MUCH-DISCUSSED PICTURE

Evening Star, Issue 20993, 6 January 1932, Page 2

MUCH-DISCUSSED PICTURE

1 SEED ’ COMING TO ST. JAMES ‘ Seed ’ is probably the most discussed picture to come to Dunedin for a very long time. Heading the new programme at the St. Janies on Friday, it is a film whose coming has been anticipated with the greatest interest by all picturegoers. Yet its theme is by no means new; there is little in the situations which it provides that have much of novelty about them. But it is considered to be one of the best pictures that the St. James has ever offered. For one thing, it deals with a problem that is a real problem to most men and women of to-day. In this film they are not taken on any fanciful flights of imagination or treated to the delectation of fairy dances. The things that ‘ Seed ’ deals of are the real bread-and-butter things of everyday _ real life, and because of that the picture makes a much greater appeal than have many other fine films that have set out with much more ambitious missions.

Essentially, this is a simple and homely picture, just as all the things that really matter in life are simple and homely things. None of us are concerned so much with things that happen to other people, or with the things that could happen only to characters in plays and never to ourselves as we are with those things that can and do happen to us. It is our own troubles and difficulties that wo always like to talk about, and it is just those things that this picture deals with. It deals with them with a deftness of touch that makes it hard to understand why authority should have recommended it for adults only. Perhaps children would find it dull; certainly it has nothing in it that is offensive or harmful. It is a problem picture without the sermon. It does not adopt any tutelary poses nor does it read lessons to tho < people who see and’ hear it. But, quite emphatically, it gives them something to think about. It has certainly a message to deliver, and it delivers it in the clearest possible manner. What inferences one draws from it and what influence it has on one depend on oneself. It is magnificently mounted and splendidly acted. It is engrossingly interesting. There is not a moment from the beginning until the final fade out, when the attention wanders for an instant or the mind leaves close consideration of the very vital facts of life that are involved. The picture contains a triangle story, but _ that is merely incidental to the main theme. In this picture the people are the puppets and not the of destiny. They are'Very much as ordinary people in ordinary homes are; the things that happen to them are the ordinary things that happen to ordinary people; and the lesson that the picture teaches is the lesson that is enacted about us so often in ordinary life and in so very obvious a manner that wo have overlooked it perhaps for that very reason. Most of us do not see very far m front of our noses. ‘Seed’ supplies the necessary optical assistance.