AMUSEMENTS

Grey River Argus, 13 October 1949, Page 2

AMUSEMENTS

Opera House

Finally to-night: "Whispering City,” Commencing to-morrow: “They Passed This Way,” starring Joel

McCrea and Frances Dee

Based on facts as well as fiction, the Enterprise studio uroduction, “They Passed This Way,” a tense and thrilling chapter of the old west commencing a' the Opera House tomorrow concerns itself with the dramatic man-hunt of Ross. McEwen, a glamorous westerner, who made just one slip away from the law. Starring Joel McCrea, as the strangest desperado the west has ever known, Frances Dee as the girl who braved shame and disgrace tn go with him into the wastelands is ably supported by Charles Bickford and Joseph Calleia. The story opens in the frontiei’ town of Santa Maria, in New Mexico, on the day Pat Garrett is welcomed as U.S. Marshall. Under his very nose Ross McEwen rides into town and, entering the bank demands and gets 2000 dollars in currency, leaving his 1.0. U. and an enraged banker behind. It is not long before Pat Garrert and an enraged posse get on McEwen's trail. In the first stage of his exciting journey of escape, McEwen is slowed up by his meeting with Fay Hollister, who has come out from the East to become a nurse at the new hospital at Alamagordo. And in the second stage he is held up by his heroic attempt to save the lives of a Mexican family desperately ill with diptheria. When Pat Garret finally catches up with him at the Mexican cabin, he does not arrest him. But McEwen, because of his great love fo r Fay, decides to give himself up and Garret assures him that a jury could not fail to treat lightly a man who had already shown his willingness to repay his monetary as well as his moral debt to humanity. Regent Theatre Finally To-night: “Three Daring Daughters.” Commencing to-morrow: “A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” If you were suddenly catapulted back into time and found yourself in Sixth Century Britain with King Arthur and his Round Table knights, you’d be as bewildered as Bing Crosby to whom exactly that happens in his new Paramount picture, “A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Bing plays the title role in the Technicolour, music-spiked production of Mark Twain’s immortal classic and is costarred in the film, with Rhonda Fleming, William Bendix and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. “A Yankee In King Arthur’s Court” is the kind of story that lends itself so well to dramatisation that it was the basis of a Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical a number of years ago, it was a silent motion picture in 1921 and it was filmed agaip in 1931 with Will Rogers. However, all three of these productions took a good many liberties with Mark Twain’s original story, which is not true of the new Paramount picture. This adaptation by Edmund Beloin hews closely to the novel and every effort was made to match the film story and its atmosphere to the Twain classic. In the Bing Crosby film, the story begins and ends in 1910, the year Twain wrote his novel. From the era the hero is hurled back to 528, just as in the original so that to-day’s picture might have been made the year the novel was published, if motion pictures at that time had to-day’s perfection of photography, sound recording alid technicolour—and Bing Crosby.