ENTERTAINMENTS

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

OPERA HOUSE—-Now Showing: “MIRACLES FOR SALE.” | Weird mysteries of the spirit world,; uncanny illusions of professional i magicians, and modern witchcraft! form the bizarre setting of “Miracles j For Sale,” fantastic detective story | laid amid a group of professional: magicians and clairvoyants, to be! screened at the Opera House to-night, to-morrow and Thursday, with Robert Young, Florence Rice, Frank Craven, Henry Hull and .Lee Bowman in the cast. Young plays a master magician with a penchant of exposing fraudulent spirit mediums, who, through plans to expose a mystery woman from Europe, finds himself obliged to turji detective and help the police find the murderer of a strange dembnologist. Most of the action takes place behind the scenes in magic shops and theatres. The underlying detective story is embellished with such illusions as “Sawing a Woman in Half,” the “Headless Woman,” ectoplasm, or materialisation of a ghost, and the bullet trick in which Miss Rice catches a bullet, fired at her, in her teeth. Hull appears in a number of bizarre make-ups, one of which actually changes the colour of his eyes. Craven plays the principal character comedy role as Young’s < small town father, and Frederic Wor-| lock, famous British and Broadway stage actor, comes to the screen to play Dr. Sabbatt, mysterious demonologis t. Others in the cast include Cliff Clark, Astrid Allwyn, Walter Kingsford, Gloria Holden and William Demarest. Settings include" the fantastic apartment of the dead dempnologist, with his weird cabalistic inscription and magic circle; the shop, pt' Young, where stage illusions are built for performing magicians; the odd apartment of the magician, Tauro, ’ murdered, according to police physic? fans, four's hours before : he was seen actually talking to tlie police, and .backstage in a theatre during the progress of a professional magic show. REGENT—Commencing Wednesday: “HELL’S KITCHEN” and “I SEE ICE.” More sympathetically presented than they ever have'been before, the “Dead ; End” Kids are the central characters of “Hell’s Kitchen.” The'stoi'y is also 1 unusual in that it includes as a foil for the boisterous youngsters an adult character who is in effect just such a kid grown much older, much wiser I and much tougher. This character is!

played by Stanley Fields. The other leading roles are taken by Margaret Lindsay, Ronald Reagan, Grant Mitchell and Frankie Burke, the erstwhile i Cagney impersonator being in this ; instance added to the gang, in a series, of absorbing sequences 'which [range from the luridly melodramatic to the hilariously humorous, the picture tells of the regeneration of the thuggish racketeer played by Fields as a result of the sympathy aroused in him by the tough but essentially good inmates of a shelter home for hoys. The boys, the leaders among whom are depicted by the “Dead Enders,” are just' such kids as Fields realises he was himself as a youngster. They'are'half-starved and brutally treated and eventually they revolt against their intolerable lot. Fields’ original interest in the shelter home has been that of a racketeer who has just come across something from which he can make some money, but it hasn’t taken long for the boys to arouse in him a rough but genuine paternal interest! And he proves this effectively when he voluntarily surrenders himself for a prison term just so that he can help in defending and exonerating the boys from the consequences of their revolt. “I SEE ICE.”, George Formby is an amateur photographer who runs into trouble as only George can. His adventures, land him in debt, into prison and crash into the middle of an international ice hockey match — : as the referee, of all persons, and what a referee! But they always find him a charming wife, and Formby himself finds time to sing four Formby fun songs, accompanying himself on the banjo. All in. all, it’s real fun. Kay Walsh, Cyril Ritchard and Betty Stockfield head the big supporting cast. ’Phone 601 arid reserve your seats.