward,’ from the play ‘Magnolia,’ by Booth Parking-. ton; ‘ The Heritage of the Desert,’ produced under the personal supervision of Zaue Grey; ‘The Loves of Pharaoh,’ a wonderful spectacle picture. With the excellent title of ‘ Bluff,’ Agnes Ayers will offer a remarkably clover society story —the story of a girl of the new era who brings New York to her feet. A remarkable travel story is registered in ‘Around the World in the Speejacks,’ which is now showing in New Zealand centres. ‘ The Stranger,’ adapted from one of John Galsworthy’s noted novels (‘ The First and the Last ’), featuring Richard Dix, Betty Compson, and Tully Marshall, is one of the strongest dramatic stories since Paramount’s ‘ The Miracle Man.’

In due course the most wonderful achievement in the history of the moving picture, ‘The Ten Commandments,’ by Cecil B. De Mille, will be released in this country. It is at present being shown to record houses on Broadway, and hero it has been received with greater enthusiasm than even ‘The Covered Waggon,’ One of the most remarkable things ever done on the screen shows the drying up of the Red Sea to let the Israelites pass through to escape the hordes of Pharaoh. A further big move has been made recently by Paramount, and that is the securing of D. W. Griffith’s services to produce pictures for Paramount. During the forthcoming year most of the above-mentioned pictures will bo screened at the Octagon and Empire Theatres.