ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 168, 15 June 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

MAYFAIR THEATRE. “DANGER" FLIGHT.” 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 tho building of model aeroplanes and shows how youngsters of to-day come to love and understand aviation through models. Primarily it is the'story of Tailspin Tommy’s Air Scouts, a' young organisation similar to the Boy/Scouts, and tolls of the regeneration of Whitey, who gives up his gang to join the Scouts of the Air. With Tommy as bis 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 effective than it might be ordinarily by telling the story of an innocent girl who was being toward a prison term. METEOR THEATRE. “MAN’S CASTLE.” Without- doubt the most poignant and moving love story ever _ brought to tho screen, Columbia’s “Man's Castle,” to-day presents Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young to Meteor Theatre audiences in one of tiio most poignant motion pictures of all time. Both Tracy, who won the 1938 Academy Award, and Miss Young- have appeared in scores of excellent films: “Man’s. Castle” ranks easily with the greatest. Tracy is seen as a shiftless, homeless vagrant, and .Miss Young as a hungry, helpless waif whom he rescues from the streets and takes to his ramshackle tin shanty in the riverside “dumps.” Footloose and irresponsible, lie soon becomes restless under the restraint of living so long in one place, and lie tolls the girl he doesn’t love her and plans to leave her. She, happy in the home she lias, secs her world crumbling _ beneath her. The girl announces that she is soon to become a mother. But that means nothing to the vagrant, except that he must now provide the money to care for both before ho can leave. To get money he attempts a robbery and .fails. But the result, of that failure- sn'aightcns out the langlcd .romance of these children of poverty. Exceptionally capable players support the stars, Marjdrie Rambcau, Glenda Farrell, Walter Connolly, Arthur Hold and Dickie Moore arc among the actors who add brilliant performances to a brilliant film.