REGENT THEATRE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 48, Issue 2887, 31 March 1939, Page 5

REGENT THEATRE

DOUBLE BILL TO-NIGHT SUBMARINE DRAMA COMING GREAT FILM FOR TO-MORR'OW An all-star cast headed' by Ray Milland, Dorothy Lamour, Bob Burns and Martha Raye, a setting in romantic southern Mexico, six new songs from Mexico’s most popular composer, and a gay story about mad Hollywood people are the main attractions of Paramount’s musical fiesta, “Tropic Holiday,” which screens to-night at the Regent Theatre. In this comedy, a bored screen writer, Milland, runs away to Mexico to forget his work and finds Dorothy Lamour who makes him forget everything.

A murder mystery set in a college background, “Extortion” offers a representative assortment of campus characters involved in as absorbing a “whodunit” as anything the screen has yet revealed. The new Columbia attraction, which also screens to-night was ably directed by Lambert Hillyer. Its principal characters include a football player, a college editor, a pretty co-ed, her physics professor father, a football coach, and the most disliked person in the school, the proctor. It is the proctor who is murdered, after building for himself a list of enemies unequalled in recent mystery dramas. Everybody is suspect, and with good reason. The football player has been expelled; the editor has lost his girl friend to the proctor; the professor has been induced to speculate his life savings-; and the proctor is trying to replace the - football’ <?oach with his own candidate.

“Submarine D-l,” a melodrama dealing with the exploits of Uncle Sam’s undersea boats and ; the gallant lads who man them, will thrill enthusiastic audiences at the Regent Theatre, to-morrow, where this Warner Bros, feature has its first local Showing. The picture is authentic as well as stirring, for it was made with the complete co-operation of the Navy, which turned over to the movie-mak-ers all its facilities at Newport, R. 1., Cocos Coco in the Panama Canal Zone, and' San Diego, California, There are scores of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and airplanes taking part, and many hundreds of gobs and marines are seen going through their peace-time and war-time duties. So “Submarine D-l” seems to be just what its makers term it —best “service” film Warner Bros, have ever turned out. Pat O’Brien and George Brent are co-starred, and in a part that seems to be quite as important is young Wayne Morris, the lad who shot up to top ranking recently on the strength of one picture, Galahad.” Then, too, in the cast are such well-known troupers as Frank McHugh, Doris Weston, Regis Toomey and Henry O’Neill. (But after all, it is the “D-l” itself—a new Navy sub. which also bears the title of “Dolphin,” that is the hero of the piece. The U-boat seems to take on almost a human personality and the audiences cheered when it was brought to the surface safely after having been rammed and sunk in a war game.