ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 167, 14 June 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

' METEOR THEATRE. “COMET OVER BROADWAY.” “Comet Over Broadway/’ the Warncf Bros, drama which is now showing at the Meteor Theatre, was adapted from Faith Baldwin’s Cosmopolitan Magazine story by Mark Dellinger and Robert Buckner, an array of writing talent such as is seldom assembled on one picture. Kay Francis heads the cast of, “Comet Over Broadway,” which includes such brilliant, players 'as lan Hunter, John Litel, Minna Gombel, Donald Crisp, the capable little nine-year-old Sybil Jason, and many others. Busby Berkeley, who recently guided the production of “Garden of the Moon,” directed. The Title of this picture may be taken quite literally, too, as the highly dramatic story deals, with the comet-like" career of an actress, who, at the height of her greatest fame, gives it up to make amends to the husband who she has wronged. Posed' against a background that -shifts from a small midwestern town, through-a series of up anc downs where the actress gets her nrs„ stage experience, on to London where sno first gains fame, back to Broadway and the bright lights which burn all too briefly for her and back to the old- homo town, the story moves swiftly and, surely to its powerful dramatic climax. Thrilling action is the keynote ot the second full-length feature, “Invisible Stripes,” which has in the starring roles such popular players as George Raft, William Holden, Humphrey Bogart, Jane Byran and Flora Robson. MAYFAIR THEATRE. “DANGER FLICIIT.” Thrills are the theme song of “Danger Flight,” the latest- Tailspin Tommy film now showing at the Mayfair Theatre. “Danger Flight,” fourth in the Tailspin Tommy series, dramatises the building of model aeroplanes and shows how youngsters of to-day come to love and understand aviation through models. Primarily it is (he story of Tailspin Tommy’s Air Scouts, a young organisation similar to the Boy Scouts, and tells of the regeneration of Whitey, who gives up his gang to join the Scouts of the Air. With Tommy as his guide and hero, Whitey becomes leader of the Scouts, and things are running smoothly until his gangster brother sees a chance to use the Scouts and their model ’planes to work a racket, and Whitey unwittingly helps him. A thrilling climax ensues when Tommy embarks on a mercy flight with gangsters plotting to trap him and only Whitey and his model plane can save the flier, “Girls on Probation,” a Warner Bros, production now screening at the Mayfair Theatre with a cast headed by Jane Bryan and . Ronald Reagan, is a vivid, . pulsating melodrama which also presents fairly and sympathetically—-perhaps for the first time in a motion picture—the workings of the much misunderstood and often maligned system of probation. Most of the offenders granted probation are, ■of course, undoubtedly guilty of the crimes of which they have been convicted, but the Warner picture makes its argument for the system even_ more effec-tive-than it might "bo ordinarily by telling the story of an innocent girl who was being railroaded toward a prison term. STATE THEATRE'. “ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE.” Ohe of the most dramatic sequences in “On the Night of the Fire,” which shows to-day at - the State Theatre, shows the star Ralph Richardson walking down tho dark, empty street in a windstorm,' and entering the house of a man who has been trying to blackmail him. Dust is raised and swept into his face by tho wind. Old . newspapers fly past him.. In the distance, behind, him, the. sky is lit up by a tire which is ravaging a. section of, the city.' It is indeed the night of the fire—the night he chooses, to. kill. the blackmailer. Henry Oscar (flays the, blackmailer who threatens to expose Richardson to the police for a theft he has previously cominittoecl. The thoft amounted to £IOO and was the issue of a Hum-drum existence and- a discontented life. With this money he had hoped to give up his barber shop and start life afresh in a dreamed Utopia,. hut. tho gods decreed otherwise. A triumphant hour became a torment of -agonised weeks culminating in a finale of life itself. Diana Wynyard plays opposite Richardson. Ihe brilliant featurettes include the Battle of Narvik, showing dramatic shots actually taken in the battle waters off Norway, and showing the havoc wrought by British destroyers tho German Navy.